Amiga audio early lead lost..

[paul1981]

16 Bit zorro sound cards were available in the late 80's for the Amiga. How is that being "behind the times" as it were? I'm grateful Amiga had built in sound as standard. The truth is if you wanted 16 bit sound it WAS there, you just needed a Zorro sound card and a free Zorro slot. With Amiga Zorro gear being more expensive that others, maybe it would have been better for the consumer if Amiga's came with usable ISA slots instead, thus opening lots of possibilities, and then PCI... It may have saved the Amiga. Spilt milk though.

[paul1981]

Well, the whole point of CyberSound's calibration (the driver for which is what Paula 14-bit mode in AHI uses) is to mitigate the non-linearity of Paula's DACs, so if you have calibrated it well, it should sound relatively clean. It does depend on what you listen to, however. I can still hear quantization noise and aliasing however, particularly on gentle volume ramps in quiet parts of music, even having painstakingly calibrated my machine. These days, it's hidden behind digital noise. I suspect some caps have dried out wherever the analogue stage is decoupled.

It doesn't bother me particularly however, since any multichannel mods I write end up rendered to disk and when I do use Paula as a sample player, I usually want all that colouring.

Personally, I find even the uncalibrated 14 bit output sounds fantastic. Maybe I'm biased.

[paul1981]

Again, it all depends what you use it for. Really, the intent of the 14-bit mode was to overcome the fidelity issues imposed by the existing 8-bit mode. Viewed in that light, you really ought to calibrate your CyberSound driver and use that calibrated output to get the best fidelity from your system.

I have a Prelude1200, so I don't bother much with the 14 bit mode.
I have done calibrations in the past though, the most recent one was about 6 months ago where I calibrated my A600 (68000, 4MB ram, KS2) perfectly which took about 2 hours. I did it because I ordered an ACA620 (which is now back with Jens for a firmware fix) so would therefore be able to play stuff back easily through the 14 bit calibrated mode.
I never actually tried the ACA620 in that machine before having to return it for the fix, but as soon as I get it back I'll be trying it out. I got that A600 to play back uncalibrated 14 bit though (16 bit 28KHz stereo audio), albeit it had to take a breath every 4 seconds whilst it buffered up in 14 bit mode. :crazy:
Seriously though, the uncalibrated 14 bit output is fantastic when compared to standard 8 bit.