dark.za.org

Been a while since I've posted anything, but no fear - I will return.

Unfortunately my production machine experienced a slight case of deadness a while ago. All attempts and rituals to bring it back to life failed so I had to live without one for a while. It did have blown caps on the motherboard for the last couple of years that I was never able to get fixed, so it was just a matter of time anyway.

I have since gotten a budget replacement, an AMD Sephron 3400+ system on an AM2 mobo which has the usual onboard stuff. I must say the AMD performs rather generously for a budget processor and is almost three times the speed of my old PIII. The onboard VGA even ran Doom3 (to my surprise) without any glitches, though it IS dog slow at times, hehe. ;)

The audio I discovered is vastly different from my previous board, as in it sucks even worse. Besides the terrible quality of the sound the geniuses somehow managed to get the subwoofer channel mixed in with the front-speakers and there seems to be no way to disable it. I've tried my best to filter the tremendous increase in sub-bass frequencies but I keep getting random peeks of frequencies still pushing through.

With my already bad setup and speakers it's difficult to tell what exactly is going on and how to try to compensate, never mind that I get huge hums and other sonic interference from the motherboard. Combine that with new strange glitches and crackle in the audio in Renoise (which I suspect would be a driver problem) and I think this is the most f**king retarded onboard sound I've ever tested.

Luckily I've had some generous friends donate some sound cards to me in the past and will be testing them soon to see if I can come up with a better temporary solution. If I can at least get back to where I was before the old machine died I can finish up some of my tracks.

In the long run I think the solution I'm more interested in would be not to buy a new snazzy soundcard, but to finally buy a real amplifier with SPDIF-in and just run the audio digitally. Good quality Amps usually do a decent job of the digital-to-analog conversion to the speakers anyway and should solve alot of headaches with my bad sound. I might even be able to master my tracks, hehe.

Now I just need to work on the cash bit... ;)

Keep your sequencers firing.

TM.