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ON BOARD AUDIO CONTROLLER
Introduction
CREATIVE ES1371 Sound Blaster AudioPCI
™
64V
The On-board audio controller is the new Creative AC97 digital controller which pro-
vides the next generation of audio performance to the PC market. The ES1371 is avail-
able in a 5.0 V PCI bus compatible device that enables the Creative/ENSONIQ
Wavetable synthesis PCI solution.
The ES1371 chip includes a complete audio recording and playback system. The ES1371
interfaces to the PCI bus and to AC97, an industry standard CODEC/mixer. This solu-
tion is sound Blaster PCI compatible utilizing a patented method of Sound Blaster emula-
tion from Ensoniq. In addition, it is compliant to AC97 interface, Microsoft PC97 and
PC98, and Multimedia PC Level II and III specifications.
The ES1371 provides 64 voices polyphony for wavetable audio, sound effects such as
reverb, chorus, bass, and treble. As a result, the produced music is more complete and
closer to the actual sound. What's more, the ES1371 supports the 3D Positional Audio
algorithm from Ensoniq. This 3D Positional Audio implementation also supports the
Aureal A3D API for 3D Positional Audio. This allows applications written to this API to
run on the ES1371.
The ES1371 support Microsoft DirectSound, DirectSound 3D and DirectMusic. All of
these implementations are accelerated through the drivers from Ensoniq. This provides
better overall performance for the system and the audio quality.
What is AudioPCI
™
?
AudioPCI™
technology is a combination of hardware and software that provides the
highest quality in PC sound and the greatest compatibility with current standards.
Why PCI?
The PCI bus is far superior to the ISA bus. It is capable of transferring data on a wider
32-bit bandwidth bus. This allows much more data to pass from the PCI bus to the host
processor. The ISA bus is only capable of 16-bit bandwidth transfers. Using the PCI bus
will allow a 4 to 20 times increase in speed over much slower DMA transfers on the ISA
bus. This drastically reduces the overhead on the host CPU. This tremendous processing
power opens up new possibilities for sound cards. Real-time software based sound fields
are now possible without bogging down the host CPU.
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