I need to rant about sound cards, people...

[LifeForceExplorer]

I'm fried.

What's with sound card and driver terminology ? Have you ever seen such gibberish ? Have you ever seen a subject which NO ONE can write a decent article about in simple English giving the WHOLE BIG PICTURE on sound cards ? Try finding one on the net.

It's like a mystery cult that youre supposed to hang around for years and years gradually, slowwwwwly learning things - when you just want to make some friggin MUSIC!!

MME, WMD, GSIF, ASIO

TSR, TS, TRX, RCA, S/PDIF (cinch!), TOS, OPTICAL, COAXIAL

gain, dithering down, attentuation, -4db, + 10db

on and on and on and on....

And the sound card manufacturers all use this terminology with such PRIDE. It's their SECRET LANGUAGE. They would never ever, ever slow down for their prospective CUSTOMERS who give them MONEY and actually explain IN SIMPLE ENGLISH WHOLE SENTENCES what their card can and cant do. Not even in their friggin manuals AFTER youve bought their friggin product!!!

No, no. It's much cooler to create a techy looking manual and brochures with audio engineer's diagrams and LOTS of little tech abbreviations and bulleted little spec listings. And after you buy their product their tech support people answer you by email with the same little friggin tech language with lots of clever ----> routing arrows in their abbreviated answers.

We're all supposed to swim around from forum to forum picking up tid bits of PRACTICAL information, wasting months til we finally find out from SOMEBODY who uses ENGLISH that THAT term means its ONLY for Mac you dummy, or its only for using with Steinberg products, or you cant connect it to THAT kind of device you dummy. ALL the manufacturers would have to do is hire someone who speaks English to slow down and EXPLAIN in actual sentences what their friggin COMMON terminology actually means. But this wouldnt be "cool". It wouldnt look "techy". It wouldnt IMPRESS people and be PROFESSIONAL.

I just arrived at this little rant after some one recommended my attention to the Maya44 card at www.audiotrack.net. Notice how they tell you about their "6.3mm jacks". What the friggin H*** is a 6.3MM JACK !!!!!!!!! Why cant these jerks come up with a common terminology and create a simple, educational sound card and driver BASICS website for their own common friggin industry and agree to some standards that would only help them to ACTUALLY SELL PEOPLE MORE PRODUCTS AND MAKE MORE MONEY AND FRUSTRATE FEWER POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS!!!!

STICK IT UP YOUR 6.3MM JACKS, SOUND CARD MANUFACTURERS!!! YOUR TECH TALK DOESNT IMPRESS ME!!!!!!!!!!!!! And I've got a college degree and two masters degrees and a lot of expertise at MUSIC you bunch of pointy headed GEEKS :mad:

(Ahhhhhh....I'm going to have a nice cold beer now and start to feel much better. And I wont have to kick the dog.)

[cpufan]

Dude, you don't need a beer, you need a vallium!

And all this technical mumbo-jumbo alphabet soup jargon, well it's all this guy's fault. (http://www.mugshots.org/misc/bill-gates.html)

[fossil]

LOL, typical American response. Funny I didnt see a link with a USA flag on their site, how dare they use a metric system when dealing with England, Germany, Korea and Japan! Everything should be listed in inches, feet and yards not that nonsense metric system!

Did you try to convert 6.3MM to inches? Any guess as to what it translates to in American inches? Hmmmm could it be 1/4"? All kidding aside (and I am definately just joking around) get used to jargon its used in every form of business, sport, hobby, art and your local PTA meetings, its just a part of life. Unfortunately if you want to learn most anything it requires some actual time and effort in learning what specs are useful and what ones are to hook the marks. With the internet and sites such as this it is much easier to learn today then it was 10 years ago.

If you think the Soundcard manufacturers are bad with their jargon and acronymns try working for the defense industry.

definition of an Elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.

