pouët.net

I was noticing that I have no idea what a soundcard does nowadays. There are no programable DSPs low end cards, only on some pro high end cards. They don't do much more than DAC conversion and everything is done on the processor, right?

I thought they had SPU's on them?

I have one of those low-end sound cards. I bought it because my on-board audio at the time was very noisy and it was driving my nuts. Another plus is ASIO support, which enables teh low latencies.

But apart from that, yes, it's basically just a DAC (slash ADC).

I guess there's not much point in dedicated DSPs on cheap sound cards anymore.

They used to have hardware effects, life reverb and stuff, but I think now everything is done in software.

e-mu 0404 pci has a dsp thats not that bad.the creative x-fi crystalizer is totally awesome. especially for cheap mastering

depends on the features you need. let's mention some:

- good preamp(s)
- lots of INs (for liverecording drums or so...)
- lots of OUTs (for analog summing)
- good A/D-Converters (like burr-brown chips)
- mixing. as in "turning (hard- or software) faders and knobs for channels and fx simultaneously in realtime with no latency/hiccups/crackling etc."
- liverecording of guitars, reamping etc.
- recording singing/rapping (built in direct monitor with headphone-jack and mixing-ability daw-out/direct input signal would be the weapon of choice)
- flexible routing (to integrate your outboard perfectly)
- midi

ASIO-latency/stability is not really a problem with nowaday's cards.
for me, analog summing is important, so I need many outs. also, a good mixing-workflow is essential for me, so dsp-cards are a must. on the controller-side, a console would be nice but would be "another extra" as in more money to spend, so has not 1st prio for me.

Why can't fast PCs do everything native? I think there are three aspects:
- you can never have enough fx (at least as possibility) on your, let's say, 50channel-mix. the faster pcs get, the more sophisticated the fx-algos will get, so the amount of fx is always limited. you can push the limit with a dsp-card (use the dsps for good-sounding bread&butter-fx ;-)
- On a native CPU, EVERYTHING happens. Background-Processes accumulate... - there's no safety of performance of your fx all the time...
- DSP-Algos are especially programmed for the architecture of the DSP-chip. You can always trust the DSP-Load of those Algos, they never change (since there are no background processes and so on).

Good DSP-Cards are f.e. UAD2 and TC Powercore (300+ euros)
Usable Audiocards start at around 200 Euros (depends on the features you need, see above. Can get very expensive. There are numerous solutions (audiocards) for all kinds of "feature-bundles").

As always: Sorry for my bad english ;-)

ah yes, "soundcards" don't really need dsp-chips on them. that's "alibi" for better sales ;-) 3d-sound in games can be done native without problems f.e.

in case you are only interested in "soundcards", forget my former post. i talked about "audiocards" (and separate dsp-cards for mixing and fx. no in/outs) ;-)

I was talking about standard stuff, not pro stuff.

them radeons have sound over displayport/hdmi builtin...
I wonder if it is possible to use a compute unit or three to do what you are thinking of

Sound with your videocard ?
Linux did it back in 2001

linux did it and nobody got anything out of it except wankers

PulkoMandy> Huh, that's actually kinda neat.

That make me think about these people who worked on making videocards calculating audio effects as most of the time, computer comes with some onboard geforce chips that musicians never really use...

OpenCL anyone?

CUDA anyone?

knl> Well, I personally think the cpu gets away with it just fine. There's so much state involved with soft-synths that I think it would be difficult to translate that into something like glsl

Oh ok, you know, i'm not at all into such stuff and adding my two cents... especially since I didn't have any news from it.
Of course, my CPU handles bunch of VSTs without suffering much.