I have been making small synths with the atmega328 for sometime and am starting to get frustrated with the quality of sound. I can run about 5 oscs at 12 bit, 8kHz (with a lot of noise).
It appears that the Codec chip used in these products is used to clock the atmega. I don't really understand why the codec is needed if the atmega is running at ~44kHz and telling the codec exactly what to do, couldn't the atmega be doing it itself?
I want to be able to make something with lots of voices and oscillators, with a high sound quality. Further down the road, I'd like to playback samples too. Should I just try and get into proper DSP programming or could I potentially be doing all this with my own version of something like the wavesheild / MICrODEC?
Well, if anyone is interested, I just bought a dsPIC33F and a microstick II. A little worried about the lack of support for noobs, but hopefully I'll be making quality noises soon enough.
Arduino noob here, but experienced programmer/systems engineer. I think that Arduino can do all the things the Audio Codec Shield can do, but they've done a lot of the "piddly work" for the user, added hardware connections, etc... rs
