The Apple Sound Chip (ASC) contains two 1K sound buffers which allow sounds to be played independently of the CPU. The Sound Manager routines built into the Macintosh ROM insulate the application program from the sound hardware. This allows Macintosh SE/30 to play a sound continuously from a sound file stored on disk while the CPU runs another application.
Two additional Sony sound chips handle the filtering and amplification through the stereo sound port on the back of Macintosh SE/30. Headphones or a stereo amplifier using a mini-stereo plug can be attached to the sound port for true stereo sound.