IRQ sharing and lots of Soundcards?

[Ethan]

Hello all,

 I'm currently involved in a project where we stream about 12 local public
service audio feeds onto the internet. We currently use 4 HP computers
each with 3 soundcards and FreeBSD. It works fairly well, but we plan to
add another 12 or so streams (if not 20+ more!)

 I just purchased two single board computer systems. Each one has the
motherboard on a card (standard CTI/Telephony fare) with a backplane card
that has 16 PCI slots.

 The computer will have a small IDE disk, a network interface, and lots of
sound cards.

 IRQ conflicts... can PCI really share IRQs? And can it share them when
the cards are actively "generating requests"? The sound cards are Sound
Blaster 128 PCI's, which are base model cards (no game ports!).

 At minimum we could probably get 6 sound cards per machine, but it would
be AWESOME to be able to shove 12 of them in each box.... is PCI that
good, or am I still limited by the same factors that gave me headaches
when putting a Sound Blaster 1.0 in a Tandy 1000sx?

 Also, the board says it has two PCI busses. One is tied to 2 PCI slots,
one is tied to 14 slots. *NO* idea how that works.

 Much thanks. If I could just get the software developers to add support
for splitting left and right audio into separate feeds :-(

					-- Ethan