SONIC BLASTER revealed
By Chris Nelligan.
Copyright (c) 1990 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Applied Engineering are infamous for their high quality products for the Apple II range of computers, and their add-ons for the IIGS are coming thick and fast. One of their latest is the SONIC BLASTER, a stereo playback and recording card.
Every Apple IIGS has an Ensoniq digital synthesizer sound chip in it, this chip is used by professional musicians and studios to compose, synthesize and analyze up to 15 voices simultaneously. As you would know, most applications on the IIGS take advantage of this sound chip producing unbeleivable sounds. PBI software were one of the first.
The IIGS only produces a mono output from the socket at the back of the computer not unleashing the real sound. That is where stereo cards come in. The Sonic Blaster plugs into a slot inside your computer and a cable is also connected to the stereo connector. The card is a phantom card (ie: you don't have to select 'your card' in the control panel). All you do then is plug in your external speakers to the jacks on the rear of the card, and presto out come amplified stereo sounds from your Apple IIGS.
Programs like Thexder, Silent Service, Alien Mind, Tomahawk, Music studio and so on now come to life.
The Sonic blaster also allows you to digitize your own sounds using a Record player, Tape player, CD player, TV, Video etc into the computer. Recordings can be made in either channel 1, 2 or both. This produces high quality sounds which can be played back at any time.
Software is included which allows playback and recording of sounds. An oscilloscope helps you to set correct sound levels and clean up the sound. The software also allows you to distort, echo, repeat, speed up, slow down, copy, paste your sounds together. Sound files are saved to disk in just about every format including Apple's Audio Interchange File Format as used in the IIGS and the MAC.
My friends and I had a lot of fun recording our own sounds. We used a CD player and a microphone, the results were great. Surfing with the Alien, Learning to Fly and Sweet Child of Mine never sounded so good. With about 800k of free RAM you can record 22 seconds of sound. I saved about 15meg of recordings to my hard disk. Playing back sounds at a later date is great fun, especially if you have a start up file during GSOS boot. The only problem was getting the right connecting plug for the card, instead of using an RCA connection, it uses the small connection like the headphone jack on the rear of the computer.
Another great feature of the software was its ability to cut and paste sections of sounds. The time elapsed to perform the special effects was substantially faster than other programs such as FutureSound.
Summing up. Since having the Sonic Blaster in my computer, it is hard to go back to a machine which is not producing stereo sounds. The Software was great fun to use making my life easy. Digitizing was not at all that difficult, and in the future I will use these sounds in my own programs.
Sonic Blaster is available from Two Series Software for $195. This is a good price considering it is an Applied Engineering product. The one card does both the playback and the recording. Lots of sample recordings are included with the package, with a easy to follow manual. Good software with stereo recording samples are included.
Sonic Blaster courtesy of Powertechnik.

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