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Article from Sound On Sound, August 1993 |
Brian Heywood reports on an outbreak of new soundcards, SADiE gets an update and the PC finds a niche at the APRS show. Eight out of 10 exhibitors said their stand preferred it...
The APRS show was very busy this year, with lots of companies showing off their products and trying to part the punters from their money — politely, of course! As I wandered around the various stands, I decided on the spur of the moment to do a straw poll of the numbers and types of personal computers on the stands. Of the 120 or so stands I checked out, just over a third of them had a computer of any sort, with a total of 52 computers in all. Of these, 40 were PCs, 10 were Macintoshes (two of them were turned off!) and there were two lonely Ataris. Of the PCs, about 40% were running Windows, whilst the other 60% were showing MS-DOS applications. The applications being shown ranged from digital audio recording (Digidesign, Soundscape, SADiE and Digigram) to library music and radio station control systems. It looks like the PC has found itself a home in the professional music and broadcast world.
Studio Audio were showing the latest version of their PC-based SADiE hard disk recording system. Version two of the software seems to add quite a few new features, including support for 24-bit digital audio, 8-track operation, and signal processing, such as a digital compressor. You may wonder why you need 24-bit digital audio when DAT and CD can only handle 16 bits, but it seems you can use the higher resolution to improve the apparent signal to noise ratio of the 16-bit signal. This is most useful when you are dealing with recordings that have a very large dynamic range, such as classical music. Sony already use a similar technique on their most recent classical CDs.
I've had a chance to look at the new Gravis software (reviewed SOS March '93) and it is a big improvement on that reviewed. The synthesizer section sounds are considerably better than the originals, and the Windows sample-playing driver now replays 16-bit digital audio. This makes the card very good value if you need a multimedia soundcard that provides a decent sound quality when used with MIDI. The Windows drivers still only work in enhanced mode, which may be a problem if you are using Cubase. Contact Optech on (Contact Details) for details of how to upgrade or purchase the card.
Turtle Beach — who make the Multisound MPC soundcard (reviewed in SOS July '92) — have announced a wavetable synthesizer upgrade card called the Maui. The new soundcard is being introduced so that owners of sound cards with lower quality synthesizer sections — such as the Sound Blaster — can add the benefits of a 24-voice wavetable synthesizer and sampling capabilities to their Windows 3.1 system. The Maui's GM-compatible, 24-voice, 16-bit samples are stored in 2MB of ROM on the card. The most interesting feature is the bundled Sample Store software, a user-definable sample player for creating your own samples and 'downloading' them to RAM resident on the Maui, using existing Windows WAV files as a starting point. Thus, you can use MPC software like Turtle Beach's Wave for Windows to prepare your samples and then use the Maui to play them back polyphonically. The card should be released in September and the US price will be $199. I'll keep you informed of developments.
Finally, I've had a look at the new version of SeqWin, and it looks very impressive. One of the new features is the ability to handle digital audio in the same way that MIDI data is handled — you need an MPC soundcard to hear it, of course. This means that you can record an audio track within the sequence — say a vocal line — and manipulate it in exactly the same way as you would the 'normal' MIDI data using the graphical arranger. You can even perform simple editing of the wave form, such as adding echo or changing the equalisation. This program is definitely worth a look.
SoftZone have also produced a MIDI interface driver that allows multiple Windows applications to share a single MPU 401 (or compatible) interface. The driver merges the MIDI data streams and even allows you to feed the MIDI output from one program into the input of another. One use of this would be to record the output of your auto-accompaniment program into your sequencer or to add MIDI 'filters' into the data stream to perform additional processing on the MIDI data in real-time.
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Feature by Brian Heywood
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