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Technology Stocks : Creative Labs (CREAF) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (9061)	1/27/1998 8:30:00 PM
From: Fred Mah	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13925

Mary, "How about Cyrix's (now National Semiconductor) all in one chip? Couldn't they come up with guality audio and other functionality and blow away the competition someday soon?" It's more technical then that, since the typical recommendation for getting good audio quality from a sound card is to get it as far away as possible from all other components in the computer. Inside of a computer is a real big mess of electrical noise and magnetic fields that ruin an analog signal, which in this case is the sound output (i.e. line-out from the soundcard). Placing the D/A converter (digital to analog converter), which takes the digital information and then creates the analog audio signal we hear, on the motherboard and closer to components like the power supply, CPU and CPU fan, etc... all degrade the signal. If you were to take a typical CD player and a computer with sound card along with a test CD that contained various test tones and sound, and then performed measurements on the output (e.g. signal to noise ratio, frequency response) from the PC and CD player it is likely the CD player would always come out on top. The comments and analyses I've seen about the Creative Vibra integrated chip is that the freqency response is worse than a cassette tape. You would have to go to high end cards (these are generally designed with better shielding and other more technical design differences) to come closer to the output of the CD player , even though the CD player may use cheaper D/A converters, it doesn't fight near as much electrical noise. However, most general purpose users don't care or notice if the sound is a bit lesser in quality. Now if you use something like the Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold you can use the SPDIF digital output that keeps the signal in the digital state and routes it outside the computer. Then you can perform the D/A conversion away from the computer, although most external D/A converters are expensive. There are various scenarios where either USB or IEEE 1394 are used to route audio signals outside the computer and then D/A outside, but again that's more cost to the consumer who, especially at the OEM level, likely wouldn't notice any benefit especially with the "multimedia" speakers that come with computer systems.