sound cards in eee pcs

[dr_bangs]

Well, It seems contra to my previous suspicions, that the eee pc, in fact any of those realtech type sound cards in laptops can record line in and what's more, do it rather well! I, of course also tried it as stereo mic in which it indeed is, although the noise is a bit much, about the same as my zoom H2. The frequency response is very nice,

Comments

Re: eeepcs audio etc

[dr_bangs]

It was the 701. I have little doubt the eee box will be similar, it's a similar chip if not the same one. I'll try the eee box at some stage to see how it go's If good, it may even cover the 1000h* as well.

[borrisinabox]

I think my Acer Aspire One would do this as well, but for some reason turning the mic boost option off only works on the internal microphone. Pressing the checkbox does approximately nothing when an external source is connected, and it's stuck to on

[dr_bangs]

Interesting! The other thing they seem to be playing with, is a weered directional array, where the mics point in one direction probably using 2 omny capsules. I can only suggest they may slightly delay one of them so they become perfectly in phase when you are coming from one direction. It would be very interesting to make a phased array of several mics and then use some kind of multi-tap delay to combine them at a speed of sound VS distance of the mics and see how sensitive you could make it! It could probably be done if you got stereo mics which most of these sound cards technically support, and used whatever DSP they have internally to do odd things. Your problem sounds like eather that, or the noise cancelation which does rather weered things like break input sound down into a few bands like a really bad MP3, and then iliminate the ones that are constant in level. Anything left over that changes in level is considered voice and amplified/gated in. It can be turned off, but you'll have to let that manager run that you use to tell

[borrisinabox]

Actually, this particular Realtek manager doesn't have noise reduction anywhere on the screen. I've seen other netbooks, I.E. the Samsung NC10, which does have it in the interface next to noise reduction, but for me, it simply doesn't exist. I've even installed a generic Realtek HD Audio driver, and no noise reduction on that either, so I'm guessing it's getting something from the hardware that says "don't do that anymore."
The built-in mic definitely has some kind of funky non-turn-offable noise reduction on it, but it all gets bypassed when you plug an external source in.
I've been able to do things with the Realtek thing in control pannel, such as playing with the various bands and presets in the graphic EQ, their bad EAC effects implementation, and a few other things. IT doesn't read so well, but you can kind of make things work.

[dr_bangs]

Who knows! Unless you can find a machine that does have EC and then find what in the registry gets patched to turn it off. Of course if the mic has any other weeredness running, you'll never get it to do what you want. Often re installing the drivers gets things back to defaults, but seems you've tried that! Perhaps an older or newer version might work!

[dr_bangs]

Ok, The eee box tests are now complete!
Sound quallity is very similar, Perhaps margenally more bass, but it's hard to tell, the difference is minute! The downside of the eee box, however is that in spite of stereo mix being muted, there is a bit of jaws leakage and some other squeely artifacts, probably about 60DB down at a guess. I didn't notice any such thing with the 701. I can, however say they both seem able to do the job.
Of course, I only guessed at the line-equivilant level from the little MP3 player I was using, but think I was roughly right. BTW, Shopping square have the 1000ha for 499 for another 12 hours! It's a 1000h missing wireless "N" and bluetooth, but does have the 160gb drive.