Creative has in my opinion worked harder than most to put me off their hardware.
Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile.
It felt like they’ve been coasting from their good reputation in 90’s for a long time now even though they don’t deserve it any more.
My friend in late 90’s got a Sound Blaster live or something. In the early 2000’s you could download driver updates off Creative’s website for their stuff, but if you lost the original driver CD you, you had to find drivers elsewhere.
There was a story of how some guy patched their binary driver to fix a long outstanding bug and at the same time discovered that it was trivial to upgrade the sound card by tweaking the driver and of course Creative got all hostile.
My brother had their WoW headphones and it had a bug where the mic would get progressively softer the longer he was using Ventrillo or Skype and he would have to periodically jump off and back onto the call.
Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves.
When Vista deprecated hardware accelerated audio in Windows and Creative labs moaned about it, I had zero sympathy.
fodkodrasz · 7h ago
> Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves.
I assume you made a typo and were thinking about mid 00s, as my memory tells me that motherboard audio was really rare thing in mid 90s.
It started to become common after Intel's AC97 standard. (I'd call that more late 90s... That is late 90s, early 00s possibly by the time it started to spread.
rickdeckard · 6h ago
Soundblaster 16 was launched in 1992 and was the de-facto standard for several years, so I'd say it's a typo
tialaramex · 3h ago
I agree that mid-90s is a bit early but I would say mid 00's is too late.
I'm pretty sure it's a rapid change almost immediately after AC97. In 1998 it's cool if your new PC has built in CD quality audio. In 2000 that's a basic feature like colour graphics, if your PC doesn't then it sucks.
da_chicken · 2h ago
From my memory, AC97 was rough early on. It seemed to be consistently plagued with crosstalk and other interference issues as well as driver issues. By the time WinXP dropped these issues were mostly sorted out, though.
tialaramex · 51m ago
I don't remember too much interference, but then I've never had excellent hearing. Driver issues were definitely a thing but I think that same period around 2000 is when games are shifting from "(Most games work in DOS but) Some games need Windows" to "Some games still need DOS". AC97 was not great for DOS
postexitus · 4h ago
I built 2 pc's with generic motherboard audio in 97 and 99; while this is anecdotal, the option was definitely there late 90's.
mxfh · 4h ago
late 90s is a whole different thing than mid 90s.
The 97 in AC'97 is there for a reason.
Would still say that Audigy 2001 front panel was peak consumer audio experience. Good access for headphone out and ASIO support, so for anyone wnating to connect you a midi keyboard for first excursion into digital music creation everything was there for a reasonable price point.
Even firewire for your DV imports.
A digital media entry point like no others existed at the time at that price point.
martijnvds · 4h ago
Motherboard audio started to become more common with the AC'97 spec/standard.
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
rollulus · 7h ago
Man! TextAssist was the very first thought I had when I opened the article. I occasionally search the web for it, and indeed, it seems in the process of becoming forgotten. Made me wonder if I was the only one spending many hours with it. Thanks for your comment!
casenmgreen · 5h ago
I have and never will forgive Sound Blaster for using legal costs to destroy a competitor, Aureal.
Aureal made the most unbeliveably amazing sound card, which use ray-tracing for sound, in hardware, to produce 3D sound like you are actually there. The sound engine knew the geometry of the space you were in, in your game.
I played the original Half-Life using this, and it was peak gaming.
RedShift1 · 3h ago
Back when I was playing with my Aureal Vortex 2 card, locating enemies via sound was easy peasy through footsteps. That system (and card unfortunately) is now long gone. On my current day system, sound location doesn't work nearly as well, I can't tell if something is in front or behind me, I have to move my head (in-game) to figure that out. I really miss my Vortex 2 :-(.
amiga-workbench · 4h ago
I've often wondered why audio in games never seemed to get back to this kind of realism.
Its shocking how primitive most game engines are with audio processing. You get linear/inverse square falloff on volume over distance and perhaps reverb in some places and that's about it.
keyringlight · 4h ago
There's been some efforts to use GPU ray tracing to bring some of it back, IIRC Call of Duty from a few years ago had it, but as you say it hasn't caught on and displaced 'good enough' audio.
