Six multifunction telephony boards manage fax, voice, modem, and sound
Tom Yager
Affordable computer telephony products are a boon to small businesses and work-at-home professionals. The low prices come from increasingly inexpensive DSPs (digital signal processors). These chips can single-handedly juggle voice messages, faxes, data communications, digital audio, and more. Equipped with one of these programmable chips, an expansion card can act as a combined data/fax modem, multimedia sound card, and telephony board for under $400. Besides giving your enterprise a big-business feel, these multifunction cards conserve scarce expansion slots and reduce configuration hassles.
DSP programmability also provides an easy route to correct bugs and enhance functions (upgrade modem speed--to a limit--or add caller ID capab
ility). Five of the six cards reviewed use programmable DSPs. As you'll see, however, effective telephony doesn't require a DSP, nor does a DSP ensure effective telephony. In all cases, the software makes the difference.
The
cards in this review
are based on the ISA bus and support 14.4-Kbps (V.32bis) or faster modem traffic, 14.4-Kbps fax transfers, and digital audio at sampling rates of 44.1 kHz in 16-bit stereo. All six cards can record and play audio through the phone line, an external speaker and microphone, or a locally connected telephone handset. Windows audio software is standard, and each card has at least one CD-ROM controller. A joystick/MIDI port is common but not universal.
Three of the cards use a version of IBM's Mwave chip and DSP OS; two use AT&T's 32xx Roadrunner DSP with its VCOS (visual caching OS). Also tested was a non-DSP card from Boca Research that manages to squeeze enough circuitry onto a full-size card to provide voice, fax, modem, and sound fu
nctions. We didn't look at WindSurfer, IBM's own Mwave card, because a new version replaced it after this review was completed. Non-DSP cards from Creative Labs and Diamond Multimedia weren't ready to review.
The test platform was a 66-MHz Boss 486DX2 with 28 MB of RAM and a network card. All products come with Windows-based telephony applications. Keep in mind that if you don't find the telephony functions you want with these cards, you can get them with a little programming. All the reviewed Mwave cards, for example, work with Visual Voice for Mwave (Stylus Innovation, Cambridge, MA, (617) 621-9545). (See Code Talk, November 1994 BYTE, page 44.)
Spectrum Signal Processing's OfficeF/X
Like other Mwave cards, the OfficeF/X is a small half-length card with many Mwave-based software features. It supports V.17 (14.4 Kbps) faxing, V.32bis data transmission (with claimed upgradability to V.34), 16-bit stereo sound sampling at up to 44.1 kHz, wave-table sound synthesis, MIDI c
apability, Sound Blaster compatibility, and telephony features.
OfficeF/X is the first card to use the latest Mwave DSP, the MDSP2780, which brings more processing power and on-chip Sound Blaster hardware compatibility. The card has connections for audio line inputs and outputs (through stereo 1/8-inch phone jacks), a microphone input, and a joystick/MIDI port. The line output drives headphones directly (an Mwave mixer applet is included). One telephone jack connects both phone line and handset with the RJ-12 pigtail splitter that Spectrum supplies.
With no DIP switches or jumpers, setup should have been simple using the card's graphical DOS installation program. In most cases, you just select "automatic setup and test" and wait a few seconds. We weren't so lucky. OfficeF/X's installation refused to accept the COM2 setting, even though it was unused by other hardware. It finally worked with COM3.
OfficeF/X comes with Delrina's WinFax Lite and WinComm Lite, MKS Internet Anywhere for E-mail
, and Spectrum's own SwitchBoard, a digital answering machine.
SwitchBoard's unified inbox lists fax, voice, and E-mail messages. SwitchBoard handles voice messages itself and communicates with WinFax Lite and Internet Anywhere to meld their receive logs into one. OfficeF/X's Mwave software manages audio, fax/modem, and wave-table synthesis pretty well, though we did find the digital audio quality somewhat wanting. When we listened to messages and calls through headphones, the card emitted a constant pink noise/whine that made listening unpleasant. Muting the inputs in the mixer applet didn't help.
