Reply 20 of 42, by 640K!enough
wrote:I recall having read that GUS was able to play up to 14 audio samples at the same time (or up to 32 at a reduced frequency rate).
This is true for UltraSound (and compatible) cards based on the GF1 chip. They support up to 14 channels at the maximum sample rate of 44.1 kHz; beyond 14 channels, the sample rate gradually drops with each additional channel. If I remember correctly, at 32 channels, the sample rate is just over 29 kHz (EDIT: it's actually around 19.4 kHz).
This is not true for cards based on the AMD InterWave chips; its synthesiser module always operates at 44.1 kHz in native/"enhanced" mode, regardless of the number of active channels. When operating in legacy compatibility mode, it uses "frame expansion" to approximate the sample rate behaviour of the older cards.
Software that supports the GUS directly is able to specify the number of active voices. No Sound Blaster card before the AWE32 supported more than a single stereo channel (sometimes listed as 2 voices) for digital audio. Even though you could, for example, hear a door close and gunshots at the same time in Doom, they would have been mixed in software with a Sound Blaster or similar card, whereas the UltraSound could do that in hardware (though some software failed to leverage that feature).