PC Soundcard/Multiple Channel questions...

[RedShiftZ]

Hi all,
I'm new to this so please bear with me. I've done a brief search of the site and come up with little that answers my questions. I'm also not sure if I'm posting in the right area... Anyway...

I'm a software developer by trade and have a new project that I've started working on. It involves outputing multiple sound streams simultaneously to different areas of a haunted house.

Basically I can do this currently by having up to 6 PCI cards and one builtin soundcard on the motherboard. But this only gives me 7 areas per PC. Not an optimal solution. I'd like to utilize one or more cards with as many outs if possible.

I keep seeing cards like this... http://www.maxioxd.com/ that advertises 32 output channels.

But I don't know enough about the hardware to know if I can target each "output channel" directly with it's own individual sounds. Also, by channel do they mean stereo or mono?

An optimal "too much to hope for" solution would be a card with each channel or stereo set being it's own targetable sound "device" in Windows.

Any help to figure out what I need would be appriciated.

Thanks,

Jeff Young

[Mr Evil]

If they say 32 channels, they mean 32 mono sound channels, not stereo pairs.

You most certainly should be able to direct sounds to any channel you want. I don't know how other cards work, but the multichannel soundcard I use has stereo pairs of channels visible as discrete sound devices in Windows.

I'm not much of a programmer, but wouldn't it be possible to direct sounds to individual channels of a standard 5.1 soundcard? Then you can have 6 * 5.1 = 36 channels, which is probably cheaper than a 32 channel card.

[megajocke]

Check out
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/

I don't know if the original drivers for the soundblaster cards let you output different stuff to the channels discretely, but with the kX drivers the DSP on the card can be reconfigured so you have a couple of different independent channels (number depending on which card).