Re: Still WOT Re: Sound card

[Michael Beck <mibeck@vassar.edu>]

>Someone else's point of veiw on the audio quality of the Sound blaster.

    Some clarification is evidently in order. I have no way of knowing 
how good the sound generational aspects of the SBLive are. By all 
accounts, the whole sample-playback thing is pretty cool. And the D/A 
might be good, too, although I would venture to say that any 
converters shoe-horned into a PCI card have an uphill battle. But 
again, I wouldn't know anything about that, never having used an 
SBLive myself.
    My comments were merely to point out that the SBLive doesn't do 
what you would expect & give you a bit-accurate copy: instead, it 
resamples everything coming into its digital inputs to 48KHz, 
regardless of the incoming signal's actual sample rate. Thus there is 
the *potential* for sound degradation.
    Now, again, this may or may not result in any audible problems. 
However, even if it did, you would not hear anything wrong with the 
sample playback or the digital or analog *outputs* of the card. This 
problem is limited SOLELY to the digital *inputs*: the data that your 
software gets is not an exact duplicate of the signal your DAT 
machine (or external converters, effects box, ADAT, etc.) puts out.
    Again, you probably won't hear this after just 1 pass. But if you 
habitually send data out to an external processor and route the audio 
back into your computer through the digital inputs, for example, you 
must consider the possibility of audible distortion. Now, if you do 
this several times within a project, the same audio data could be 
resampled 4 or 5 times before you mix it and burn it or dump it to 
DAT or whatever, even if all your transfers are at standard 48KHz. 
That could be a problem. Perhaps.
    With the apparent widespread availability of cheap bit-for-bit 
digital input cards, if you're really worried about this there are 
alternatives. Keep your SBLive for sample playback and analog output, 
and add a second card for accurate digital input. Or if you're buying 
a new card altogether, keep this in mind & weigh it against the 
SBLive's other attractions, like the sample playback stuff. As 
always, YMMV.

                                                   - Mike