Explanations

We cannot guarantee information given in the table above may contain errors. Note that the sound devices working with Widows 95 should also work with Win 98 and ME. The OPL3-SAx that is listed under Sound Chips is also used on sound devices. Each term in the table is explained below:

Sound Devices displays the name of the sound devices. At the bottom of the list, sound chips usually used in laptops are displayed.

Channel(s) indicate the maximum number of channels that can be measured with WinMLS using the sound device. Note that the ARC88 can measure 8 channels, but a hardware error gives a small time difference between the channel pairs. Note also that Midiman DMAN 2044 is a 4-channel card, but it can only be used for 1-channel measurements without feedback loop in the current version of WinMLS.

Mixer tells if the sound device supports the built in WinMLS audio mixer that makes it easier to perform the measurements and you may also save volume settings for each measurement. If the WinMLS audio mixer is not supported, you may still perform measurements; especially the ARC44 and ARC88 have a nice external mixer.

Mic. input tells if the sound device has an input for microphone. If “Adj.”, then the card has a input that can be selected to be either line or microphone input. If “Yes” there is a microphone input in addition to the line input and you can do 2 channel measurements with feedback loop without having to order a special device for this (If you want to, we can supply such a device). You can connect a feedback loop to either the line input or the microphone input, and use the other input for your measurements. See the User’s Guide for more information about this.

Price, the suggested price of the cards is only meant to give an indication and may not be correct.

AD/DA tells how many bits the analog to digital and digital to analog converters is. Note that for most of the sound devices and in the current version of WinMLS, only 16 bits digital play and record is supported. So the extra bits that the 18 and 20 bits converts have are not used. Anyway the cards that have 18 and 20 bits converters usually do have less background noise than the cards having 16 bits converters.

Fs [kHz]– This column displays the upper sampling frequency that the sound device supports. In addition to this, all the sound devices in the table support 11025 kHz, 22050 kHz and 44100 kHz. Some sound devices like the ARC44 support a wide range of sampling frequencies.

Noise indicates the level of the background noise. DIG means that the card is digital and converters are needed. +++ means an extremely low noise level (better than -100 dB A-weighed), ++ means very low level (appr. -96 dB A-weighed), + means low level (appr. -85 dB), 0 means a fairly low level ( appr. –75 dB), - means quite high level (the range  –75 dB to  -50 dB). Note that other systems for MLS measurements use 12-bits cards, which gives at best a background noise level of –76 dB. Unless you want extremely accurate measurements, the level of background noise does not have to be critical. In many cases increasing the measurements time can average it out.

Frequency Range - Frequency response range given as the upper and lower frequencies where the magnitude frequency response is -3 dB down. For the sound devices that have built-in bass and treble settings, e.g. the OPL3-Sax, this was difficult to measure because the frequency response is not flat in the middle. If no comment is added, the bass and treble settings were set to maximum value during the measurements and we measured the frequencies where the drop-off is 3 dB down from the average value of the frequency response in the “linear range”. In this case we have measured the maximum frequency range.

Operative System tells if the sound device can be run in Windows 95(98) and/or in Windows NT. If it supports Windows 95 then it should support Windows 98 also.