| Maestro Paula |

Maestro Paula - the Old Lady and the Master

Old but good? Or old and dusty? Are her bones getting creaky, or can the old girl assert herself against the great Maestro?

Well, it's quite unfair to make a comparison between the Paula, who's beautiful sounds make your heart flutter, and a MaestroPro, which sits blinking in beams of red light.

Why is it so, that many still always prefer the good old, occasionally a little crusty, that is to say, the crazy sounding sound of Paula over the Maestro, even now with the claims the Maestro can deliver CD quality sound with its optical port (TOSLINK, please don't compare with DOSlink, even when a dealer would like to persuade you otherwise)?

Establishing Contact

Paula connects with the crucial outside world using few electronics and two simple RCA connectors, to which a good amplifier can be connected. When considering quality, the choice of parts by the late Commodore was very average, as over time the connectors in just about every old Amiga are in some state of decay...

Also, this formally well-known and praised clumsy connector is not exactly what you'd call professional, but perhaps that explains why this irreplaceable sound is rather average, as the sound is, hmmm, somehow cleaner in my test A4000 with newly soldered connectors. But who knows what the Maestro's girlfriend has in mind - perhaps she'll want her old hardware that she's grown so fond of back.

By contrast, the MaestroPro has simple right-angled sockets, which connect to CD, LD, MD and certain D players with accompanying optical cables - quite futuristic. They are however more sensitive - a little dust in a unprotected socket and nothing works any more. A strong, not-too-moist air-blower does wonders here.

As a Zorro-II card, the Maestro by its very nature feels a little less at home in an Amiga than the aforementioned lady. Nevertheless, the slot were as if made for it, and only the orchestra's selection, in other words the Amiga, is still to be made by the well-disposed reader - never easy.

Test Recording

To make the Paula talk is not especially difficult; there are plenty of Audio Players in the Aminet, and they can make the agile lady go with gusto, or if you use this newish thing called AHI, that comes at the cost of processor power as well. And in order to really hear something, it's well recommended to externally hook up a boom box. In this review there's one or two tips for this :-)

The Maestro exhibits more glam; absolutely no conventional audio plug will fit its strange connectors. Why? As is, what comes out will be painful to the ear. Its digital data needs to be specially converted to optical beams for the Maestro, as well its input specifically processed.

To get data into the Maestro, the simplest method is direct from CD, but an AtoD converter in a MiniDisc or DAT deck works quite ok too. The other way around - there are very few CD players that take digital data and then give out analogue (what surely would be an interesting modification project, by the wealth of DtoA converters that are within CD players standing in just about every room), but with the other decks that is not the case; also there's a few high-end DtoA converters, whose peculiarities make a worthy gentleman understandable to yokels - a "loud speaker", so's to say.

Our nice girlfriend nearby pretends to know nothing of the resonant gentleman who often visits her, so once again we use the already well known feature that costs good money (AHI). Uhm, to clarify: the MaestroPro is made available per AutoConfig, but does nothing more than pass the audio signal from one connector through to the other.

Things begin to hot up with the use of translation software - either AHI or Maestix.

Part of an Ensemble

AHI, meant as a hardware independent audio subsystem, has meanwhile become as well known and widespread as Picasso96 or CyberGrafX, and now it works with the Maestro exactly like the Paula - and both can go pretty loud. Naturally, Amiga sound samples go only with the MaestroPro, who isn't to be confused with his amateur cousin called Maestro, but both haven't been available in dealers for a long time now...

A 44.1 KHz sample is possible without anything further, but not when a good old A2000 forms the basis system. Due to design problems, the interrupt handling takes too much time in this Amiga, and it takes too long for the requests from the MaestroPro to be answered, especially when all slots are occupied, just as you would expect. Within a small amount of time, the (much too small) internal buffer of the Maestro runs over, and it will need a reset before it can continue to work.

In other Amigas (only those with Zorro slots), it's absolutely no problem for the gentleman to display his abilities, which amongst other things samples at a rate determined by the device it's connected to to, whether it's 32 KHz, 44.1 KHz or 48 KHz, and the MaestroPro delivers its data at exactly these three rates too.

The MaestroPro can talk when an application supports AHI. If not, you can always program it yourself, as in the Aminet there's a fine little package called Maestix, in the meantime at version 41.30, which provides you with a library so you can take the Maestro under your wing and urge it on with power. A couple of compiled demo applications are included along with source, so you can see how easily it can be programmed.

It is possible to simply pump audio data, something not typical of the Amiga, in which the equipment simply samples entire tracks when using a rather fast hard disk and a (more important) quite large processor (AHI doesn't go at all with anything less than an 030), and even 50MB can be chewed up. But what is 50MB nowadays?

On the other hand, the Paula can manage with 512KB and "no" processor. Well, who else made that typical "Boing" in the Boing Ball demo? As a native chip in the Amiga, the agile lady has a naturally undeniable birthright, meaning, making a racket. She can do that well, even when the dynamics leave well little to be desired, and while 14 bit is no longer state-of-the art, she is for her age of approx. 15 years (hey, a jubilee!!!) quite clear of mind.

What makes her sound so unique? My own infatuation in our beloved girlfriend? Or can one hear a difference in a test for the blind? Well, why can you dim your power LED - ahh, to switch the audio filter in and out.

Finale

As an output device, for me a Paula has always been good enough, and with a little help in amplification, she compares volumewise with other much, much newer devices in the audio domain.

A MaestroPro by itself will never really be able to be loud; it will have to rely on external help, but on the other hand it has laid a claim in quality.

Let me have both and I'll be happy; to use a cliché, which PC user can have several audio cards in his computer. With various Maestros, it's possible to mix and overlay several digital (naturally also analogue with other audio cards) sources live on a clean digital basis. The software is naturally nonexistent, the usual anomaly, but with Maestix that would not be a big problem. And so are the different ladies and gentlemen both quite comparable, and in such a union the Paula plays a worthy role.

Oliver Gerler
Steve Bowman

Aminet:mus/misc/ahiusr.lha

Aminet:util/libs/Maestix.lha