info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (09/05/84)
From: Thomas.Newton@cmu-cs-spice.arpa What do you mean, "quite nice digital sound for the price"? According to the owner's manual, the Mac has "four-voice sound with eight-bit digital- analog conversion." Big deal. My Atari has four eight-bit voices, and it doesn't require 50% of the processor time to maintain them. Besides, eight- bit D/A conversion sounds really horrible for music. The Atari allows you to combine voices to get two sixteen-bit channels. The Commodore 64 has even better sound -- three sixteen-bit voices with various filtering options. Given the resolution of the Mac A/D converters, and the processor overhead needed to generate sound, it's pretty obvious that Mac sound is better suited to voice synthesis than to music. Commodore 64s and Ataris are pretty cheap these days, so it can't be too expensive to include a custom sound chip in a personal computer. It's too bad that Apple didn't include a sound chip with the Mac *in addition* to the sound buffer -- I know that I would have been willing to pay an extra $10 or $20 for high-quality sound & voice synthesis.
info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (09/08/84)
From: mark@harvard.ARPA (Mark Lentczner)
-=-
The problem with the custom sound chips that are included within the Commodore
64 and the Atari is that they only perform a very fixed type of synthesis.
The Mac's 8-bit DAC is limitless in the sense that you don't have to use a
particular synthesis method such as additive synthesis, or working with square
waves and shift-register noise (the Atari method). Of course, the Mac offers
a four-voice look-up-table oscillator scheme if you want it, but you can do
anything you want with the DAC. Thus the possibilities for sound on the Mac
are far greater than on the Atari or Commodore.
As far as 8-bits are concerned, I have be composing computer music for years
using 8-bit DACs. Yes, of course the quality is less than 12 or 16 bits. But
I have found that there is a lot to be had out of an 8-bit DAC. I'll admit that
there are certian things that I have to avoid, but why write music that can
only be played on a Stienway?
-mark lentczner
electronic music studio
music department
harvard university
cambridge, ma 02138
lentczner@harvard.ARPA
{allegra,genrad,ihnp4,ima,ucbvax}!harvard!lentczner.UUCPinfo-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (09/14/84)
From: olson@harvard.ARPA (Eric Olson) I said sound, not music. I'm not very interested in playing lots of pure tones on a computer, I want to see a music system for the Mac with 4 separate envelopes, waveforms, and frequencies. Try that on anything else. I'd rather have a Kurzweil 250 anyway. Eric.