The Mac sound hardware was pretty rudimentary : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K/512K_technical_details It is basically a DAC mono running at 22.25kHz. I guess it was kind of advanced for the time? I assume all the speech stuff was software synthesis, like the DOS programs like say.exe that did similar tricks. Sound Blaster 1.0 was limited to 11khz on it's DAC so the Macintosh was better. But SBPro had dual 22.5khz for stereo. The Atari ST was similar CPU, no idea why it could achieve faster performance. Early Macs sure are pretty sluggish though. - Ethan On Wed, 23 Jun 2021, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Hey folks --
Two items I'm curious about on the classic (and very original) Apple Macs..
1. Mac (128kb ,512kb, etc) audio -- was there a custom or off the shelf sound chip for the audio on the original Mac? and was it 1 channel / and was it a custom chip by Apple? (how did it achieve speech synthesis in 1984)
2. The Macintosh Classic released in 1990 "was about 25% faster than the original Macs". This is in line with the Atari ST often being quoted as faster than a Mac when emulating a Mac via Magic Sac or similar. What changed in the architecture to make the Mac Classic (or an ST in emulation) faster than the original Mac? Was it faster memory that gave more availability for CPU usage? were only certain instructions sped up or was everything faster?
Thanks!