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

To: Zakrosian who wrote (9200)	1/29/1998 8:12:00 PM
From: Chris Sholler	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 13925

ISA and PCI are buses (data highways) inside your PC. ISA is "old" technology (re: slow, dumb) whereas PCI is "newer" (re: faster, smarter). Since the intro of PCI a number of years ago, motherboards include both buses. Add-in cards fit into a slot that connects the card to one of these buses. CREAF SoundBlaster products are ISA-based products. Intel and Microsoft want to migrate away from ISA to PCI to take advantage of the faster, smarter bus. A number of would-be CREAF competitors seized the opportunity to announce plans to enter the audio market with PCI audio parts. Their marketing-based press releases extol the virtues of the PCI-bus and infer dramatic improvements in audio quality do to the bus speed (bulls__t). Audio quality is far more a function of the number of "points" used to interpolate along a sine wave in your wave table than from bus speed. CREAF's new Ensoniq products use linear interpolation (2 points) like the overwhelming majority of audio parts; their 8008 part uses 4 points and their 10k1 part uses 8 points. If you love music, you'll be astounded at the quality from the SB Live (10k1).

To: Zakrosian who wrote (9200)	1/29/1998 10:12:00 PM
From: Fred Fahmy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13925

Zakrosian, <Can you suggest a site through which I, as a layman who spends a lot of time listening to music, can learn what ISA and PCI are and their implications? Thanks> Thanks for your remarks. As for the question above, I don't know of a site off of the top of my head that explains ISA and PCI. Bascilly, ISA and PCI are the buses used in PC's. The bus includes the interface between cards (such as sound cards and video cards) and the motherboard. The speed and width of the bus have a lot to do with system and peripheral performances. Almost all new computers use PCI (which is much more advanced than ISA) interfaces although they provide some ISA slots (for things like Soundblaster cards and older cards). High end audio cards which use PCI interfaces have not been common and up until now I don't think CREAF has offered any PCI solutions (someone correct me if I'm wrong about this). Ensoniq has been focusing on PCI and should round out CREAF's product line nicely. Hope I didn't confuse you further, FF