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Sound Blaster Grows Up! The days of Sound Blaster cards being synonymous with games cards are numbered. The new Sound Blaster 16 ASP is a CD-quality 16-bit stereo sound card for use with audio sampling as well as multi-media presentations. By DARREN YATES 4  Silicon Chip This screen graphic shows Creative WaveStudio displaying the amplitude envelope of the Windows sound file CHIMES.WAV. When the PLAY icon is selected, the sound file is played through with a marker indicating the current position. I F YOU’VE BEEN around kids of late who have grown up with the PC rather than those silly little games machines, they’ll tell you that a game isn’t a game unless you have a Sound Blaster card. And they’re right too! Unless you have some pretty fancy software, the PC speaker doesn’t lend itself to realistic sound reproduction and you can be surprised how much a sound card can add to the enjoyment of a game. (Not that we do that here, boss!) However, the idea of sampling or recording audio input onto the PC is one which is likely to arouse the interest of many readers. The problem with the original Sound Blaster card was that it was only an 8-bit system. The quality of sound produced digitally is proportional to the number of bits used – in fact, the usual rule is 6dB of dynamic range for each bit. Thus, an 8-bit card would give you a range of 48dB, which is on a par with an standard cassette deck; ie, pretty poor. Now that digital signal processing has become a viable reality, the people at Creative Labs Inc in the USA have finally come up with a 16-bit CD-quality sound card nicely wrapped with bundled software in a packag priced at only $399. We recently obtained a copy of this latest addition to the Sound Blaster audio range from Dick Smith Electronics, who carry a wide range of the Sound Blaster products. Opening the box After clawing our way through the packaging, we were almost overcome with cards and books and discs and even a nicely-built microphone popped out. Seriously though, the 16-bit ASP system is jammed-packed with features which we’ll outline in a moment. The first thing we did was to install the card into one of our 386DX 40MHz machines and load in the first of the five discs that come with the package. Having looked through the directory of the disc, we found INSTALL.EXE and confidently marched forth. All of the input & mixing levels are controlled by software through the Mixer control window. Individual controls for inputs include microphone, MIDI, CD & line levels. The bass & treble levels for each channel can be changed either together or separately using the mouse. December 1993  5 When recording a track using SoundO’le, this is the screen you will see. The level display indicates the current signal level & the timer displays the current recording time as well as the total time of the recorded file. The JukeBox program allows you select any number of stored MIDI files & play them through the SoundBlaster voice generator chip. You can pause at any time, as well as skip any selection. The installation program was simple to use and is automatic, just asking for the drive where the Sound Blaster files are to be stored (only because we were running two hard drives) and for the location of Windows. Now before those of you who dislike Windows dismiss the 16-ASP as a waste of time, the software also gives you the option of running either from the DOS prompt or Windows – pretty good, huh? It also automatically checks and selects the I/O addresses for the internal card. User manuals Note that we haven’t mentioned anything about user manuals at this stage. It’s not because there aren’t any – there are! It’s just that whenever you get a new toy to play with, who reads the manuals beforehand? But having push­­ed our luck getting this far, common sense suggested that we were heading for a fall if we went any This is the main setup window for the Talking Scheduler program. This is a multimedia program which allows you to incor­porate text-tospeech and voice annotation to your appointments. The speech & pitch controls allow you to change the tone of the artificially generated voice. 6  Silicon Chip further without consulting the manual. Because of the mountains of software included, there are six manuals that explain it but amongst it all was a nice, lit­tle, thin one entitled, in big letters, “Getting Started”. It was only about 30-odd pages – you little beauty! As it turned out, we had already sailed through the first eight pages and we were moving along comfortably. The software in­stallation is set up so that if you have an ordinary system with just a serial card, video card and printer card, there’s nothing you have to do to the 16-ASP card before you install it. If you have other cards in your machine, you may have to change some of the jumper settings on the ASP-16 card but the manual explains all of this so there’s little chance of striking problems. Sound Blaster Software To explain all the features, it’s easiest to go through the ASP-16 in terms of the software. The main Sound Blaster software comes on the first two discs, with the other three for the textto-speech, PC Animate and Inter­Active multimedia software. As already noted, Sound Blaster comes with DOS and Windows versions. The Windows version is the easiest to run (but is slower to get going), so we will go through this first (Windows 3.1 preferred). When you boot up Windows, you’ll find that it has created its own menu group and each program has its own icon. Now if you