PNW Chair Dan Mortensen opened the meeting, and had all attendees briefly introduce themselves, and state the computer platform they used. Meeting organizer James (JJ) Johnston introduced Elliot Omiya.

Mr. Omiya started with a Powerpoint slide of the venerable Heathkit AR-15 receiver, and described how his interest in audio began by watching his father solder the Heathkit. After hearing a fair number of attendees say they used a PC, he joked that back in the LA area, PC users would seldom admit to using one. He said his talk would be PC oriented, although he would show how platform hardware convergence meant that PCs and Macs were becoming more alike. Mr. Omiya noted that his presentation would be a general overview for the diverse audience, and mentioned how he would speak often of streaming audio around the computer, use lots of TLAs (three-letter acronyms), and show slides of drawings of many boxes to explain things.

He started with the general signal flow within a PC: a signal source, which moves through the PC audio hardware, to memory, then to a small PC audio amplifier. He compare this to a standalone audio product like a CD player: a similar processing flow, but now PC audio has hardware such as hard drive storage which allow new uses such as geoshifting - being able to hear internet radio stations, for example. In fact, all former economic models for music distribution are now changed.

Mr. Omiya noted that in 1990, software was specific for each soundcard - a pain. Now there is software to let the PC handle quality audio - APIs (application programming interfaces) and the necessary operating system "stacks." He described the two basic PC audio stacks for enumeration and streaming control.

Since the PC manipulates audio in PCM (pulse code modulation), essential terminology was reviewed, such as PCM and its phone system heritage, Nyquist criteria, sampling rates and data rates, and A/D-D/A conversion. Filenames such as wav and its predecessor riff, and aiff were explained. He said discussions were underway to get files greater than 4GB for WAVs.

Next, he continued with the example of what happens when an audio CD is played on a computer to describe how digital audio is streamed within the computer for listening or "ripping" (copying the audio as a computer file). Mr. Omiya further defined streaming, data rates, buffers and various clocks for timing functions in the computer. He stressed the differences between synchronous data transmission (data is requested and sent), asynchronous (data is requested and you don't know when it will be sent), and isochronous (data has to just get there on time).

He ended the first portion of his talk briefly describing Microsoft APIs used for handling and programming audio on the PC. These have only existed for the last 15 years or so.

After a break, Microsoft Studios representative Rick Senechal described studio operations to attendees and answered questions, as there were too many people for a guided tour. Next, door prizes were awarded:

• Courtesy Dansound Inc:
  • Compact Disc - Craig Mueller
  • Wintergrass Festival T-shirt - Luke Peterson
• Wavetek multimeters, courtesy Rick Rodrigues and Fluke:
  • Mike Wall
  • Matt Terjeson
  • Andy Short
• Microsoft Visual Studio software, courtesy Elliot Omiya and Microsoft
  • Alden Hackmann
  • Melissa Rice

• Chair: Dan Mortensen
• Vice-Chair: Steve Turnidge
• Secretary: Gary Louie
• Treasurer: Dave Franzwa

1. Daniel Casado
2. Rick Chinn
3. Bob Gudgel
4. Aurika Hays
5. James Johnston (JJ)
6. Dr. Michael Matesky
7. Jake Perrine
8. Melissa Rice
9. Mark Rogers
10. Dave Tosti-Lane

A question was posed about how a product such as Digidesign's Protools and their hardware operate with such low latency? He answered that PCs can handle audio three main ways: using Microsoft Direct Kernel Streaming (as Cakewalk does); ASIO drivers (Audio Streaming I/O); or, writing your own API and driver (what Digidesign does).

New hardware motherboard designs for the Windows Vista and Mac OS operating systems will use a new "HD Audio" architecture. HD Audio acommodates up to 8 channels of 32bit, 192kHz audio. Why bother to include all this on the computer? Their market research indicates that most folks don't want to buy an external box for audio.

Mr. Omiya noted the need for data compression to stream content over the internet. He described some types of lossy, psychoacoustic coding, such as MP3, AAC, etc. Decoding must be able to be done quickly (on-time, but not really in real time). He further explained bitrate, constant and VBR (variable bitrate) and codec (coder/decoder, or compressor/decompressor) artifacts. Some popular songs used for testing codecs are quite famous among the researchers. He also mentioned lossless coding which can more efficiently pack data.

The rise of services like iTunes means dealing with encryption and DRM (digital rights management) for selling online media. A discussion of business problems and proprietary services followed.

Finally, he had a few words on the future of PC audio, especially regarding distribution. He spoke of IP (internet protocol) addressable speakers in development, that can be synchronized via a transmitted clock. He figures that over the air music purchases may result from a convergence of the cell phone and the personal music player. And he felt higher resolution audio will become more common. Some brief previews of the upcoming Windows Vista operating system indicates many audio improvements are coming over Windows XP.

Some questions and discussions followed, such as whether there will there be better ways to adjust PCs to improve performance for pro audio? Comments were made about technology vs. business models - would pro audio improvements be worth it for a general purpose OS an computer? Probably not. It was suggestion to select one's pro audio hardware and software carefully and set it up and monitor it carefully. Another discussion centered on Sony's recent CD rootkit debacle.

Finally, Mr. Omiya gave a "plug" for James (JJ) Johnston's Microsoft Research group working on the Audio Engine in Windows Vista. He encouraged the fearless to try the beta software's audio features.

Our special thanks to Elliot Omiya and Microsoft Studios/Rick Senechal