Other moments of Zen derived from excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long:

- Always store beer in a dark place
-Certainly the game is rigged. Dont let that stop you; if you dont bet, you cant win.
- What a wondeful world it is that has girls in it!
- Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
- A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; He is unbiased - he hates all creative people equally.
- Be wary of strong drink it can make you shoot at tax collectors.... and miss.
- A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain.

[IsildursBane]

>If you think the Soundcard manufacturers are bad with their
>jargon and acronymns try working for the defense industry.

Ugh... My first week at <my current employer>... I couldn't follow a single conversation... Any document, any piece of software, any process, any person's title - all acronyms.

>And the sound card manufacturers all use this terminology with
>such PRIDE. It's their SECRET LANGUAGE. They would never
>ever, ever slow down for their prospective CUSTOMERS who
>give them MONEY and actually explain IN SIMPLE ENGLISH
>WHOLE SENTENCES what their card can and cant do. Not even
>in their friggin manuals AFTER youve bought their friggin
>product!!!

What the heck do you want them to say? How's this for an ad?

"Buy our sound card cuz' it rocks, and it'll help you rock!"

I want to know what the hell it is that I'm buying, not some marketting idiot's presentation of it. Giving the customer such detailed information is a BENEFIT for the consumer! They're not hiding their merchandise behind some ridiculous marketing slogan or celebrity endorsement. They're saying that their product is better, and giving you the reasons why.

>And I've got a college degree and two masters degrees

In what?

I can understand being frustrated, but if you have an aversion to educating yourself about the gear you want to use, you're an idiot.

-Dan.

[Styrerra]

yes yes

the computer must be stupid

that's what it is

And now an anti-americian sprung up. Don't mix Open Jam with Americians.

[Hidden]

Musicians using DAW and PC´s a lot in general, turns into geeks eventually.

- You must know how to tweak and configure your system
- You must learn new words and expressions all the time
- When something goes wrong (always), you will spend hours and hours trying to figure out where the problem is, and fix it (not always, though)
- You oughta know what your MIDI equipment does on all channels, all the time.
- Learning advanced stuff like MIDI commands
- Reading books on it, so boring you wish you never got into it
+++

Or what? Not always, but just look at peeps buying monsters like Motif, Karma e.t.c. Ok, so you can just sit down and play and have great fun, but then you will sound like everybody else doing it, and you don´t want that. So you must dive into the fat users manual and try to understand what it tells you. After a couple pages you throw it away and get back to playing because that was a lot more fun in the first place.. :D

Just face it, anyway: If you are planning on keeping up with what´s going in in the great (..) world of MIDI (2), you must read a lot and try things out, not just play.

Thank God I play guitar too, but I fear the day I put a MIDI pickup on a guitar. It will happen some day, I know it. Tried a decent guitarsynth in a music store once, and it blew me away. Too bad :D

[GrammarCop]

OK, for the metric thing--I've heard plenty of British music products calling 1/4" plugs "1/4 inch." Go look at Vox, Laney, or Marshall and see what they call them.... They could at least clarify with "6.3mm phone plugs" as they're commonly called, because, in all my experience with music gear (and I'm a geek, and usually pretty into all of the jargon), I've never heard 1/4" plugs referred to as 6.3mm. And I definitely own UK made gear with 1/4" plugs.

[fossil]

Originally posted by Revol
OK, for the metric thing--I've heard plenty of British music products calling 1/4" plugs "1/4 inch." Go look at Vox, Laney, or Marshall and see what they call them.... They could at least clarify with "6.3mm phone plugs" as they're commonly called, because, in all my experience with music gear (and I'm a geek, and usually pretty into all of the jargon), I've never heard 1/4" plugs referred to as 6.3mm. And I definitely own UK made gear with 1/4" plugs.