I also had a Vortex2 and it's not about requiring a high-end surround system, as I suspect even today there's still a significant amount of players with decent but not high-end audio. I was playing Quake3 with A3D before they patched it out with either basic stereo speakers or headphones and the placement was superb.
bananaboy · 2h ago
We've been using Microsoft's Triton[0] for a few years now on Call of Duty.
I wish the article had gone into detail about SoundFonts. I had an AWE64 back in the day, and the SoundFonts were a relatively inexpensive way to do sampling. CPUs were generally too slow to do sampling without dedicated hardware. I still remember the day I got the memory daughterboard and was able to load bigger SoundFonts.
I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.
sohkamyung · 3h ago
An article that brings back memories for me, since I worked at Creative Technology (the Singapore HQ) from the CD-ROM days until recently. :-)
I was also one of the people who worked on the Nomad II MP3 player.
Beretta_Vexee · 5h ago
One of the major contributors to Soundblaster's decline was DirectX.
Before DirectX, games and multimedia applications were designed to support a handful of cards, such as Soundblaster, Borland, Turtle Beach, and Ultrasound.
There were no unified drivers, no standard interface, etc. A few middleware programs, such as Miles Audio, began to appear to manage multiple types of cards, but this was done at the application level.
With DirectX, integrated cards and various SB clones were supported out of the box as long as they had Windows drivers.
Very quickly, users realised that the built-in clones and cards were just enough for most uses.
Especially given the appalling quality of PC speakers at the time (I'll never forgive you Packard Bell).
throwaway_20357 · 2h ago
Borland => Roland
sombragris · 43m ago
As I type this, I'm listening to music with a set of Creative Pebble Pro speakers connected to my laptop. They sound OK, and would be a great device, but the quality is not that good. The USB digital audio ceased working roughly after a year of purchase. Then, some months after, it began to work again...
bigmattystyles · 9h ago
I look back fondly to kid years when I took shots in the dark with IRQ and DMA settings on my boot diskette (so as not to mess with my dad’s settings) with autoexec.bat and config.sys (?), trying to balance out keeping enough available memory for the game but still keep the sound driver loaded. I don’t remember all the details, we’d guess a lot, but still learned.
Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.
Beretta_Vexee · 5h ago
IRQ 7, DMA 1, Port 220H !
Now I have a vague idea of what IRQs and DMA are, but I still have no idea what port 220h was.
Don't forget that the Sound Blaster card had a MIDI port to which you could connect a controller or joystick.
That was also a nightmare to configure, with calibrations on all axes, button remapping, etc. We were really motivated for pre-teens.
pansa2 · 4h ago
> I still have no idea what port 220h was
It’s the address (in I/O space, separate from memory space) which the CPU can read/write to communicate with the sound card.
jabl · 33m ago
Not to mention when you had multiple devices you had to piddle with physical jumpers so no two devices shared an IRQ. Good ol' ISA.
prawn · 3h ago
Great era. I remember being unleashed on the family computer and then attempting to neaten the file structure of our various games (Commander Keen, etc) in DOS and copying EVERYTHING into one central directory. Botched graphics display for the games that continued to slightly work...
ksec · 8h ago
The good old days when games requires Sound Blaster to play probably. It is too bad Creative Technology failed to transform out of Sound Card market. I remember discussing this in the early 2000s with a friend of mine in UK who is a Singaporean. He said Creative used to be pride of Singapore.
liendolucas · 3h ago
Today they are mostly irrelevant. Just skimmed their website and I can't find any reason why people would spend money on their products. In a competitive industry such as audio I would never purchase headphones or speakers from them. Audio cards, I don't know, today probably no, and not from them.
In the '90 they were renowned for many of their products (multimedia kits, anybody?). I remember having purchased a Sound Blaster Live and was kind of blown away at the time with its audio quality, maybe because what I had in my motherboard was really bad audio.
One of my siblings had a Creative Zen Vision for ages, it was rock solid to the point that he destroyed its case and audio jack and the thing still worked perfectly. It was possibly one of a few products I've seen that resisted so much and kept working.
