@jazzmammal,

Peter's definition of "synth chip" is on the money. There is no dedicated sound synthesizer chip. The MS GS Wavetable SW Synth is a software synthesizer. A very small sample set, the GM.DLS, is a lookup table of samples stored in a file, not in RAM or ROM. It's a software synthesizer of the sample playback variety, not a hardware synth.

While all MOBOs these days do in fact have an on-board sound chip of some type, they do not have 'synthesizer' chips on them, which based on some kind of command will generate sounds via dedicated oscillator chips.

Contrast this with some of the soundblaster cards of the past, add-on cards inserted into slots, which had dedicated synthesizer chips on-board.

These days, there really is no need for any of the dedicated DSP for sample playback. Playback of sound samples continues to become lighter weight tasks for modern era processing capability.

-Scott

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