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What exactly IS AC'97?

T

ThatWasFat

Member
Alright. What exactly is AC'97? I has an nForce 2 motherboard, and on the specs it still says AC'97 on it. I thought it was SoundStorm? What IS the AC'97 part? Is it the physical hardware that I plug my speakers into? Is it a standard? A standard of what?

I'm just curious
 
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
It's a chipset.
Click to expand...

No, it's an audio standard. Being able to play back certain frequencies of sound and whatnot. Certain chipsets are AC'97 compliant, but there is no AC'97 chip. Some things are far better than just compliant with AC'97. But it can be understood that if someone refers to AC'97 sound, they're talking about bottom of the barrel plain jane sound.
 
Originally posted by: Nebor
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
It's a chipset.
Click to expand...

No, it's an audio standard. Being able to play back certain frequencies of sound and whatnot. Certain chipsets are AC'97 compliant, but there is no AC'97 chip. Some things are far better than just compliant with AC'97. But it can be understood that if someone refers to AC'97 sound, they're talking about bottom of the barrel plain jane sound.
Click to expand...

Thank you.
 
So I would assume that the audio chip from the nForce2 MCP is wasted on an AC'97 compliant sound device? Since AC'97 is bottom of the barrel, and nForce2 sound isnt.
 
What do you mean by "device"?

If you have the soundstorm playing through speakers, then you should hear the sounds as well as the soundstorm can reproduce it.

Also, a device can be AC'97 compliant, but still be much better than AC'97 itself. Actually, check out the sound standards article that was recently posted on the front page, they have a list of some of the specific rules that AC'97 devices must meet as well as some of the specs of "higher" standards. Incidentally, AC'97 is higher quality than CD Audio, so it's not like some low end cheesy quality standard. A big drawback to AC'97 is that it is stereo only, and does not provide any standards for multi-channel sound.

http://www.anandtech.com/audio/showdoc.html?i=2079

-D'oh!
 
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