Audio Engineering

Digital Audio Production 603

for high-quality, dual-channel audio. The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus
is incorporated in newer Pentium-based IBM PCs. PCI is a local bus, so named because
it is a bus which is much “ closer ” to the CPU. Local buses run at a much higher rate and
PCI offers considerable performance advantages over the traditional ISA bus, allowing
data to be transferred at between 5 and 70 Mbytes/s; allowing the possibility of real-time,
multitrack audio applications. The PCI bus is a processor-independent bus specifi cation
that allows peripheral boards to access system memory directly (under the aegis of a local
bus controller) without directly using the CPU, employing a 32-bit data bus and a 64-bit
address bus at full clock speed. Installation and confi guration of PCI bus plug-in cards are
much simpler than the equivalent installation on the ISA bus. Commonly referred to as
the “ plug-and-play ” feature of the PCI bus, this user transparency is achieved by having
the PCs BIOS confi gure the plug-in card’s base address and interrupt level at power-up.
Because all cards are automatically confi gured, confl icts between them are eliminated. It
is a process that can only be done manually with cards on the ISA bus. The PCI Bus is
not limited to PCs; it is the primary peripheral bus in the PowerPC and PowerMacs from
Apple. Incorporation of the PCI bus is planned for other RISC-based processor platforms.

20.5 Disks and Other Peripheral Hardware ..................................................................

Read/write compact disk (CD-R) drives are now available at a price within the reach
of the small recording studio, and recordable media are less than $2. CD-R drives are

Figure 20.5 : Creative Labs ’ Creative Mixer utility.