The Mwave discriminator routine determines where each incoming call should go: voice, fax, or data. You can also set up brute-force discrimination, letting the caller indicate the call type with DTMF Touch-Tones, or depend on caller ID and phone-number information you enter into OfficeF/X's contact list.
WinFax Lite and WinComm Lite are arbitrarily crippled. SwitchBoard supports multiple incomi
ng mailboxes, but beyond that, its features are only equal to a $99 answering machine. It has no message forwarding or beeper notification, no voice-menu programmability, and no fax forwarding or fax-on-demand. In short, OfficeF/X is just about what you'd get if you combined an average fax machine, modem, and answering machine.
When running Windows, Mwave acts as an acceptable wave-table synthesizer. It can handle simultaneous fax and MIDI, audio and modem, or almost any combination that doesn't overtax the DSP's capacity. If you overdo it, a window pops up complaining about "not enough MIPS." (All these cards support simultaneous functions to a reasonable degree.)
Best Data's ACE 5000
Best Data's ACE 5000, one of the first Mwave-based cards, uses the original Mwave chip, now called the MDSP1012 by IBM. Although the Mwave cards share capabilities and are similar, each has a different layout, components, and connectors. The ACE half-length card has clear advantages and di
sadvantages when compared with the other Mwave cards. Unfortunately, the balance tips to the negative.
On the ACE card, all ports are easily accessible and well labeled, with two RJ-11 jacks, microphone input, and line input and output. This card supports only a single CD-ROM drive type--Panasonic. A MIDI connector kit is optional. Installation isn't nearly as straightforward as with OfficeF/X, because the ACE card has both jumpers and DIP switches. Worse, Best Data's hardware sniffer utility works well only if you get the settings right the first time. After using it once, if you try different port and IRQ (interrupt request) combinations, you must first pull the board and manually remove all references to the previous ACE installation from your SYSTEM.INI file.
The ACE card comes with QuickLink Message Center, from Smith Micro Software. This somewhat uneven program provides central control with a unified inbox (actually, 10 inboxes organized as mailboxes) for incoming voice messages and faxes.
QuickLink's impressive list of business features (i.e., operator paging, call transfer, fax-on-demand, remote fax retrieval, and pager notification) seemingly puts it at the top of the Mwave list, but some of the features are flawed.
In an office running on a Centrex or similar small-business phone system with extensions, QuickLink will transfer incoming calls to an extension identified by the mailbox. No problems here. It will also page an operator by beeping the system's speaker or by playing a WAV file.
Fax-on-demand should also be a welcome feature, and we were pleased with QuickLink's ability to automatically generate a faxable list of available documents. However, you can't view faxes as you add them to the list, nor is there callback capability. Callers must request fax-on-demand from the fax machine itself. And QuickLink doesn't offer callers any opportunity to verify document choices or delete selections.
Pager notification works, but it rings your pager even if the caller hangs
up immediately. Configuration details are buried in deep trees of dialog boxes, which forces you to hunt for some common switches and parameters. The greetings and voice prompts supplied are useless demonstrations, requiring you to rerecord every message in your own voice. QuickLink also turned up the only application errors encountered during this review. While the errors weren't fatal--clicking the "ignore" button dismissed them--they did hang the application, and they were consistently repeatable after two reinstallations.
Taking advantage of DSP programmability, Best Data offers several upgrade options. You can upgrade the V.32bis data modem software to V.34, but it remains to be seen whether or not the MDSP1012 chip can handle 28.8-Kbps transmission with full four-times compression. Other software options are caller ID, full-duplex speakerphone, network fax, Q-Sound (simulated 3-D), and a three-way call discrimination (voice, fax, and data).
While QuickLink's list of business-oriented feat
ures stands out, the implementation simply doesn't measure up to our expectations for actual use. Overall, we rate the ACE 5000 behind OfficeF/X. The ACE card works with Visual Voice, if you have a custom application in mind. Or you can wait for the MDSP2780-based ACE 6000 with its upgraded software.
Objix Multimedia's Media Manager
Objix Multimedia's Media Manager is an Mwave card. Like the ACE 5000, this half-length card uses IBM's MDSP1012 Mwave chip, and its features and DSP software capabilities are similar. A joystick/MIDI connector is standard (through an adjacent slot opening), and the audio connections (microphone, line in and out) run through a pigtail. There is a bundled microphone, and the card has a scanner port and software that supports scan to fax, giving you real fax-machine capability.
