Re: New "Grand Piano" instrument bank for MIDIsynth

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

In article cjredwolf@aol.com (CJ RedWolf) writes...
>
jpoore@pro-palmtree.cts.com (James Poore) writes...
>>Thanks for the updated "Grand Piano BAnk" file.  I know I have been waiting
>>patiently for the updated version ever since I d/led the original.
>>All avid GS owners eventually show off the great sound qualities of the GS
>>to the PC users world, and delight in the knowledge that this ol dinasour
>>can beat the pants off of a "multimedia" computer in the sound dept.
>>This is only one reason that I will keep my GS forever.
>
>Whoa.. what fantasy world are you living in? Obviously you haven't heard
>any of the new "multimedia" computers that you are referring to.. The
>ensoniq chip in the GS was awesome for its time, and even many years
>afterwards.. but you just cannot compare it to the new PC cards.. its not
>even CLOSE.. you cannot compare a GS with a 64k ram sound chip on it to
>wavetable cards with 8 megs of ram on them.. 

	Unfortunately, I must agree. PC sound boards, like the Gravis 
UltraSound, basically have on board the next generation of sound 
hardware that is built into the Apple IIgs. Namely an Ensoniq 5505 
and 1MB (1,048,576 bytes) of DOC-RAM with 16-bit resolution, where as 
the IIgs has an Ensoniq 5503 and 64K (65,536 bytes) of DOC-RAM with an 
8-bit resolution. The whole key to wavetable synthesis is use of 
digital samples. 

	I see only two ways to bring the Apple IIgs up to par with
current PC wavetable sound boards. Either use what hardware is 
available and find some way to make use of standard GS memory as 
DOC-RAM (swap between 64Kb and system memory when playing MIDI
files). This should be possible with a very high-speed accelerator
and the GS doing nothing else but playing music, but programming
it would be quite a task. I'm not even sure if this is doable.

	The other solution, and obviously the best of the two, is 
if someone does something along the lines of the Second Sight board. 
That is a slot card with the new sound chips on it. In fact you could 
have it replace your current stereo card and have a cable running to
the old Ensoniq molex connector (this way you could "grab" and mix the 
old Ensoniq's output to the new board for compatibility with old 
software). New software would could address the board directly.
I'd love to see the makers of the BlueDisk and TurboIDE create a
hardware product like this, afterall they seem interested in bringing
PC products to the IIgs. :)

>5 years ago I would agree the GS would beat any PC in sound, but times 
>have changed big time. Next thing you will be telling me is that the 
>Second Sight card has faster VGA than the latest PC video cards. :) I 
>have a GS and a Pentium system.. the GS just doesn't compare anymore in 
>sound... its still very good, but you cannot say it "blows the pants off" 
>any new PC.. it just doesn't.

	Well the IIgs still "blows the pants off" any stock PC with it's
internal speaker or FM-synthesis boards such as the AdLib, SoundBlaster or
ProAudioSpectrum-16 which many users out there still have. And unless
I'm mistaken, it still has better sound than the Macintosh, which has
no _synthesis_ capabilities at all (expect for perhaps the AV models,
they're only able to playback 8 or 16-bit digital sound samples).

	That kind of places the Apple IIgs in the middle for it's
sound capabilities. It's above the Macintosh and the older slew of
sound boards for the PC (which again are still in wide use) but
far below modern-day wavetable PC sound boards now getting quite 
popular.

Mitchell Spector
spector@vax2.concordia.ca