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The Audicom cards are a family of PC audio cards with real time audio compression developed in the '80 by Solidyne. They developed a novel tecnique to reduce the entropy<ref>Information entropy</ref> based on masking principles<ref>Psychoacoustics</ref> that they called ECAM.
They were intended to the broadcasting market and some models included the Audicom broadcasting system.</br>
Audicom stands for: Audio en Computadora.

History

In mid 80's Solidyne, a broadcast manufacturer company, started the project of recording audio in a PC to automate the spots emision (at that time done by cartridges). By that time, the hard disk were very expensive and extremly small (a PC hard drive allowed 10MBytes of storage),
so the engineers wanted to reduce the required bits as much as possible. The result was the ECAM audio system with the ECAM cards (aka Audicom cards). The first cards were showed to the 'Secretaria de Ciencia y Tecnica de la Nacion de la Republica Argentina' in 1988. The product (cards, driver, and application software) was available en 1989 and was worldwide showed at LAB in 1990 <ref> audicom&dq=solidyne audicom&pgis=1 Audicom introduced at LAB</ref>.

Models

ADX 903: First card, mono playing/recording. Allowed compression rates of 4:1, 7.5:1, 9:1 and 13:1 (vs a PCM system <ref> Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem</ref>) called HI (High speed), SP (Standard Play), LP (Long Play), and VL (Very Low Play). The card included a DB25 connector to get balanced output/input and also to support 'digisolid', a mechanism to control audio consoles or other devices.

ADX 922: Stereo card. All new hardware was implemented on a 'second floor', so the card was made with two separated PCB (the card used a single ISA slot, but required the space of the second ISA card)

ADX 925: Stereo card, with a third mono channel used for 'CUE'. This card allowed mixing in hardware (so music can be stamped with a radio promotional).

ADX 925 Serie X: By implementing all logic into a Altera chip the design allowed to return to a single card.

SX 48 and SX 48a: First PCI card. Made with Crystal IC's, designed to be a 6 channel audio card. Balanced inputs and outputs, included digital AES/EBU output. No hardware support for coding/deconding audio, instead a software algorithm was intended to support ECAM decoding. Duo to problems with shortage IC's by Crystal it was replaced in favor of SX46 (a more simple design).

SX 46: Standard PCI (2 channels play/rec). Balanced inputs and outputs, with AES/EBU output. By creating an standard card allowed to the company to offer to customers of others broadcasting software. As the market moved, there was more comercial interest in support standard audio formats than ECAM. Audicom cards and Audicom software becomed separated products for the company.

DSP 48: Moved to newer DSP provided by Crystal. This card included two digital outputs channels and 6 analog channels. By using a DSP, this card allowed to decode MP3 by hardware. No longer in production.

References

See also

Audicom

Broadcast automation