Automatic configuration by a Windows program makes installation straightforward. The card supports only one type of CD-ROM drive--Sony.
Media Manager comes with th
e most limited software of the six cards. The PhoneManager program handles voice calls, providing one mailbox, your choice of three greetings, and only the most basic telephone-plus-answering-machine functionality. Similarly, the Fax Desktop program offers little beyond the minimum required features of a fax machine.
The standard Mwave discriminator routes calls to PhoneManager and Fax Desktop, but there is no central manager to get voice and fax services running automatically. Fax Desktop also requires you to log in with a name and password, making it difficult to set your machine to restart itself after a power loss. The user interfaces are clunky, with separate voice and fax inboxes and poorly drawn icons.
The bundled microphone is a nice touch, but the card's line output wasn't strong enough to drive our headphones at an acceptable volume. In its present state, fax and voice support are so basic as to put the Media Manager in last place among its Mwave counterparts. The manual that came with
the Media Manager card was stamped "preliminary," leaving hope that the software will move forward.
MediaMagic's Telemetry-32
This three-quarter-length multifunction DSP card was the first one to use AT&T's Roadrunner 3210 chip. The card's hardware features are impressive: four CD-ROM interfaces, stereo microphone input, audio jacks, dual RJ-11 telephone jacks, a game port, and a stereo microphone.
While the Telemetry-32's basic software capabilities are similar to the Mwave cards, that's where the similarity ends. For once, installation was truly automatic. The software includes Voyetra's Multimedia Sound Software for Windows, and voice and fax action are handled impressively by Syncro Development's Multimedia Connect with three-way call discrimination.
Multimedia Connect is hampered by a too-sparse manual, and the answering-machine software suffers from the common flaw of recording after an immediate hang-up. However, Multimedia Connect makes the Telemetry-32 t
elephony bundle professional and complete enough to put to business use immediately.
Surprisingly, Multimedia Connect's greetings and prompts are delivered by a clear, professional voice. The layout of the voice menus, mailbox access, and remote administration is clean and sensible. Multimedia Connect is clearly patterned after high-end voice-mail systems.
Its features go way beyond a unified inbox for fax and voice messages. The standard voice menus invite fax senders to attach voice messages, which then appear as icons in the fax viewer toolbar. You double-click on the icon to hear the message. Multimedia Connect also forwards faxes and messages to other mailboxes, and it will even forward faxes to another fax machine (with automatic retries and the ability to reprogram the forwarding number remotely). The program doesn't forward voice messages to other locations or notify pagers.
The stylish Multimedia Connect interface (
see the screen
) is compact enough to let y
ou run other programs on a 1024- by 768-pixel screen. Also, the program can play WAV files to callers on hold. This big-system feature lets you annoy callers with marketing messages and music, but it keeps callers from wondering if they've been disconnected. The interface doesn't make it clear enough, however, that a caller is on hold.
Unfortunately, Multimedia Connect's Touch-Tone duration is too brief for most voice-mail systems to recognize, and the speakerphone introduces a jarring delay between your speech (into the microphone) and its playback in your headphones. Also, the board itself is a little noisy, playing a constant, almost tune-like, sequence of random tones through the headphones when the line is quiet.
The Multimedia Connect interface has a "terminal" button that enables the modem emulator and launches any external terminal program you choose. The package also includes AT&T's stand-alone data and fax modem emulators, so you can run third-party communications software.
The
Telemetry-32 was up and running faster, and presenting a more professional interface to the caller, than the other cards tested. It has no pager notification or remote fax retrieval, but overall, we give the Telemetry-32 high marks and recommend it for any small business that wants to sound big.
American Megatrends' Media-TEL
American Megatrends (AMI) supplied its new Media-TEL card with prerelease installation software. With the same hardware and software features, this card is virtually indistinguishable from MediaMagic's Telemetry-32. (The cards aren't identical at the component level, though the Media-TEL uses two MediaMagic chips.) Both run AT&T Roadrunner chips at 55 MHz (AMI uses the 3207 version with no serial interface), both support four different flavors of CD-ROM drive, and both run Syncro Development's Multimedia Connect voice/fax manager. Only the Media-TEL provides a game/MIDI interface.