want to use it just to play games (what a waste!), we can tell you that there’s nothing left to do. You can just load in your game and the installed driver which is automatically loaded when you boot up will take care of the rest – there’s no need to get into Windows or type anything else! Having booted up in Windows, the first thing you’ll prob­ably want to do is try out the audio recording and see how good it is – and we can tell you it is excellent. The card employs a 16bit 90dB CODEC (coder-decoder) chip which is used in DAT recorders and allows sampling of CD-quality 16-bit sound at up to 44.1kHz. It also has two built-in audio amplifiers which can be set to either power external speakers or headphones. The Windows Sound Blaster Icon group includes six sections which are; WaveStudio, SoundO’le, JukeBox, Scheduler, SB16 Mixer and Mosaic. Both WaveStudio and SoundO’le allow you to record audio signals but it is SoundO’le which gives you the most options. Double-clicking on the SoundO’le icon brings up the recording session mode but before you hit the record button, there are two things to check: the recording options and the mixer options. There are a wide number of choices available for recording parameters. These include mono or stereo input, 8 or 16-bit sampling size and sampling rates of 11, 22 or 44.1kHz. You can also include echoes and reverb, as well as change the amplitude and speed of the recording. However, its biggest advantage over a number of other software packages, including Microsoft’s Sound for Windows which we reviewed several months ago, is that you can continu- ously record and dump the sound file straight to your hard disc. For example, say you have an empty 120Mb hard drive. This allows you 12 minutes of continuous stereo audio sampled at 44.1kHz/16-bits. program, you can then use the simple read command and get the computer to actually say what ever is entered as an ASCII text file, or is typed in inside inverted commas. Curiosity definitely got the better of me with this novel piece of software. I started off by just typing a few well chosen words and within a second or so, back they came! Next, I tried a text file – in fact, this very article – and again back it came. Although it is artificially generated speech using selected “mouth sounds” or phonemes, it was fairly easy to hear and under­stand. In some cases though, words were spelt out rather than spoken and this probably occurs when a word is not part of a given vocabulary or SB­TALKER doesn’t know how to pronounce it. However, this is an area of computing which will take off in years to come when more efficient and faster algorithms can be written to make speech sound more lifelike than at present. One thing worth noting is that this software has been patented which shows you that it’s an idea that isn’t quite as old as you may think. Overall, the ASP-16 is the most advanced sound card I’ve seen so far for such a reasonable price and with 16-bit CD-quality sound, you can look forward to seeing and hearing some of the best games available. The SoundBlaster ASP-16 sound system is available from Dick Smith Electronics and also from Rod Irving SC Electronics. Multimedia applications This ability to record direct to the hard disc makes it extremely useful in multimedia applications. Multimedia is the process whereby both sound and vision are used in a presentation for greater impact. Included with the bundled software is a copy of HSC Interactive, a Windows-based program which allows you to link sound files with bitmap images as well as animated vision. The 113-page manual is a little long to go through here but nevertheless, it allows you to take control of your PC and create a presentation from the ground up. The program allows you to control when sound is played and allows for interactive usage via either keyboard or mouse. Animation is created through a program called PC Animate Plus which allows you to draw and paint individual frames, then cut and paste these frames together. You can view these frames as you go and generate special effects such as smooth fades. And, of course, you can add in sound. Test to speech translation Finally, one of the more unusual programs which utilises the Sound­ Blaster card is the SBTALKER text-tospeech translator. Once you install the Silicon Supply and Manufacturing 74HC11 $0.45 74HC27 .40 74HC30 .40 74HC76 .55 74HC86 .45 74HC138 .85 74HC139 .50 74HC154 3.15 74HC165 .85 74HC174 .65 74HC373 1.05 74F00 74F02 74F08 74F10 74F11 74F20 74F21 74F27 74F30 74F32 74F36 .40 .40 .40 .40 .40 .40 .40 .40 .40 .40 .85 74F38 74F151 74F163 74F169 74F175 74F241 74F244 74F257 74F258 74F353 74LS00 .65 .55 .70 1.92 .65 .95 .90 .60 1.80 1.45 .50 74LS01 74LS02 74LS03 74LS05 74LS11 74LS12 74LS13 74LS14 74LS20 74LS21 74LS27 MAIL ORDER SPECIALIST .50 .50 .45 .45 .50 .50 .85 .55 .55 .40 .40 74LS30 74LS33 74LS49 74LS73 74LS74 74LS83 74LS85 74LS90 74LS92 74LS109 74LS126 .40 .50 2.35 1.10 .45 .75 .60 .90 1.20 .90 .50 PO Box 92 Bexley North NSW Australia 2207 74LS138 74LS139 74LS147 74LS148 74LS151 74LS155 74LS158 74LS160 74LS164 74LS175 74LS191 Credit Cards welcome -Visa, Mastercard, Bankcard. Plus Sales Tax, packing and postage .60 .60 2.35 1.05 .50 .50 .70 .75 .75 .80 .80 74LS193 74LS196 74LS240 74LS241 74LS245 74LS257 74LS273 74LS366 74LS368 74LS373 74LS374 .80 1.35 .90 .95 .80 .60 .80 .55 .60 .80 .85 Ph.: (02) 554 3114 Fax: (02) 554 9374 After hours only bulletin board on (02) 554 3114 (Ringback). Let the modem ring twice, hang-up, redial the BBS number, modem answers on second call. December 1993  7