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To: Rutgers who wrote (6748)	12/8/1997 4:35:00 AM
From: Jon Tara	Respond to of 13925

Wannabe, I am quite familiar with DirectX. In fact, I've written some real-time quote software that uses it to position "trading sounds" in 3D so that you can "hear the market" positionally. Actually, what they must be referring to here is DirectSound, a component of DirectX. This is another one of those rediculous red herrings being tossed out by people who don't know what the hell they are talking about. DirectSound provides some advanced capabilities that aren't present in the standard wave drivers - the ability to layer multiple sounds, 3-D positioning, etc. It has absolutely nothing to do with the MIDI interface, however, which is where most recent sound card development has been. These enhancements can be done purely in software (on your CPU) or they can take advantage of advanced sound card features. Obviously, if your CPU does the work, you are bogging it down so that it has less time available to do other things. It is up to the DirectSound drivers for a particular card as to just where the work is done. A powerful sound card that can do these things on-board is always going to be better. DirectSound doesn't do anything to "replace" a sound card, nor does it do anything to make standards any less important. In fact, Windows sound drivers (plain old non-DirectSound) provide just as much "threat" as DirectSound, as they permit any sound card to be used with Windows. Yes, it is correct to say that - if you only use Windows (not DOS games) then compatability doesn't matter any more and you could use any sound card as easily as another. But DirectSound doesn't change this situation one bit. On the other hand, compatability DOES matter in terms of support for new OSs and new versions of OSs. You're always going to be better off with the industry leader, because you are guaranteed that the lastest OS IS going to support it.