While the Telemetry-32's installation was smooth, the Media-TEL's was
n't. AMI told us its final installation routine will be good because it relies on the same hardware sniffing routines used in its AMIDIAG utility. The company includes an odd assortment of AT&T DSP demonstration programs, the most impressive of which made short work of JPEG image decoding. Reserving judgment on AMI's unfinished installation routine, we expect to like the Media-TEL as much as the Telemetry-32, for the same reasons.
Boca Research's SoundExpression 14.4VSp
The SoundExpression 14.4VSp (Boca calls it the SE1440) blazes its own trail. Rather than using one DSP to handle everything, the SE1440 employs discrete components, which explains why it's a full-length card. In specifications, it does nearly everything the DSP-based cards reviewed here will do. What you don't get is software upgradability.
You can connect four kinds of CD-ROM drives with internal audio cable support for each. Line in and out as well as microphone and joystick/MIDI jacks are standard. Wit
h only one RJ-11 jack on the card, Boca supplies an odd-looking splitter that lets you connect a handset as well.
Boca did a first-class job packaging the SE1440. A preinstallataion COM-port sniffer tells you how to set jumpers for the fax modem's I/O port and IRQ. All audio and CD-ROM parameters are then set in the well-designed installation program, which makes configuration effortless. Boca doesn't include the Sound System software, instead bundling MidiSoft's Sound Impression tools.
The real story behind the SE1440 is the FaxWorks software from SofNet. It makes the SE1440 the most powerful and capable telephony card in this review. FaxWorks' base of operations, the Communication Center, lets you see how many voice and fax messages you have at a glance. Its unified inbox has a twist: Tab headers let you browse among fax and voice, new and old, and incoming and outgoing messages with ease. With each of FaxWorks' multiple voice/fax mailboxes, you can set a per-mailbox disk-space limit. Your mai
lbox can also have its own private fax-on-demand list, and FaxWorks' forwarding options are impressive.
When you're traveling, FaxWorks can notify you about new faxes and voice messages by digital pager or by faxing a status update. In both cases, FaxWorks gives you the number of new and old fax and voice messages, and the total number of new fax pages. With pager notification, FaxWorks ingeniously turns this data into Touch-Tones. The counts appear in your pager's display as a suffix following any mailbox-specific ID code you supply. When you call in for your messages, you can also get your faxes selectively. And FaxWorks satisfies our fax-back standards by letting you call from any phone and specify a callback fax-machine number.
The versatile FaxWorks gives you three ways to deliver fax-on-demand: 10 global demand documents, 10 additional documents per mailbox, and up to 1000 documents in a master document-retrieval tank. Each fax-on-demand document may contain several pages, and you can see
both thumbnail and full-size views as you select documents for the list. The smaller global and per-mailbox fax-on-demand lists support both voice and faxable text descriptions, but the document-retrieval area requires the caller to know the four-digit document code and its four-digit password. As with fax retrieval, fax-on-demand supports both immediate and delayed transmission.
While not quite the equal of the voice prompts included with the Multimedia Connect software shared by the MediaMagic and AMI cards, FaxWorks' standard voice prompts and greetings are clean and professional. It has many nifty features. With a lightning-fast viewer, annotation, and automatic cover pages, the fax component is not crippled at all. The terminal emulator includes a host mode for quickie file transfers. If you get lost, you can turn on FaxWorks' "cue card" facility, which pops up a helpful hints window for the control you're pointing at.
The SE1440 card does have a quirk or two, including too-loud Touch-Tones
while dialing and an ear-jamming pop that precedes local playback of greetings and prompts. Overall, however, we give the SE1440 top marks for the quality of FaxWorks.
As hardware, all the reviewed multifunction cards are capable enough for telephony; it's the bundled software that makes the difference. For now, the Boca SE1440 and the AT&T cards from MediaMagic and AMI provide the best business telephony software.