I do understand that the market for audio players now are kind of niche/dead if you can run an audio player on your phone, but I would still buy a good quality and affordable audio player that is not polluted with android. Just put music and play it... Their audio players were nice, not the best in terms of software. I owned a Zen Pebble and a Zen Micro and at the time I was quite happy with them.
One thing that is not minor is that they never seemed to have any interest on supporting other OSes rather than Windows or MacOS (a sign that still reflects that they haven't adapted to today's open source movement). If it weren't for the OSS community their cards wouldn't work on Linux.
Another company that suffered a similar or worse fate is Turtle Beach. I remember that they sound cards were also renowed at the time. They now make headsets and joysticks. I guess both companies didn't learn to adapt to the unforgiving tech market and kind of perished.
Podrod · 6h ago
I have a very distinct memory of going to a local independent PC shop with my dad to buy a Sound Blaster 16 for my PC back in 1994. It's odd because I have a really poor memory and don't actually remember much from my childhood,but my brain decided buying a sound card was worth holding on to. I don't remember my dad installing it or what games I first experienced that glorious SB16 sound with, just buying the thing. That said it was probably Doom. I still have that SB16 in its box somewhere.
I bought a _lot_ of Creative Labs products over my pre-teen and teen PC building years. Saving up to get the SB2 or the AWE32 or the AWE64 or SBLive... so that I could eventually get something that supported 4.1 for my Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 kit that I got... (mentioned elsewhere in the comments here).
This was really the primary way to get any sort of good sound. And when it came time to upgrade my computer late last year to an AM5 chipset, I realized that my Klipsch 5.1 system wasn't going to cleanly plug into the on-motherboard outputs. You have to split and use your front panel audio out in order to feed the rear channel, which is kludgy and stupid, so off I went again, and found I could still buy a Sound Blaster: this time, the AE-7. It's been pretty reliable, has a little volume knob/input guy for my headset, and the desktop software and drivers aren't as nightmarish as the internet had led me to believe they'd be, even on Windows 11.
It did lead me down this path of wondering how CL was doing nowadays, so it's funny to come across this piece outlining their history in detail and where they are today.
temp0826 · 3h ago
It's kind of bizarre to think about all the audio struggles from the past and "good" (not actually) things like SB, and today with my truly fantastic, ~$25 usb dongle that blows it all out of the water with ease (32 bit, 448khz). Some of y'all maybe don't realize what a golden age it is (am I old?).
guappa · 3h ago
It does not. That old sound blaster had more input channels than your dongle.
sillywalk · 13h ago
I remember buying a Sound Blaster Pro. I remember being amazed by the talking parrot, and DR. SBAITSO - That's Sound Blaster Acting Intelligent Text-To-Speech Operator. It also had the proprietary Panasonic CD-ROM connector.
Cthulhu_ · 2h ago
I remember when my dad either got or bought a used sound blaster from a fellow PC enthusiast, I vaguely recall it came with stuff like a speech synthesizer and the like. Spent much time listening to MOD music (and their pretty interfaces full of buttons and graphics)
bananaboy · 2h ago
Dr Sbaitso is etched into my brain! "My name is Doctor Sbaitso. I am here to help you" haha
duskwuff · 12h ago
> An hour of audio in 64MB would absolutely not be “CD-quality.”
At 128 kbps, you can fit a bit over an hour of audio into 64 MB. Which isn't great, especially not using a late-90s MP3 encoder, but it's perfectly listenable.
ksec · 9h ago
Yeah I remember it took sometime before LAME came along and became good, but then AAC-LC took over. These days we really should just default to 256Kbps. My only wish is that AAC-LC QuickTime encoder to be open source.
stavros · 6h ago
Isn't Opus better than everything nowadays?
leeoniya · 6h ago
opus 160 vbr is basically the endgame for stereo listening. even 96-128 is transparent to the vast majority of people.
for archival and mastering you'd still use flac.
stavros · 6h ago
Ah yes, I was talking about lossy codecs. Plus it's an open format, so I'm wondering why we even use anything else. I guess hardware acceleration.
Beretta_Vexee · 5h ago
I use an audio player that is almost ten years old with Rockbox, and there is no noticeable difference in performance between decoding an MP3 and an Ogg Vorbis file.
