MultiSound

Undoubtedly the Rolls Royce of sound cards, the MultiSound has recently plummeted in price to an almost affordable $1395. When compiling this review, it was selling for around $1995.
MultiSound was incarnated by Turtle Beach Systems, a Californian company with seven years’ experience in PC audio. The MultiSound is an MPC-compatible card designed to suit the needs of the audio purist. It has 11, 22 and 44.1kHz sampling rates, 8 and 16-bit resolution, and supports stereo, which makes it better than most audio CD players.
It also comes with a built-in MIDI synthesiser that uses the E-Mu Proteus chipset found in the Proteus 1/XR synthesiser — a popular choice in the music business. The PC implementation has 16-bit samples of 126 CD-quality instruments stored in 4M of ROM, plus enough RAM to store another 384 sounds. The use of 16-bit samples, rather than FM synthesis to generate MIDI sounds gives top-quality results.
The MIDI interface has 16 channels, 32
simultaneous voices and only needs an optional MIDI cable to turn the PC into a professional musical instrument.
The MultiSound features a 20MHz Motorola DSP56OOO1 digital sound processor. Rather than overload the PC CPU with processing, the DSP56OOO1 takes care of almost all sound processing. It also has a proprietary 16-bit data-transfer architecture called Hurricane that’s far more powerful than DMA transfer, allowing sound to be played simultaneously with the most CPUintensive application, without missing a beat.
The MultiSound comes as a full-length, 16-bit card with three analogue stereo sockets (two input, one output) and a joystick port at the rear. Many of today’s compact
desktop PCs may have problems with fitting it, so check before you buy. It shouldn’t clash with other devices, however, because there’s a choice of nine port addresses and nine interrupt levels.
On the software side, the MultiSound Comes with Windows MPC drivers, DOS drivers, a range of Windows sound utilities and 27 MIDI music files. To make changes to the Proteus functions, there is a Proteus front end. It is of little use unless you’re using MIDI instruments. However, a CD-ROM mixer allows sound from a CD-ROM player to be mixed with files stored on disk, and there is an input-level meter to vary the input levels of different sound sources.
The most versatile meter is called Wave for Windows Lite. It is a cut-down version of a $195 sound-recording and editing program, Wave For Windows, which is used to edit the waveforms of recorded sounds. Up to four files can be opened at once, and sounds can be recorded, played back and edited using a mouse and a zoom function.
The MultiSound does not support popular game sound standards, though it can handle the sound from MPC-compliant CD-ROM games very well. If you want music, not sound effects, then opt for the MultiSound.