Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Chris Sholler who wrote (9208)	1/29/1998 8:33:00 PM
From: santhosh mohan	Respond to of 13925

Chris, your post was very informative. Thanks. Is the Universal Serial Bus relevant to this discussion at all?

To: Chris Sholler who wrote (9208)	1/29/1998 9:05:00 PM
From: Fred Mah	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13925

"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)." Actually, I've done some examining of my AWE32 and two PCI cards. Running the X 3d graphical demo I notice significant pausing with the AWE while neither PCI card had the same glitches. PCI cards can be bus masters, meaning that they can transfer data through the bus without CPU utilization/interference. "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)." When you are talking about points of interpolating, that's almost exclusive to MIDI wavetable music. So playing a WAV file on an AWE does not incorporate this interpolation and therefore is not significantly different than using a different piece of hardware. The 10k1 is another matter. E-mu's interpolation is very smooth sounding, but Creative doesn't particularly take any advantage of it, most comments note that it sounds shrill or shrieking (including a recent review in PC Mag). This is of course just a matter of balancing the sounds.

To: Chris Sholler who wrote (9208)	1/29/1998 9:37:00 PM
From: Zakrosian	Respond to of 13925

Chris - Many thanks for your response, even though I don't understand the technical aspects of it. But let me ask a simplistic question: there is an incredible wealth of music available on the web- tapes of Dead concerts, Chet Baker ballads, and tons more. Does CREAF have products that will make the music sound better than it currently does - a bit like car audio of a couple decades ago - or is there something else involved?

To: Chris Sholler who wrote (9208)	1/29/1998 9:55:00 PM
From: DRRISK	Respond to of 13925

Chris, I have not seen these cards in the Comp usa or other stores. Where have you seen these? Drrisk Thanks in advance

To: Chris Sholler who wrote (9208)	1/29/1998 10:11:00 PM
From: Rutgers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13925

$64 Question should be "how many 'points' do Creative's Patents cover?" "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)." It would be AWEsome if it covered 2, 4 and 8 points, which would then give us a lock on the industry. Creative Patent No. 5698803: Here's the abstract A digital sampling instrument for multi-channel interpolatative playback of digital audio data stored in a waveform memory provides improved interpolation of musical sounds by use of a cache memory. The present invention includes a plurality of interpolator circuits utilizing a single waveform memory where each of the interpolator circuits produces a unique bus request signal which is responsive to a unique bus acknowledge signal to determine which of the interpolator circuits has control of the waveform memory at any given waveform memory cycle.