Vorbis is very good, but managing the audio library, transcoding and transferring to the player are tedious and seem stuck in the 2000s.
Many of us have a large library of MP3s. The gain in quality and space from switching from MP3 V0 to Vorbis Q5 is negligible and does not justify the effort if you are not transcoding from FLAC.
stavros · 5h ago
Well, you definitely won't gain any quality if you're transcoding from a lossy format. You also wouldn't notice the difference in performance, but you might notice it in battery life.
If you're transcoding from FLAC, I think your best bet nowadays is just Opus, really.
Beretta_Vexee · 4h ago
The idea is rather that someone with a large FLAC library, who has already transcoded some of it to MP3 for listening on a portable player, has little interest in transcoding their FLAC files to Vorbis again.
The battery life of an MP3 player, even with a ten-year-old battery, is still more than ten hours of continuous playback regardless of the format, which is more than enough.
The real limiting factor is the maximum size supported by microSD cards. If the player wasn't limited to 64GB, I wouldn't even bother transcoding.
stavros · 4h ago
Sure, there's no massive gain from replacing mp3 with Opus. For new files, though, mp3/Vorbis doesn't make sense any more.
Beretta_Vexee · 1h ago
It took more than 10 years for Vorbis support to become widespread. It will take a few more years before we can hope to play Opus easily everywhere.
We are at a stage where current solutions are just good enough in most case. Change is therefore becoming increasingly slow.
Even for music streaming, many services continue to use MP3 and AAC.
leeoniya · 4h ago
i still use a RockBox'd Sansa Clip+ with SuperMix 4 iems :)
amelius · 52m ago
Funny that the entire thing now fits in a USB dongle that's $3 on AliExpress.
haspok · 4h ago
> Creative rose to dominate the sound card market at a time when there weren’t many options. They made an excellent product, marketed well, and made solid relationships with software makers.
Interesting angle. The product that actually made them mainstream (the Soundblaster) was everything but excellent - it had a single mono 8-bit DAC (compare this to the Amiga's 4 channel stereo sound, released four years prior!), and very noisy output as I recall. But it was supported by all software, so it won.
Also no mention of their very aggressive business practices, how they bankrupted Adlib by forcing Yamaha to not release a new sound chip for the upcoming Adlib Gold card - delayed until Creative were ready with their own product.
apt-apt-apt-apt · 2h ago
It looks like they got a patent on either the UI list of files or the click wheelie thing and got paid off by Apple. If it's the list of files, is it really possible to patent a simple list like that?
jnaina · 8h ago
I first met Sim Wong Hoo as a teenager while working at Funan Center, just before he launched the Cubic 99 PC (a failed product, which later inspired the Sound Blaster).
A genuinely down-to-earth person. An engineer’s engineer, somewhat like the Woz. If he had only found his "Steve Jobs", someone who had the vision and marketing savvy, Creative would be have a been major tech player.
walaueh · 7h ago
When the Ipod launched, Apple sold "U2 Special Edition" ones that had the band's autographs etched to the back.
Guess what Creative did for the launch of their Zen mp3 players (supposed iPod killers)? 10 limited edition ones autographed by CEO Sim Wong Hoo.
Like "Who cares about U2 and other artistes (admittedly there were few famous ones in SG then) right? We've got a special one signed by our CEO!"
The person who thought of this should have been fired and condemned to never work in marketing ever again.
aleph_minus_one · 7h ago
> 10 limited edition ones autographed by CEO Sim Wong Hoo. Like "Who cares about U2 and other artistes (admittedly there were few famous ones in SG then) right? We've got a special one signed by our CEO!" The person who thought of this should have been fired and condemned to never work in marketing ever again.
Honestly, having the decision between a "U2 Special Edition" and "CEO-signed Special Edition", I would without hesitation (all other things equal) choose the latter one.
A great middle finger to all this musical band fandom, and the hypocrisy of lots of insanely commercially successful musicians who claim that they do this all for the love of music instead of love for money (just to be clear: there exist lots of indie bands for which I immediately do believe their love for music, but these bands are nearly always far too unknown to be suitable for being poster children for selling MP3 players).
