Subj : Play audio from a serial port
To   : Bob Worm
From : AKAcastor
Date : Wed May 22 2024 21:10:48

 > Bob - wonderful video!  Great presentation and excellent demonstration of
 > what's coming out of the serial port and how it sounds.  Super well done.

 BW> Thanks for the kind words. As usual I wasn't really 
 BW> happy with it by the time I started cutting the clips 
 BW> together but I couldn't quite bring myself to re-film 
 BW> any of it :) I'm sure it will improve with practice.

I understand the inclination to look for defects in our own work, but I honestly thought the video was great.  Well put together, well explained, well paced, interesting and informative.  Really very good.

You had me at "BOB WORM - SERIAL PORT ENTHUSIAST"!

I also consider myself a serial port enthusiast, and I think your clear explanation and visualization of the data/audio signal with the oscilloscope is one of the clearest presentations I've seen.  And then the shock of how acceptable the quality of the audio ended up being!

I'm pasting a link to the video here in case anyone reading hasn't watched it but is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9vlxCXxzrg

 BW> Yeah, tell me about it. I remember those Windows 3.1 PC 
 BW> speaker sound drivers that would basically halt the PC 
 BW> until sound stopped playing, I'm not sure it even 
 BW> sounded as good as the serial port thing.

I think you're right!  I remember being wowed by the PC speaker sound at the time, but it was pretty terrible.  I'd have happily played a ton of games with the 115.2kbps audio. :)

 BW> It's kind of ironic that I suffered for so long without a sound card 
 BW> yet now good sound is available everywhere I'm back, 
 BW> voluntarily, messing around with scratchy low-fi :)

There's purity in the audio beyond just "sound quality". :)

 BW> I have a USB parallel port kicking around somewhere, 
 BW> maybe I'll try one of those oldskool parallel to audio 
 BW> adaptors now that I actually have some veroboard to 
 BW> mount it on... then I just need to find some software 
 BW> that supports it. I can see how this is going to go...

I think USB parallel ports will probably have timing problems for audio DAC output.  The USB interface requires packetization that breaks fine grained timing, the USB parallel ports I've tried have only been usable on a printer.  (I'd be happy to hear I'm wrong about this, though!)

PCIe parallel ports should work still, I think.  If you don't have a PC with a parallel port but do have a desktop with an open PCIe slot there are cards available.


Chris/akacastor

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