now the AMIII is discontinued I don't see why apple can't use it as the mac's audio
Yeah, I noticed that straight away, infact CDs sound a lot cleaner and louder listening to them through my audiomedia III through the AUX input on my hifi than the CD player on my hifi does.
It's the fact the mac reads the audio off a CD digitially and then the card has high quality digital to analogue converters with 128 x oversampling and a really clean signal. Obviously it's asmuch the cable's you use to hook it up as the card as far as low noise is concerned but when I got my protools LE system and listened to a CD through the card for the first time it blew me away.
I don't see how apple can't work with digidesign to incorporate the converters and stuff off the card into the motherboard, it would only need some kind of bridge chip so it doesn't require any drivers and then they can add decent audio to the mac that's already proven to be good quality. I'm sure the converters in the mac at present only compares to the ones on £10 bargain basement soundcards you can get for windows. Plus we need that input back.
Also, when I checked the specs of the TiBook's new audio input on the apple site (someone had put a link to a technical document here a while ago), the minijack input has exactly the same dynamic range and signal to noise ratio as the yamaha SW1000XG card, that's more of a GM tone module with audio bolted on but it's still a good card and it's a good sign that apple are at least closing the gap a little between it's built in audio support and the quality you can get from a 3rd party card.
Yeah, I noticed that straight away, infact CDs sound a lot cleaner and louder listening to them through my audiomedia III through the AUX input on my hifi than the CD player on my hifi does.
It's the fact the mac reads the audio off a CD digitially and then the card has high quality digital to analogue converters with 128 x oversampling and a really clean signal. Obviously it's asmuch the cable's you use to hook it up as the card as far as low noise is concerned but when I got my protools LE system and listened to a CD through the card for the first time it blew me away.
I don't see how apple can't work with digidesign to incorporate the converters and stuff off the card into the motherboard, it would only need some kind of bridge chip so it doesn't require any drivers and then they can add decent audio to the mac that's already proven to be good quality. I'm sure the converters in the mac at present only compares to the ones on £10 bargain basement soundcards you can get for windows. Plus we need that input back.
Also, when I checked the specs of the TiBook's new audio input on the apple site (someone had put a link to a technical document here a while ago), the minijack input has exactly the same dynamic range and signal to noise ratio as the yamaha SW1000XG card, that's more of a GM tone module with audio bolted on but it's still a good card and it's a good sign that apple are at least closing the gap a little between it's built in audio support and the quality you can get from a 3rd party card.
