User`s manual

Introduction

1-3

1-2 Introducing the SoundWave 128 PCI

The SoundWave 128 PCI is a high performance multimedia

sound card which takes full advantage of the PCI bus archi-

tecture, while maintaining compatibility with legacy soft-

ware. It supports 64-voice XG capital wavetable synthesis,

DirectMusic

, DirectSound

, and full hardware

SoundBlaster® Pro compatibility. Each sound in the wavet-

able is derived from real instrument sounds, created with

wavetable synthesis and held to a professional performance

standard for the extensive sound library.

One of the great advantages of this sound card is that being

a 32-bit PCI sound card, it is far more superior to the 16-bit

ISA sound cards. The SoundWave 128 PCI is capable of trans-

ferring data on a wider 32-bit bandwidth bus, which allows

much more data to pass from the PCI bus to the host proces-

sor. Using the PCI bus allows a 4 to 20 times increase in speed

over the much slower DMA transfers on the ISA bus, which

drastically reduces the overhead on the host CPU. Real-time

software-based sound fields are now possible without bog-

ging down your computer’s processor.

Because of the high PCI-bus data transfer rates, the Sound-

Wave 128 PCI is able to utilize a much more flexible method

of storing and accessing wavetable sounds (as com-

pared to the limitations of the ROM stored sounds). All 128

General MIDI instrument sounds are now stored on the PC’s

hard drive, where it is accessed using the computer’s on-

board RAM—and it’s more easily upgradable!