No need to mention that I love this kind of marketing. I guess I sometimes have a non-mainstream taste. :-)
hypercube33 · 3h ago
My late 90s Micron PC has a front panel easter egg - it is signed by what I assume to be the team that designed it, molded into the plastic.
It's cool enough for me that Ive kept it.
rickdeckard · 6h ago
Worth to note those Creative devices were not sold, they were given away as a prize in a contest.
And it wasn't a total of 10 units, the winner received a collector's package with ALL TEN autographed Creative "Zen Micro" , one in each color available. 2nd~10th place won one "normal" Zen Micro respectively.
Frankly, could be worse. Imagine being a teenager back then and winning 10 MP3 players...
fodkodrasz · 7h ago
Maybe this was an inspiration for the Gavin Belson Signature Box III in the series Silicon Valley?
hed · 2h ago
> Layoffs of some staff in Stillwater, Oklahoma followed in 2008.
How did Creative end up with offices there? Was there some kind of research going on at Oklahoma State University?
kensai · 2h ago
Trip down the memory line, this article. Serious question: does anyone care to have hardware audio cards nowadays, let alone from Creative?
greener_grass · 2h ago
In an alternate reality maybe Creative went from Audio cards to MP3 players to Smartphones and GPUs
Cthulhu_ · 2h ago
They tried, sort of, in 2002 they acquired 3DLabs. Wish they kept making MP3 players though, but that market collapsed in on itself with the rise of smartphones. A shame, for a few years I had both a smartphone (Galaxy A) and an MP3 player (ipod touch, but I miss my mini/nano) separately. I really wouldn't mind a dedicated music player again.
lif · 15h ago
the sound of PC gaming in the late 90s, e.g. with good old PCWorks FourPointSurround by Cambridge Soundworks
(iykyk)
disillusioned · 7h ago
This. This this this this this this this. MaximumPC wrote up the FPS2000 kit and I, an obsessed 14 year-old, saved up as much money as I could to buy it. I _needed_ surround sound.
I was then similarly obsessed with 4.1 sound in, eg, Half-Life, and other games, but also the dumb helicopter demo. My friends loved it too: no one else had a 4.1 system, so this was a Big Deal.
Eventually, some component or another failed in the sub/amp, and I moved on to the vaunted Logitech Z-5500, which was a pretty solid choice, but a lot "boomier" and less even.
I then migrated my way to the Klipsch ProMedia 5.1, which I am _still using today_, having kept it on life support by finding some guy online who refurbishes the very testy "BASH" boards inside them, and, after several swaps, eventually ordered a rebuilt amp with a newly designed BASH board that he had printed up.
No one makes true PC audio 5.1 systems anymore, really. Logitech has their Z906, which I could get if I had to, but my understanding is my precious little Klipsch system still kicks its ass.
But it all harkens back to the FPS2000. Cambridge Soundworks put something _special_ together with that bit of kit.
bananaboy · 12h ago
I still use those speakers plus sub today!
sdh7kk7 · 2h ago
Anyone remember Ensoniq?
mobilio · 45m ago
Yup!
AudioPCI rebranded devices later sold as SoundBlaster cheaper edition.
Mistletoe · 8h ago
Creative is reviving the Sound Blaster. I’m unsure what that will entail.
The first image which looks like some kind of music-making hardware ("instrument") looked a lot like the OP-1 by Teenage Engineering [1]. That would be an interesting partnership, right?
I don't think they ever stopped using the name. The wiki article has Sound Blaster audio devices listed as being released up to 2021 and a quick search on Amazon shows they're still selling them brand new.
Guessing the kickstarter is for some retro thing judging by the image of their old talking parrot on that announcement page.
eduction · 12h ago
You should explain what the AdLib is.
This whole thing just drowns in jargon and quick technical assertions that are never explained. It is skimming the surface (as though clipped together from various poorly understood sources) rather than explaining things with any depth. The heart of this story is how PC sound worked and how it evolved. Instead you have recitations of speeds and feeds.
