sound cards in eee pcs

[dr_bangs]

Well, It seems contra to my previous suspicions, that the eee pc, in fact any of those realtech type sound cards in laptops can record line in and what's more, do it rather well! I, of course also tried it as stereo mic in which it indeed is, although the noise is a bit much, about the same as my zoom H2. The frequency response is very nice,

Comments

[borrisinabox]

I think my Acer Aspire One would do this as well, but for some reason turning the mic boost option off only works on the internal microphone. Pressing the checkbox does approximately nothing when an external source is connected, and it's stuck to on.
You can drive a line level signal into it at about line level with the volume down, but it clips out in a very weird way, almost like there's a limiter somewhere, not just a straight nasty digital clip, although there's a bit of that before it tries to compensate and fails miserably at it.
I'm almost sure it used to work at one point, because I remember managing to get about -74DB or so on the Sound Forge meter.

I tried someone else's Realtek driver, which broke the internal mic completely, although external still worked. Granted, the internal is one of the crappiest ones I've seen, with some kind of filtering and a very strange look-ahead before it gets sent to anything, even before echo cancelation (there is no noise reduction option at all). Weird times. If you spike it loud enough, you getith sweird beep thing at around 2 khz. If you drive it really hard or hit the monitor hard enough, which is where the mic is, you get the beep, then input audio dies completely for about five seconds. While the audio is dead, you get a quieter continuous version of this 2khz thing. Very odd.

Apparently, some of the newer netbooks actually come with two capsules built-in. I don't know if they're using one mic out of phase for noise reduction or if it's actually in stereo. I did see one full-sized laptop with properly configured stereo internal mic configuration using two most likely omni-directional capsules. Didn't really get to play with it much.

[dr_bangs]

Interesting! The other thing they seem to be playing with, is a weered directional array, where the mics point in one direction probably using 2 omny capsules. I can only suggest they may slightly delay one of them so they become perfectly in phase when you are coming from one direction. It would be very interesting to make a phased array of several mics and then use some kind of multi-tap delay to combine them at a speed of sound VS distance of the mics and see how sensitive you could make it! It could probably be done if you got stereo mics which most of these sound cards technically support, and used whatever DSP they have internally to do odd things. Your problem sounds like eather that, or the noise cancelation which does rather weered things like break input sound down into a few bands like a really bad MP3, and then iliminate the ones that are constant in level. Anything left over that changes in level is considered voice and amplified/gated in. It can be turned off, but you'll have to let that manager run that you use to tell it what you just plugged in and the window of the realtech sound manager that also opens up behind it, is kind of sort of accessible if you mouse click it. Forget the control panel one, it's useless!

[borrisinabox]

Actually, this particular Realtek manager doesn't have noise reduction anywhere on the screen. I've seen other netbooks, I.E. the Samsung NC10, which does have it in the interface next to noise reduction, but for me, it simply doesn't exist. I've even installed a generic Realtek HD Audio driver, and no noise reduction on that either, so I'm guessing it's getting something from the hardware that says "don't do that anymore."
The built-in mic definitely has some kind of funky non-turn-offable noise reduction on it, but it all gets bypassed when you plug an external source in.
I've been able to do things with the Realtek thing in control pannel, such as playing with the various bands and presets in the graphic EQ, their bad EAC effects implementation, and a few other things. IT doesn't read so well, but you can kind of make things work.

[dr_bangs]

Who knows! Unless you can find a machine that does have EC and then find what in the registry gets patched to turn it off. Of course if the mic has any other weeredness running, you'll never get it to do what you want. Often re installing the drivers gets things back to defaults, but seems you've tried that! Perhaps an older or newer version might work!

[dr_bangs]

I'm currently trying to convince the eee box to do some tests, but I'm of course being thwarted by it's *Bad* wireless! Even my IBM which is B only and I always thought, pretty ordenary, works perfectly where this really struggles. The best seems to be the 701. I have heard a few say the 1000h isn't too good eather! To the stereo mics, Well, Yep, seems a bit pointless if they're bad especially if they cop garbage from the screen as well. The only thing I know of that has good internal Mic is the Nokia N95, and that's only in video mode, Go figure!