Re: laptop or desktop for audio processing?

(Warning, this will require a lot of reading through rambling digressions to
get to the point)

No 24 bit playback on my laptop -- an Averatec 2150, which is I bought new a
year or two ago. It don't do no stinkin' 24 bit and it sounds awful even at
16 bits. The quality of the onboard sound is just hideous. Maybe okay for
a business user or casual listen, but that's about it. I use a $100 SB
Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card with it, and the difference is huge.

It was a lo-end laptop at the time, so I imagine it's considered even worse
by now. By the way, I would not recommend anyone buy an Averatec. As it
turned out, this laptop had no user-accessible bay to install more memory or
replace the hard drive. I had to take the whole thing apart by
dead-reckoning to upgrade the memory from 512MB to 2GB -- and void my
warranty in the process. Evidently, upgrading the memory was "not
supported." They wouldn't even send me a freakin' repair manual to tell me
how to get the laptop apart.

When the hard drive died about about 9 months after I bought the laptop, I
took it apart again and replaced the hard drive. When I called Averatec
Customer Support and asked for an RMA to send them the hard drive to get a
new one, they insisted I send them the whole laptop and would not replace
the dead hard drive that I already took out. I figured it wasn't worth
sending them the laptop just to get a 60GB hard drive.

My desktop uses a Gigabyte 81K-1100 Rev. 2 motherboard. I never got the
built-in audio (Realtek ALC658) to handle 24-bit files. It's a pretty
ancient system, and I'm probably going to retire it soon for an AMD Athlon
64 X2 5600+, which is still way behind the curve and would be very much a
budget desktop.

I'm too lazy at the moment to look for the manufacture date on the board,
but the .pdf manual says 2002. It's currently running a Pentium IV 2.4 Ghz
processor. It is a 4-to-5-year-old board.

In other words I'm using a a 4-5 year old desktop motherboard and a
less-than-2-year-old laptop; neither one's built-in audio chip will support
24-bit PCM .wav files.

FYI: The Realtek ALC658 audio chip built-in to my desktop motherboard
(Gigabyte 82K-1100) specs are at:
ftp://202.65.194.211/pc/audio/ALC658_DataSheet_1.3.pdf .

The specs seem indicate that the DAC will handle 20-bit files, but since all
my PCM .wav files were either 16-bit or 24-bit, I never got to try a 20 bit
file.

Unlike my old Realtek ALC658 audio chip, I suspect the newer chips from
Realtek will support support 24 bits wave files. From the little bit of
poking around I've done, the built-in Realtek audio chips on the newer
motherboards (cheap ones) I looked at support high-def codecs. I'd check it
out to be sure though. Also, the various Realtek high-def chips have
varying S/N ratios, so it might be worth looking at the built-in chip's
specs when shopping for a motherboard.

I know that my ALC658 does not fall into what Realtek calls "hi-definition."

Perhaps they have driver or codec updates that would fix that, but the last
time I tried (with drivers current at the time) was probably about a year or
two ago. It wasn't happening. No 24-bit playback. I don't think a driver
will change that -- My guess it's a hardware limitation, or at least the
software permanently burned onto the ASIC chips.

Realtek's published specs aren't real forthcoming on the bit-quantization.
I think you have to actually look at the specific chip's codec data ***.
In my case, the specs indicate 20-bit DACs. The marketing specs
conveniently don't even refer to the bit-quantization (i.e., 16-bit, 24-bit)
of the chip. I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that the answer lies in the
DAC's bit-quantization shown in the published codec specs for the specific
audio chip.




"Kevin Van Sant" <kvansant@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:imbbj3d59a3ei4gql9jgcmgipaf796ktg0@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:02:14 -0800, "Chickenhead"
<kuNOrtshapiroSPAM@NOSPAMhotTHANKSmail dawt cawm> wrote in message
<tvidnbZL2N42-KjanZ2dnUVZ_uWlnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx> :

You're a pretty tech-savvy guy, Kevin, and, IIRC, you have a little
programming/coding background too (I don't), so you might be able to pull
it
off. Have you had success with that? If so, what driver, soundcard and
audio program were you using and how did you do it? I would not be
surprised if it could be done. But why bother?

no programming background for me. What I know is just from trial and
error. I also have never owned a laptop so I don't know anything
about the soundcards built into them. But I've built and rebuilt a my
own desktops for years. Sometimes I used a cheap soundcard,
sometimes I used the one built into the MB. I have an M-Audio card
which I haven't bothered putting in my new system yet because I
haven't used it for recording an analog signal yet. Anyway, what
you say may all be right, I'm no expert, but from what I've seen even
the crappy built in soundcards from MBs 6 or 7 years ago could all
playback 24bit files. I would expect any new PC bought today will
definitely do that.

_________________________________________
Kevin Van Sant

http://www.kevinvansant.com
CDs, videos, mp3s, gigs, pics, lessons, info.



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