Pcm
Pcm
Nope, not really. PCM is just a fancy way of saying you're digitizing a signal sampled at fixed interval. By nature parallel data as well. Raw .wav files are basically uncompressed PCM data, with a bit of overhead telling sample rate, etc. You can take PCM and get lots more complicated by varying the quantization word size, varying the time interval, using just 1 bit to reflect the changes in levels (Delta), or folding a larger word size into a smaller by some sort of non-linear mapping( what phone companies do).
But straight PCM just gets sent to the D/A.
I guess it depends on the soundcard, I think the original Soundblaster could do 8-bit PCM, but the trouble was that it was so much easier to send FM commands to the Yamaha chip then to synchronize PCM audio, which did, after all, require a lot of space, with all the other stuff that was going on in games, who were typically the only programs to really use sound cards on a PC, that it took a while for games to start incorporating PCM.
I think the biggest problem was space, something called ADPCM was supported in hardware to keep space requirements down, but of course it sounded terrible.
I have the datasheet for the PCM-53's (500k), if you want it, by the way.
patscc