I understand your point but the website he referred to in his first post is not trying to sell the product in the US, go look at the website he linked to in his post and you will see what I mean. Also american products such as the M-Audio Delta 1010 are advertised as having 6.3mm inputs in other countries ( see http://www.midiman.de/delta1010.htm do a search for 6,3mm (they had a typo using a comma rather than a period)). I had never heard of 6.3mm jacks before either, as Im also from the US, but it only took me about 10 seconds to figure out they were the same as 1/4" jacks.

[LifeForceExplorer]

Hehe...nice to see that this thread is still alive. If you're interested in my other thread I'm getting good at:

IRQs, PCI, ACPI bus, and SCI - all with my wonderful EWX !!

Okay, okay - I should have done a simple study of what 6.3mm converts to. Fair enough. But youre reading something and you just want to get the gist - but then it's stop, scratch the noggin, get the ruler and lose your train of thought. Hate that.

Besides - the whole metric thing is the invention of a bunch of crazed idealists during the French Revolution, you know.

http://www.footrule.org/How%20Metric%20is%20Europe.htm

It is a system without human meaning (while we all know where the "foot" came from right?) or necessity. Artificial and simplistic. Brought to you by the same kind of technocrats who eventually introduced the Euro-dollar. The metric system has been about as meaningful to the world as the United Nations.

[IsildursBane]

>It is a system without human meaning (while we all know where
>the "foot" came from right?) or necessity.

Well... I've used the Imperial/English/whatever system my whole life except in some science classes, and I'll say that metric makes MUCH more sense. Everything is related by some power of 10. If you want to divide units, just move the decimal around.

How many eighths of an inch are there in a mile?

8 eighths / 1 inch * 12 inches / 1 foot * 5280 ft / 1 mile = 506880

If you want to convert from nanometer to kilometer, just move the decimal.

1 nanometer = 10^-12 kilometers.

You can do metric stuff in your head.

-Dan.

[fossil]

Glad to see you bounced back Lifeforce and to also see you have a sense of humor. I understand the frustration that comes with days or weeks of research only to find I end up more confused than when I knew nothing about the subject. To be fair, 90% of the reason I knew that 1/4" converted to 6.3mm is because I wanted some nicotine. Went out to the garage to have a smoke and glanced at the inches to MM chart I have hanging on the wall. My father originally got the chart because he had an old MG which was notoriously English (meaning it needed to be "tinkered" with constantly or else it wouldn't run). Its come in handy over the years as I tend to buy foreign sports cars. Yeah i know, what a great American I am eh?

"Brought to you by the same kind of technocrats who eventually introduced the Euro-dollar. The metric system has been about as meaningful to the world as the United Nations."

Now that theres two perfect examples of a "lifeform with six or more legs and no brains".

"I've used the Imperial/English/whatever system my whole life except in some science classes, and I'll say that metric makes MUCH more sense"

but it makes no human sense, its just too logical! Just as there is no crying in Baseball, there is no fun in strict logic.

*note: why would some countries name their sports logically? Football should be a game where the movement of the ball involves mostly moving it with your hands, the Football should only be touched by feet often enough so the name does not seem completely illogical. Sock-her is the sport you play with your wife (or girlfriend) after you drink two six-packs and lose $200 watching your favorite Football team get Pummeled.

[LifeForceExplorer]

Thanks for the comments, lads. Here's a cold one for each of you.

Well, for what it's worth I actually found a good article at a GigaStudio forum about sound card drivers - which might be of interest to others here. Of course, as it turns out, we shouldnt really be calling them "drivers" at all.

But lets not let a little thing like confusion get us confused. I actually thought this was a very helpful piece - the kind of audio explanation you rarely see that goes deep, but in ordinary language, and tells you what is really going on:

http://www.staudio.de/kb/english/drivers/

Run a few questions based on THIS material by the salesman at the Guitar Center next time he's showing you the latest $499 sound card!

And note that it's from Europe, by the way - just to dispel the rumor that I can't appreciate anything that doesn't resemble a MacDonald's menu. :cool:

Ciao, LFE