OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Multimedia => Topic started by: Neil Waldhauer on May 24, 2019, 12:38:39 am

Title: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on May 24, 2019, 12:38:39 am
I'm trying out the SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter.



So far, I'm not getting sound. The package advertises that it uses CMedia CM119. I'm attaching the dump from USBDock. The device is 0D8C:0008

I installed ArcaOS with no sound adapter, then installed the USB Audio driver. This has worked in the past for some other adapter I no longer have.

Should this adapter work?
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Lars on May 24, 2019, 08:18:40 am
Unfortunately the USBRes output is broken (the tool is broken).

My guess is that it is an USB audio standard 2.0 device in which case you will need the USB audio drivers from my USB package. There is a USBAUD2.SYS driver that will serve those devices.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on May 24, 2019, 04:09:13 pm
I tried installing USBAUD2, but there is no difference. The following command never returns. No sound is emitted, either. This happened sometimes with a bad MMPM2.INI. But I don't understand that file well enough.

Play file=j:\mmos2\sounds\zipper.wav
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Olafur Gunnlaugsson on May 24, 2019, 06:54:16 pm
It should work, it is the same chip as Behringer uses in all their low budget USB units, and I am fairly sure I managed to get one of their UCA-xxx going with the drivers from Lars.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Lars on May 24, 2019, 10:30:41 pm
If you did install 10.227, make sure you also selected the SPI update and also the applet install.
Then, go to "Multimedia Setup" and select the default wave/ampmix device. You can switch back and forth. As soon as you have double clicked on an entry, that device will become the default device.

Lars
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on May 27, 2019, 11:42:16 pm
I installed the USB Audio 223 on my laptop, where USB audio had worked before, and the SYBA adapter is working fine. It must be a USB Audio 1.0 compatible device.

But something is stopping it from working on the desktop, a Lenovo M720s that has only USB 3.0 ports. I am using an add-in Startek USB 2.0 PCIe card to provide USB. This seems to work for booting from memory stick, and mouse and keyboard.

But for both USB Audio 223 and USB Audio 226, there is no sound. When I run play.cmd, it does not ever complete. I plan to get 227 and try it. I'll let you know if it works.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 28, 2019, 02:39:36 pm
Hi Neil.

I created a wiki page with the info you provided: https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/SYBA_USB_Stereo_Sound_Adapter (https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/SYBA_USB_Stereo_Sound_Adapter).

Please, let us known here your testing to complete the info :)

Is the driver working USBAUDIO.SYS  or USBAUD2.SYS  ??

Regards
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 28, 2019, 02:44:59 pm
Hi again.
I installed the USB Audio 223 on my laptop, where USB audio had worked before, and the SYBA adapter is working fine. It must be a USB Audio 1.0 compatible device.

On the device's website (https://www.sybausa.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=691) it says: "Compliant with USB Audio Device Class Specification 1.0"

Regards
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Lars on May 28, 2019, 05:41:54 pm
I installed the USB Audio 223 on my laptop, where USB audio had worked before, and the SYBA adapter is working fine. It must be a USB Audio 1.0 compatible device.

If 10.227 does not work for you as a whole you can also install AN 11.17 and only install the USBAUDIO install package.

But something is stopping it from working on the desktop, a Lenovo M720s that has only USB 3.0 ports. I am using an add-in Startek USB 2.0 PCIe card to provide USB. This seems to work for booting from memory stick, and mouse and keyboard.

But for both USB Audio 223 and USB Audio 226, there is no sound. When I run play.cmd, it does not ever complete. I plan to get 227 and try it. I'll let you know if it works.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on May 29, 2019, 01:08:00 am
With USB stack 10.227 and USB Audio 10.227, I now have sound on the M720s system. I had to rearrange the Config.Sys since AN USB stack 12.x has a different requirement of the order of USBD.SYS and USBHID.SYS.

The big obstacle was not the SYBA USB Stereo adapter. I believe the limitation was the Startek USB 2.0 PCIe card. It can run a mouse and keyboard, and a bootable USB stick, but not USB audio with AN USB driver. I guess I should try AN USB stack (11 and 12) with USB Audio 10.227 next.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Wim Brul on May 29, 2019, 09:54:45 am
With USB stack 10.227 and USB Audio 10.227, I now have sound on the M720s system. I had to rearrange the Config.Sys since AN USB stack 12.x has a different requirement of the order of USBD.SYS and USBHID.SYS.

The big obstacle was not the SYBA USB Stereo adapter. I believe the limitation was the Startek USB 2.0 PCIe card. It can run a mouse and keyboard, and a bootable USB stick, but not USB audio with AN USB driver. I guess I should try AN USB stack (11 and 12) with USB Audio 10.227 next.

From David Azarewicz presentation at Warpstock Europe 2019 I learned that isochronous transfers with AN USB 12.x stack are not yet working.
From personal experience I can say that USB Audio 10.227 with AN USB stack 11.17 is working on my ArcaOS 5.0 system.

