Is anyone using Breakaway or Stereo Tool on a FM? If so what sound card are you using to generate the MPX? I like all the RDS features and such offered with Stereo Tool and would like to figure out what I need to get it going.
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Using Breakaway or Stereo Tool Broadcast Processor on FM
- Thread starter mbatchelor
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Using EMu for MPX
Any sound card that can hit a sampling rate of 192 kHz will work.
I've used vintage EMu USB sound cards for several years and they sound great.
But even the built-in PC sound chips can generally do 192 kHz sampling rates these days and will get you on the air in stereo with the required 75 kHz bandwidth.
Any sound card that can hit a sampling rate of 192 kHz will work.
I've used vintage EMu USB sound cards for several years and they sound great.
But even the built-in PC sound chips can generally do 192 kHz sampling rates these days and will get you on the air in stereo with the required 75 kHz bandwidth.
Just a small correction: Most 192 kHz sound cards will work, but there are some that are problematic. For example, avoid Creative cards. For on-board cards I know that Realtek 192 kHz cards work very well (at least in Stereo Tool it can be calibrated to be flat within 1-2% between 15 Hz square wave to 60 kHz sine wave), but you should expect a bit more noise (which is mostly noticeable as stereo noise); it's not much and it will only be noticeable during moments of silence. It's not a problem if you use it as backup, but if you really want to run it 24/7 I would really suggest getting a Marian (Trace Alpha, unfortunately only PCI) or ESI Juli@ (both PCI and PCIe) card. Also note that the Realtek input can be really bad (unacceptable noise levels).
Beside the lower noise levels, the sound cards also offer less latency; the Realtek card doesn't support ASIO and to get a low latency you need to use ASIO4ALL, which adds about 10 ms of latency. In comparison, in Windows 7 I tested the latency of both the Marian and the ESI cards, and I could get audio into the pc and out again in 0.9 ms (!) without glitches. To do this, you need to avoid using core 0 for any processing, because core 0 is used by Windows drivers and they may cause hiccups of upto about 1 ms. If latency doesn't matter much, this makes no difference, but if it does you need to get a pc with enough extra cores so you can avoid core 0.
(Note, this does not mean that you can processes with under 1 ms of latency; you need to take the amount of samples that the processing needs and the time it takes to perform the calculations to the sound card latency.)
Beside the lower noise levels, the sound cards also offer less latency; the Realtek card doesn't support ASIO and to get a low latency you need to use ASIO4ALL, which adds about 10 ms of latency. In comparison, in Windows 7 I tested the latency of both the Marian and the ESI cards, and I could get audio into the pc and out again in 0.9 ms (!) without glitches. To do this, you need to avoid using core 0 for any processing, because core 0 is used by Windows drivers and they may cause hiccups of upto about 1 ms. If latency doesn't matter much, this makes no difference, but if it does you need to get a pc with enough extra cores so you can avoid core 0.
(Note, this does not mean that you can processes with under 1 ms of latency; you need to take the amount of samples that the processing needs and the time it takes to perform the calculations to the sound card latency.)
Breakaway is still available but no longer being developed. Stereo Tool may go the same way now that Omnia hired Hans.
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