[rescue] cassette?

[Ethan O'Toole]

> That was the point of my question.  I have several different
> machines available to choose from.  Each has different audio
> hardware -- and also different levels of fan noise, etc.
> (e.g., laptop runs the CPU fan based on CPU temperature
> so it is an intermittent noise... which might be better or worse
> than a "steady state" noise source; some of the servers
> are so damn noisey that you can't hear yourself *think*
> when they are on -- so adding audio hardware to them is
> foolish).

Do you have a SGI Indy laying around? They have very nice sound hardware,
and are pretty quiet (the disk would be the loudest part).

> But radio listeners can tolerate some level of background noise
> in the broadcast.  And, "real world" noise (vs. electrical
> noise -- and fans) is much more natural/acceptable.

You would think.... I can't believe the amount of trouble they go thru for
proper sound quality when the output is an AM transmitter. Many of the
stations have really good audio chains. The sound cards are like $2000 a
pop alone, because the sound quality of consumer audio cards isn't good
enough. It's wierd.

> I need some speech samples for a speech synthesizer
> (diphone based) so noise and extraneous "sounds" can severely
> impact the quality of speech -- since the noise would be
> tagged to particular "word parts" (diphones) and repeated
> each time that diphone was used to build a speech sound.
> (i.e. annoying if every "k" sound had a burst of fan noise
> in it, etc)

Gotcha.... I think with a proper mic you could do fine.

Now the sound card, there are lots of options for those from consumer
Creative Labs to the more professional MOTU, MIO and all the other pro
cards and external firewire / usb interfaces.