BirAdam · 12h ago
So, I cover the entire industry at ARF, and Adlib will come. The problem is finding the sources. Sorry you didn’t care for it. Also, as Creative didn’t make most of their chips, those too will eventually be covered.
christkv · 6h ago
I had the Creative Labs 3D Blaster PCI with the rendition verite chip another deadend chip lol but i think in some ways the most modern looking gpu as it was a risc processor
Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile.
It felt like they’ve been coasting from their good reputation in 90’s for a long time now even though they don’t deserve it any more.
My friend in late 90’s got a Sound Blaster live or something. In the early 2000’s you could download driver updates off Creative’s website for their stuff, but if you lost the original driver CD you, you had to find drivers elsewhere.
There was a story of how some guy patched their binary driver to fix a long outstanding bug and at the same time discovered that it was trivial to upgrade the sound card by tweaking the driver and of course Creative got all hostile.
My brother had their WoW headphones and it had a bug where the mic would get progressively softer the longer he was using Ventrillo or Skype and he would have to periodically jump off and back onto the call.
Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves.
When Vista deprecated hardware accelerated audio in Windows and Creative labs moaned about it, I had zero sympathy.
I assume you made a typo and were thinking about mid 00s, as my memory tells me that motherboard audio was really rare thing in mid 90s.
It started to become common after Intel's AC97 standard. (I'd call that more late 90s... That is late 90s, early 00s possibly by the time it started to spread.
I'm pretty sure it's a rapid change almost immediately after AC97. In 1998 it's cool if your new PC has built in CD quality audio. In 2000 that's a basic feature like colour graphics, if your PC doesn't then it sucks.
So that makes sense.
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
Aureal made the most unbeliveably amazing sound card, which use ray-tracing for sound, in hardware, to produce 3D sound like you are actually there. The sound engine knew the geometry of the space you were in, in your game.
I played the original Half-Life using this, and it was peak gaming.
Its shocking how primitive most game engines are with audio processing. You get linear/inverse square falloff on volume over distance and perhaps reverb in some places and that's about it.
I also had a Vortex2 and it's not about requiring a high-end surround system, as I suspect even today there's still a significant amount of players with decent but not high-end audio. I was playing Quake3 with A3D before they patched it out with either basic stereo speakers or headphones and the placement was superb.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-tri...
I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.
I was also one of the people who worked on the Nomad II MP3 player.
Before DirectX, games and multimedia applications were designed to support a handful of cards, such as Soundblaster, Borland, Turtle Beach, and Ultrasound. There were no unified drivers, no standard interface, etc. A few middleware programs, such as Miles Audio, began to appear to manage multiple types of cards, but this was done at the application level.
With DirectX, integrated cards and various SB clones were supported out of the box as long as they had Windows drivers.
Very quickly, users realised that the built-in clones and cards were just enough for most uses.
Especially given the appalling quality of PC speakers at the time (I'll never forgive you Packard Bell).
Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.
Now I have a vague idea of what IRQs and DMA are, but I still have no idea what port 220h was. Don't forget that the Sound Blaster card had a MIDI port to which you could connect a controller or joystick. That was also a nightmare to configure, with calibrations on all axes, button remapping, etc. We were really motivated for pre-teens.
It’s the address (in I/O space, separate from memory space) which the CPU can read/write to communicate with the sound card.
In the '90 they were renowned for many of their products (multimedia kits, anybody?). I remember having purchased a Sound Blaster Live and was kind of blown away at the time with its audio quality, maybe because what I had in my motherboard was really bad audio.
One of my siblings had a Creative Zen Vision for ages, it was rock solid to the point that he destroyed its case and audio jack and the thing still worked perfectly. It was possibly one of a few products I've seen that resisted so much and kept working.
I do understand that the market for audio players now are kind of niche/dead if you can run an audio player on your phone, but I would still buy a good quality and affordable audio player that is not polluted with android. Just put music and play it... Their audio players were nice, not the best in terms of software. I owned a Zen Pebble and a Zen Micro and at the time I was quite happy with them.
One thing that is not minor is that they never seemed to have any interest on supporting other OSes rather than Windows or MacOS (a sign that still reflects that they haven't adapted to today's open source movement). If it weren't for the OSS community their cards wouldn't work on Linux.
