Why asynchronous audio should not have been removed....and an idea.

[NaturalViolence]

kinkinkijkin Wrote:I crossed it out because I hadn't taken into account that by "RCA" he might be referring to S/PDIF coaxial, as I already said,

This week in "how consumers ruin terminology", the story of RCA.

RCA is actually the name for a company. Radio corportation of america. A very large american company that was involved with pretty much anything to do with radio electronics back in the day. Since their equipment was so popular in the industry the cables they used quickly became the standard. The term "RCA" started being widely used to describe the most common connector used on their equipment. Since apparently everyone was too lazy to invent a proper term for it and just decided to name it after the company that invented it instead. Later on people began referring to any cable that uses this connector as an "RCA cable" since originally there was only one standard cable (now there are many, and we still haven't managed to start using terms to distinguish between them). Once consumers start using a specific term to refer to specific products companies are forced to sell and market the products using that name so people can easily identify them. Thus we're now stuck with everybody using this confusing and downright incorrect system of terminology.

Subwoofer cables, rca audio cables, composite video cables, component video cables, spdif coaxial cables, and so on can all be referred to as "RCA cables". Stupid isn't it?

kinkinkijkin Wrote:which would mean that he WOULD be switching from a digital to audio connection,

Switching from a digital connection to an audio connection.... One day I'm going to get you to write a post that makes sense, one day.

kinkinkijkin Wrote:a thing that I said would be the only case in which he'd be right about it being the DAC. It wouldn't really surprise me if it were the DAC either, onboard audio solutions are all delicate and crappy, with very, very few exceptions

I don't see how a DAC crashing an application would even be possible.

kinkinkijkin Wrote:And, since I don't work with the micro/software side of audio, I didn't actually know that about HDMI. Though, he would be helped by a new soundcard if he also has S/PDIF optical inputs on his stereo receiver, since optical S/PDIF is superior to (if only more fragile than) coaxial S/PDIF. The thing is, though, optical cables cannot be bent too much or they will snap and become useless.

Optical cables provide no improvement in audio quality assuming the same settings are used. And you don't need to work with the "micro/software side of audio" (whatever that means) to recognize that HDMI is a digital A/V connection and therefore doesn't involve your systems analog audio circuits.

kinkinkijkin Wrote:Also, Creative still releases audio cards with hardware acceleration for some features of OpenAL, and only when it's through OpenAL. It's almost like they technically own the rights to OpenAL.

Yeah, and they're useless. There are maybe a few games in existance that can make use of these features and none of them are demanding enough to actually get any speedup from it (they're all older games). They can only accelerate a limited number of functions in certain extensions to the API and only if they're used a specific way. These days everything these cards can do can be done just as fast in software (CPU based) without all of the restrictions put in place by hardware based solutions. Which is why devs have abandoned it. There is simply no point in hardware accelerated audio anymore. In fact it's often slower than software based solutions these days. It's not like 3D rendering where GPUs are dramatically faster at performing the task at hand than CPUs and we actually need that extra speed to do things that wouldn't otherwise be possible to do.