AudioSystem EWX 24/96
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The DMA Buffer Transfer Latency.
In some programs, besides the usual choices of drivers, you will be confronted with
the buffer size. What may appear at first somewhat complicated, later reveals itself as
very useful, once you understand what it all means – and it’s not really all that diffi-
cult.
The number and size of the audio buffers determines just how fast an application (e.g.
a software synthesizer) can access the Windows driver. The fewer the buffers and the
smaller their size, the faster the card can react. You can see it for example, if you wig-
gle the controllers in a software synthesizer while it’s playing or move the positioning
marker in a hard-drive recording program during the playback.
The faster the better, they say, if it just didn’t have a limitation: which values should
be used depends on the system - and on a slow PC – “fast” values leave their mark -
as skips and hops during playback and recording. So pay attention for “drop-outs”,
and raise the values if you have to.
Differing Sample Rates / SR Conversion.
The AudioSystem EWX 24/96 utilizes
no
sample rate converter. This typical soundcard
component normally ensures that signals in different sample rates can be played
together, because the sample rates are all “interpolated” to one frequency.
