What's the advantage of a hardware synth?

[Tyler Spivey]

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The other advantage, I find, at least with my dectalk, is it can speak
fast. I listen to speech pretty quickly, and espeak just can't get
there. For example,
http://tspivey.freeshell.org/speech.ogg
is usually the rate I listen at when using windows.

On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 06:50:16PM -0600, Glenn at home wrote:
> The main reason is if the sound card doesn't work, we have the reliable 
> synth to be working.
> I don't know if it can be compared to windows, but in windows, if we have to 
> boot with no drivers, some internal speech cards would work with no drivers 
> installed.
> And I do have a link to a 300+ dollar motherboard with an ISA slot.
> I think there are some less expensive ones out there, but they were limited 
> to a slow bus speed, and a 2GB processor at best.
> Glenn
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jonathan Duddington" <jsd at clara.co.uk>
> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 6:41 PM
> Subject: What's the advantage of a hardware synth?
> 
> 
> In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.0611081636470.1525 at darkstar.example.net>,
>    randy turner <rturner222 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> > do they still build any computers with the older isa slots?
> > also has any company built any pci synths that will work in linux?
> > what are the choices that are left for linux??
> 
> I'm not visually impaired and I've not used a hardware synth myself,
> but I'm curious.  What is the advantage of a hardware synth over a
> software synth?
> 
> I can think of a few possibilities, but I'm curious which are true and
> are important for those who use or prefer hardware synths:
> 
> 1.  It doesn't affect the computer's sound system, which can therefore
> play other sounds unaffected by the TTS.  This could probably be
> achieved for a software synth by using two sound cards.
> 
> 2.  System startup messages can be spoken before the point when the
> sound system and synth software is initialized and working.  This would
> be overcome by the proposed "Spoken Boot" feature.
> 
> 3.  Problems with installing and setting up a software synth.
> 
> 4.  Prefer the sound of the hardware synth voice to those currently
> available with software synths.
> 
> 5.  Limitations of computer processor power or memory, although I doubt
> this is an issue now.
> 
> 6.  The hardware synth offers some feature not available in the
> software synths.
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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