[linux-audio-dev] Amount of analog channels with nonuncompressing demux on ENVY24HT-S based cards

Hello ! I want to setup a multichannel audio environment for use together with software that synthesize the waveforms for each channel. My newest audio card is a "Hollywood@home 7.1" card based on the ENVY24HT-S chip. I have managed to use the card to output mono and/or stereo sound under Slackware 10.1, but still want to find out if the card supports the conversion of uncompressed multichannel audio (for example 6 or 8 16-bit (or 24-bit) samples per frame from a FIFO through operating system and hardware) into analog signals ? If this is not possible with the internal DACs of the card, then I hope that it at least will be possible through ALSA with external DACs connected to the card's optical output, that seems to be of a high speed kind and expected to support ADAT (a standard established by Alesis, I think). I am not so interested in encoding the audio in DTS or some Dolby Multichannel format or simmilar, since i want the channels to be handled independently. For example I do not want to label a speaker as "left" or "right" and then select the speaker by assosiating a direction to the sound. Instead I want to be able to assign D/A channels to MIDI file tracks or MIDI channels and then placing the speakers there I want them (not there any multichannel decoder expect them to be). If I try to use several cards, then a lot of synchronization problems need to be solved, to avoid divergation in FIFO usage between cards and to maintain phase coherency. In addition to arrangements, like pathing cards to use a common chrystal oscilator and/or reserving some DAC-channels for synchronizaion purposes, I also need to convince the motherboard to accept several sound cards without causing problems during resource allocation (for example around IRQ mapping) or distributing the cards between several PCs connected together with maybe 100Mbps network cards. When I have solved these questions, then I may have to think more about the best algorithms to synthesize sound, by looking at existing open source programs and/or implementing additive synthesis with or without the use of FFT or some other optimized code. I am new to this list, so please excuse me if the answers to my questions are hidden in any recent messages in the archive. Thanks in advance for feedback/answers ! Hans Davidson _______________________________________________________ Skicka gratis SMS! http://www.passagen.se