Re: Question regarding current ESS Maestro 3M soundcard support

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

Hi,

At Mon, 11 Feb 2002 21:28:53 -0500,
Ivica Bukvic wrote:
> 
> Hi all!
> 
> I have an Dell Inspiron 8K and my question is whether the current
> Maestro M3 chip is fully supported or does it currently only furnish
> SB16 compatibility mode (I might be talking nonsense here, but this is
> what I heard a while ago, or something like it and my understanding is
> that the current driver support is only partial due to incomplete
> disclosure of the hw specs by the ESS, again, please correct me if I am
> wrong). Basically, from my understanding it seems that the M3 soundcard
> is being classified as a "sound accelerator" (whatever that means), and
> as such I would expect it to be capable of mixing audio streams in
> hardware (just as emu10k1 chip does, even though emu10k1 is much more
> powerful). So far, I was only able to get one stream out of the card in
> the latest ALSA driver, while I got 2 streams with the OSS-Free drivers
> (third stream would garble the two existing streams and return an i/o
> error).

So it is on ALSA, too.
Theoretically more could be, but it seems that the (only one) DSP code
provided from ESS has a bug.

 
> So, is this the default behavior?
 
Yes.


> I would assume that most of the modern-day cards should be capable of
> down-mixing at least 16 or 32 streams of sound, since that is what they
> are usually capable of reproducing in Windows at any given time (unless
> in Windows the down-mixing is done in software, which is certainly a
> possibility and in many cases a known fact).
> 
> So, my questions are:
> 
> Is this a hardware limitation?
 
No.

> or
> 
> Is this current driver's limitation?

Yes.
 
> If the second is the case, then what are the chances of improving this
> issue in the nearby future?
 
Only if we receive detailed information of DSP engine or better DSP
codes from ESS.


> Finally, what are the chances of getting the ESS to talk and give us the
> exact specs for this soundcard so that the driver can be finished?
 
Unfortunately ESS is famous to provide the only minimum information,
so far.  I hope this will change in future..


ciao,

Takashi

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