WHERE TO FIND
American Megatrends, Inc.
Norcross, GA
(800) 828-9264
(404) 263-8181
fax: (404) 263-9381
Best Data Products, Inc.
Chatsworth, CA
(800) 632-2378
(818) 773-9600
fax: (818) 773-9619
Boca Research, Inc.
Boca Raton, FL
(407) 997-6227
fax: (407) 997-0918
MediaMagic
IPC Technologies, Inc.
Austin, TX
(800) 624-8654
(512) 339-3500
fax: (512) 454-1357
Objix Multimedia Corp.
Waltham, MA
(800) 8
54-6211
(617) 466-8720
fax: (617) 466-8722.
Spectrum Signal Processing
Burnaby, British Columbia,
Canada
(800) 667-0018
(604) 421-5422
fax: (604) 421-1764
MULTIFUNCTION TELEPHONY CARD FEATURES
AMI
BEST DATA
MEDIA-TEL
ACE 5000
Price $399 $299
DSP AT&T 3207 IBM Mwave 1012
14.4-Kbps fax & data modem V.32terbo Yes
Upgradable to V.34 No Yes
Windows Sound System-compatible Yes No
Wave-table MIDI* Yes Optional
CD-ROM connections Sony, Mitsumi, Panasonic
Panasoni
c, IDE
Microphone Yes Yes
Telephony Software Features
Unified inbox Yes Yes
Multiple mailboxes Yes Yes
Caller ID Yes Option
Full-duplex speakerphone Yes Option
Call auto-detect Three-way Two-way
Message forwarding Voice to other mail- Yes
boxes only; forwards
faxes
Pager notification No Yes
Remote message retrieval Yes Message & Fax
Fax-on-demand No Limited
BOCA SOUND-
MEDIAMAGIC
EXPRESSION 14.4
VSP
TELEMETRY-32
Price $179 (est. street $299
price)
DSP Fixed function AT&T 3210
14.4-Kbps fax & data modem Yes V.32terbo
Upgradable to V.34 No Yes
Windows Sound System-compatible Yes Yes
Wave-table MIDI* Hardware optional Yes
CD-ROM connections Sony, Mitsumi, Sony, Mitsumi,
Panasonic, IDE Panasonic, IDE
Microphone No Yes
Telephony Software Features
Unified inbox Yes Yes
Multiple mailboxes Yes Yes
Caller ID Yes Yes
Full-duplex speakerphone Ha
lf-duplex Yes
Call auto-detect Two-way Three-way
Message forwarding Message & fax Voice to other
mailboxes only;
forwards faxes
Pager notification Yes No
Remote message retrieval Message & fax Yes
Fax-on-demand Yes No
OBJIX MEDIA
SPECTRUM
MANAGER
OFFICE/X
Price $379 $299
DSP IBM Mwave 1012 IBM Mwave 1012
14.4-Kbps fax & data modem Yes Yes
Upgradable to V.34 Yes
Yes
Windows Sound System-compatible No Yes
Wave-table MIDI* Yes Yes
CD-ROM connections Sony Sony, Panasonic
Microphone Yes No
Telephony Software Features
Unified inbox No Yes
Multiple mailboxes No Yes
Caller ID Option ($20) Yes
Full-duplex speakerphone Half-duplex Yes
Call auto-detect Two-way Three-way
Message forwarding No No
Pager notification No No
Remote message retrieval Yes Yes
Fax-on-demand No No
*All cards provide 16-bit 44MHz stereo sound with Sound Blaster capability.
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Multifunction telephony cards can give your small business or home office a big-league sound. The bundled software makes the difference.
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Multimedia Connect's main interface mimics a speakerphone. The Enter key lifts the receiver off the hook, and you can dial with your keypad. The mini inbox view shows newly arrived voice and fax messages. The program comes with the MediaMagic and AMI packages.
Tom Yager is a freelance writer and analyst living in north Texas. He is the author of The Multimedia Production Handbook for the
PC, Macintosh, and Amiga (Academic Press, 1993). You can reach him on the Internet at
tyager@maxx.lonestar.org
or on BIX c/o "editors."
Small-Scale Telephony
