Re: Apple Drops Backward Compatibility for Next MacOS

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article GUDATH@EZINFO.VMSMAIL.ETHZ.CH (Henrik 'Ratte' Gudat) writes...

>Just the facts (PowerMac):
>
>- the Mac offers 44kHz/16bit compared to ca. 25kHz/8bit
>  This is a huge difference in dynamic range.

    The maximum playback of each Ensoniq DOC 5503 channel is 25 kHz?? 
This is news to me, and contradictory to all information and written 
documentation I've seen and read. It also conflicts with GS software,
almost all I've used over the years allows you to record and playback 
digital samples at > 25 kHz (many support 44 kHz).

    If I may, here is a relevant post clipping from Ian Schmidt, that
was posted to comp.sys.apple2 about 3.5 years ago concerning Mac vs
Apple IIgs sound:

"Let's think about this.  The Ensoniq DOC 5503 has 32 independant oscillators
which can play any 8-bit sound at any speed from 51 to ($FFFF*51) Hz.  The
Mac sound chip has 4 channels, each of which can only play at 22.0 kHz. (This
is why MODs sound like crap on a Mac).  There's no comparison."

>- The Mac can play 8 channels (66Mhz) and more thru the toolbox, more if you
>provide your own sound routines.

    Ah, but there is no preset number of voices, it is dependent on the
speed and power of the processor. One Power Macintosh may have 2-voices,
another may have 10-voices, still another may have 4-voices. It doesn't
sound like it has a dedicated synthesizer chip (like the Ensoniq), so
what happens if I wrote game that supports 12-voice music. What happens
to systems that cannot handle all those voices, then what? There is no
standard across the platform for handling of music, probably the reason
most games simply use looped digitized samples (that way, you know it 
will work on every Mac system).

>- There are decent MOD players: PlayerPro and SoundTrecker.

    Yes, but understand that playing MODs is a different thing altogether.
The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST can play MODs, in fact so can a PC board
like the SoundBlaster, using it's ADC channels. None of these systems are
very good at music synthesis however.

>- QuickTime 2.5 offers quite good MIDI support. This is what I was told on the
>phone by a friend who's working with a lot with synthesizers (M3R, SY-22 etc).
>- You can play MIDI data on the Mac without MIDI peripherals (CyberSound VS for
>example)

    "Told on the phone", and "heard in person" can mean all the difference. :-)
I've literally had friends tell me their PC's with an AdLib sound card or
C=64's could do incredible music synthesis. That may have been true comparing 
the each by itself, but not when comparing it to the IIgs or modern PC 
wavetable boards. ;) It can be a relative matter of perception.

    QuickTime MIDI seems similar to what I once saw on a PC, equipped
with nothing more than a Pro AudioSpectrum-16 (this is a clone of the
FM-synthesis boards with an ADC, such as the SB). Using it's ADC, it
was able to make use of instrument sound patches normally used by a 
Gravis UltraSound to play MIDI files. The catch was you required a
_very_ fast CPU to mix the channels and make use of the samples. 
It was a "hack" trick to kind of emulate a wavetable board, although 
the quality was far from perfect. From my understanding, this is 
basically what QT-MIDI does to create synthesis, it's a software
trick.

>What I'm trying to say is that the hardware is more or less up to date. If
>entertainment software makes use of it is a totally different questions.
>However, it's rather pointless to say that the Mac sounds awful. It's adequate
>for most tasks, including real-time sound editing (Deck II).

    I didn't say Macs sound awful, they are quite capable at playing
back digital samples at 16-bit resolution. What I did say was, they 
are not really adequate for music synthesis.

    Have you ever listened to a Gravis UltraSound or Ensoniq SoundScape,
with 1-8MB of DOC-RAM? Or a Roland SCC-1 with it's 4-5MB of compressed
patches and reverb effects? The results are quite stunning to say the
least. Unfortunately for the Macintosh, none of these add-on card options
are available, and it's built-in sound hardware doesn't even begin to
approach their capabilities. In fact, I'd question whether current Macs
are comparable even to the GS's Ensoniq for _music synthesis_.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca