A challenge to all the " l33t's "
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Garylisk
- Joined: Fri Aug 17, 2001 2:03 am
- Status: Littlecolt
- Location: USA
- Contact:
Of course sound can come from a PC speaker... It's a speaker after all. Just because it usually only beeps and boops is because that's all the computer is telling it to do. With the proper driver, it can make sound just like a sound card can. I used to do that when my sound card broke way back when. I don't remember where I got the driver though, and it sounded tinny as hell because ths peaker is low quality.
Alcohol, Drugs, Overdrive, Noise, Neon Lights, Party People, Revolution
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Mask of Destiny
- Joined: Sun Aug 11, 2002 8:32 pm
Well that's not completely true. The PC speaker has only a 1-bit output. So generally you can only generate a square wave a sound card has a proper DAC and can make more complex waveforms. However, there is a way to cheat and that's what these drivers do. You output a waveform at a constant, inaudible frequency and then you vary the duty cycle of the wave so that the average voltage will be equal to the desired voltage for that sample.Garylisk wrote:Of course sound can come from a PC speaker... It's a speaker after all. Just because it usually only beeps and boops is because that's all the computer is telling it to do. With the proper driver, it can make sound just like a sound card can. I used to do that when my sound card broke way back when. I don't remember where I got the driver though, and it sounded tinny as hell because ths peaker is low quality.
It can with the method described above. However, complex waveforms sound like garbage on a Piezzo speaker, which is what many PCs have now a days.ek1 wrote:PC speaker cannot handle chords, which is the reason soundcard was invented.
The real problem with this approach to generating sound is that it is so dependent on the system timer and it needs almost exclusive access to it. This makes it difficult for the driver to play nice with other applications that are time sensitive.