Re: PCI Audio

[Dave Haynie <dave.haynie@scala.com>]

> > Hear of PCI video cards, PCI SCSI cards, PCI Network cards, ...
> > Are there many PCI Audio cards ? on what hardware ?
> > Also interested in drivers (may be sample code), utilities, .

> About the only card on the market today I know of that does audio on
> PCI is the Diamond Edge 3D (which is also a graphics accelerator).
> This is based on the NVidia NV-1 (which is a dual function device,
> audio and graphics).  Drivers as far as I know are proprietary.

Quite a few of the emerging "Multimedia" chips combine audio and video
on a single PCI chip. Expect cards based on the Chromatic MPACT and
maybe Philips TriMedia to combine graphics and audio too.

> The fundamental problem, at least with respect to legacy PC
> compatibility, is that the PC's defacto standard Sound Blaster
> requires ISA DMA channels, which simply aren't available on the PCI
> bus.

More to the point, there's no reason in the world to put a
SoundBlaster on the PCI bus. The ISA bus is more than adequate for
those clunky old things, and given that a SoundBlaster clone will run
you about $25 at a computer faire, there's no reason for anyone to
spend money on making a PCI version. 

On the other hand, the PCI bus is interesting for quality audio
applications, where compatibility with MS-DOS-based games is not an
issue. Digidesign has been shipping a multichannel audio card for the
PCI bus (in the Audiomedia series) for awhile. Support has been on the
Mac, but it's moving to Windows. There are a few others announced but
not yet shipping. All of these are high-end multichannel cards for
real audio work. 

A two-channel consumer audio device takes about 150kB/s; you simply
don't bother with that over PCI.

-Dave Haynie
 Scala, Inc.
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