Wim
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Lars on May 29, 2019, 05:45:04 pm
I fixed USBD.SYS with 10.227.
That might explain why it now works ...
In the past I have done a lot of fixes and changes to USBAUDIO.SYS. I have no idea what David has done to the corresponding AN driver.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on May 30, 2019, 10:46:57 pm
I installed ArcaOS with AN USB 11.17, and USB Audio 227, and this arrangement is working. As Wim predicted, replacing AN USB 12.x with 11.17 was all that is needed for USB Audio 227 to install.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Lars on May 31, 2019, 11:42:40 pm
Rewriting the USB driver stack as (almost) 32-bit is a waste of time. The performance gain will be unnoticeable because all transfers are done by the USB Busmaster DMA Hardware anyway. There is still the drawback with USBMSD that scatter/gather lists cannot be passed to the HC drivers (and I implemented a workaround for this limitation on my USBMSD). The USB stack otherwise works fine the way it was.
But I don't really care anymore. It is useless to argue against these decisions.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Doug Bissett on June 01, 2019, 06:43:04 am
Quote
Rewriting the USB driver stack as (almost) 32-bit is a waste of time. The performance gain will be unnoticeable because all transfers are done by the USB Busmaster DMA Hardware anyway.

I beg to differ. The  32 bit test versions are noticeably faster (with USB 2), and use less CPU, than the older versions. This is probably a very good thing, when trying to get some performance out of USB 3. Unfortunately, at the moment, it appears (to me) that HUB support is still broken, so USB 3 isn't working, for me. Apparently David does have some USB 3 devices that do work. I have no idea what hardware he is working with.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Andi B. on June 01, 2019, 02:04:09 pm
Quote
I beg to differ. The  32 bit test versions are noticeably faster (with USB 2),
What is noticeably faster? If you read what I wrote at the testers list you'll see there is nearly no speed difference when reading/writing to external disks. Different version of usbmsd make more difference than the 16/32 stacks. At least that's the result of my tests.

Maybe that changes with USB3. And maybe it's a good thing in the long term. But until your post above I didn't see anyone claiming there's a speed improvement for regular use cases.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Lars on June 01, 2019, 07:39:57 pm
I beg to doubt that Doug's judgement is based on any measurable or even measured facts.
This is how the USB HW works: you prepare a transfer by setting up transfer desriptors that point to the data to transmit. Then you kick off the HW which does the transfer completely autonomously, without any SW intervention.
The only thing left is to handle the HW interrupt that is asserted when the transfer is completed (passing the transfer descriptor back to the system, setting up the next transfer etc.).
This basic mechanism is about the same with USB 3 where USB 3 does have additional means to speed up things because I seem to remember it allows to define concurrent transfers (multiple transfers running partly in parallel). Again, it is the HW that does all the transfer, the SW part is negilible.
I don't see how changing SW from 16-bit to 32-bit can make that much of an impact but I am an engineer and not a believer.

USBMSD on the other hand is crippled by the fact that larger blocks of data (like one or multiple disk sectors) typically occupy more than one memory page (a list of "scattered" data). And then it would be helpful if the host controller drivers would allow to pass this scatter list directly to the HC drivers as the transfer descriptor mechanism allows to do just that: set up a list of discontiguous memory blocks to transfer. But this is not currently supported and therefore my workaround was to copy those scattered blocks to a contiguous piece of memory and transfer that in one shot. This DOES show performance improvement because people have already measured the performance gain.

Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: ivan on June 01, 2019, 08:08:02 pm
Hi Lars,

A bit off topic but are you thinking of producing a USB 3 driver sometime?
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Lars on June 01, 2019, 10:06:56 pm
No.
No time, no HW, no interest. And for the next 2 years (likely starting end of this year) I will be somewhere else. Which will likely coincede with the end of OS/2 for me.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: ivan on June 02, 2019, 01:14:35 am
Thanks Lars and I hope you have a good time on your new venture, also thanks for all your help.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: David Graser on June 02, 2019, 02:09:05 am
Thanks Lars and I hope you have a good time on your new venture, also thanks for all your help.
Best wishes on all future endeavors Lars.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: Fahrvenugen on June 02, 2019, 05:27:04 am
Lars,

I do want to thank you for all your work on OS/2 over the years.  I've got a bunch of cheap USB-Audio adapters that I picked up for around $1 each, based on the CM108 chipset.  I was happy to find that it works well with your USB driver.

My only complaint about it is that its record channel is only mono, but that's a limitation of the hardware and has nothing to do with your driver.  I actually found that - when recording from it in mono I got better results then when I tried similar tests under Windows (which gives the occasional choppiness).  Playback to the USB dongle works well, overall I'm very impressed.

Best!
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: OS4User on June 02, 2019, 09:36:42 pm
Which will likely coincede with the end of OS/2 for me.

Hi Lars,
Thank you for your efforts! I really hope that you will stay with OS/2 no matter what.
Title: Re: SYBA USB Stereo Sound Adapter: Good or bad?
Post by: rbri on June 03, 2019, 07:42:32 pm
No time, no HW, no interest. And for the next 2 years (likely starting end of this year) I will be somewhere else. Which will likely coincede with the end of OS/2 for me.

Hi Lars, many, many thanks for all the hard work during the last years. Enjoy whatever you plan.