Sound and Spectacle

By Jerry Pournelle

August 4, 2003

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Column 276 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Sound for Home Theater

Everyone tells me that the Philips PSC 706 Acoustic Edge sound card is great, and perhaps so; but with the present drivers it will not work with the Intel D875 Canterwood motherboard running at 3.2 GHz and Front Side Bus speed of 800. By "will not work," I mean the system is unstable, and reboots when you play certain sounds. Something tries to grab 100 percent of the system resources—on that fast a machine that's a lot of resources—and again you will find yourself rebooting.

Indeed it got so bad that I had to uninstall the card in order to get online to see if there were any new drivers for it. There weren't, but I downloaded and re-installed anyway just to be on the sure side. That left the system a little less unstable, or perhaps I had a run of good luck; but within an hour it rebooted itself. That hasn't happened with that system at any other time; it happened with the Philips card in it; and it stopped when I removed the card. That's enough for me.

Worse: an attempt to play a DVD movie seemed to be working, and indeed working very well with good sound, when suddenly the system locked up. The picture froze, and nothing I could do would get me back to the desktop or anywhere else. It was hardware reset time. When I removed the Philips card and uninstalled the drivers the problems went away.

So: I was back to the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound board. That works, and not badly, especially with the newest release of the card's drivers; but it still won't properly do a DVD Movie with synthesized 5.1 Sound, and I think I should explain all this.

Analog and Digital

Sound is, of course, "analog": that is, it's a physical wave that has frequency and amplitude; the higher the frequency the higher the "pitch." You can actually see rarefaction and compression in the media as a sound wave goes past. For a long time that's what records were: literally hills and valleys (or more likely side to side wiggles) impressed into the recording medium.

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