The Quazar Surround! This was my first piece of hardware for the Sam Coupé, and is still my flagship product! First announced in April 1995, with the first soundcards being sent a few months later it heralded the future of sound on the Sam.
Whether you’re into playing games, programming or in fact no matter how you use your Sam, the Quazar Surround soundcard is for you! Enjoy the breathtaking quality of sound... realistic instruments... atmospheric music running throughout games... earthshattering sound effects and speech and certainly not forgetting the FULL Surround sound! The Quazar Surround provides the ultimate sonic experience on your Sam and with a huge range of software available, especially enhanced for it, the Quazar Surround is the most widly supported piece of Sam hardware!
Let's get the technobabble over and done with - so what exactly does the Quazar Surround offer? Well, it provides up to 6 sound channels for playing digital (sampled) sound, up to a quality of 16 bits (4096 times the quality that the SAA1099 Sam soundchip can play samples at). The Quazar Surround has sound outputs for a front pair of speakers, and a rear pair of speakers so you can enjoy sound in full surround - giving that total immersion style feeling! (If you only connect a single pair of speakers, then the rear channels automatically gets mixed in to just give a stereo output.)
The Quazar Surround soundcard comes complete with manual and several disks of software:
Introductory Disk
The first introductory disk features software to test and demonstrate the Quazar Surround. The testing software plays samples through all the channels, testing 8 bit and 16 bit sample playback, and the front and rear channels. Demonstration software includes a 16 bit music demo and a piece of music created with the Quazar Sequencer software.
Introductory Disk 2
The second introductory disk gives software for converting samples from other computers (Amiga, PC....) to the sample format used by the Quazar Surround. There is also code routines you can use in your own programs for playing samples through the Quazar Surround.
Soundbyte
With the Quazar Surround you get six free back issues of Soundbyte. This is the magazine disk specifically for the Quazar Surround soundcard, featuring games, utilities and music demos with many reader contributions. It's currently on issue 76 at the moment, and has been running since the Quazar Surround was launched.
Please note this original version of the Quazar Surround soundcard is discontinued. The page will be updated shortly with the new 2023 Classic Version.
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