Another company that suffered a similar or worse fate is Turtle Beach. I remember that they sound cards were also renowed at the time. They now make headsets and joysticks. I guess both companies didn't learn to adapt to the unforgiving tech market and kind of perished.
This was really the primary way to get any sort of good sound. And when it came time to upgrade my computer late last year to an AM5 chipset, I realized that my Klipsch 5.1 system wasn't going to cleanly plug into the on-motherboard outputs. You have to split and use your front panel audio out in order to feed the rear channel, which is kludgy and stupid, so off I went again, and found I could still buy a Sound Blaster: this time, the AE-7. It's been pretty reliable, has a little volume knob/input guy for my headset, and the desktop software and drivers aren't as nightmarish as the internet had led me to believe they'd be, even on Windows 11.
It did lead me down this path of wondering how CL was doing nowadays, so it's funny to come across this piece outlining their history in detail and where they are today.
At 128 kbps, you can fit a bit over an hour of audio into 64 MB. Which isn't great, especially not using a late-90s MP3 encoder, but it's perfectly listenable.
for archival and mastering you'd still use flac.
Vorbis is very good, but managing the audio library, transcoding and transferring to the player are tedious and seem stuck in the 2000s.
Many of us have a large library of MP3s. The gain in quality and space from switching from MP3 V0 to Vorbis Q5 is negligible and does not justify the effort if you are not transcoding from FLAC.
If you're transcoding from FLAC, I think your best bet nowadays is just Opus, really.
The real limiting factor is the maximum size supported by microSD cards. If the player wasn't limited to 64GB, I wouldn't even bother transcoding.
We are at a stage where current solutions are just good enough in most case. Change is therefore becoming increasingly slow.
Even for music streaming, many services continue to use MP3 and AAC.
Interesting angle. The product that actually made them mainstream (the Soundblaster) was everything but excellent - it had a single mono 8-bit DAC (compare this to the Amiga's 4 channel stereo sound, released four years prior!), and very noisy output as I recall. But it was supported by all software, so it won.
Also no mention of their very aggressive business practices, how they bankrupted Adlib by forcing Yamaha to not release a new sound chip for the upcoming Adlib Gold card - delayed until Creative were ready with their own product.
A genuinely down-to-earth person. An engineer’s engineer, somewhat like the Woz. If he had only found his "Steve Jobs", someone who had the vision and marketing savvy, Creative would be have a been major tech player.
Honestly, having the decision between a "U2 Special Edition" and "CEO-signed Special Edition", I would without hesitation (all other things equal) choose the latter one.
A great middle finger to all this musical band fandom, and the hypocrisy of lots of insanely commercially successful musicians who claim that they do this all for the love of music instead of love for money (just to be clear: there exist lots of indie bands for which I immediately do believe their love for music, but these bands are nearly always far too unknown to be suitable for being poster children for selling MP3 players).
No need to mention that I love this kind of marketing. I guess I sometimes have a non-mainstream taste. :-)
It's cool enough for me that Ive kept it.
And it wasn't a total of 10 units, the winner received a collector's package with ALL TEN autographed Creative "Zen Micro" , one in each color available. 2nd~10th place won one "normal" Zen Micro respectively.
Frankly, could be worse. Imagine being a teenager back then and winning 10 MP3 players...
How did Creative end up with offices there? Was there some kind of research going on at Oklahoma State University?
(iykyk)
I was then similarly obsessed with 4.1 sound in, eg, Half-Life, and other games, but also the dumb helicopter demo. My friends loved it too: no one else had a 4.1 system, so this was a Big Deal.
Eventually, some component or another failed in the sub/amp, and I moved on to the vaunted Logitech Z-5500, which was a pretty solid choice, but a lot "boomier" and less even.
I then migrated my way to the Klipsch ProMedia 5.1, which I am _still using today_, having kept it on life support by finding some guy online who refurbishes the very testy "BASH" boards inside them, and, after several swaps, eventually ordered a rebuilt amp with a newly designed BASH board that he had printed up.
No one makes true PC audio 5.1 systems anymore, really. Logitech has their Z906, which I could get if I had to, but my understanding is my precious little Klipsch system still kicks its ass.
But it all harkens back to the FPS2000. Cambridge Soundworks put something _special_ together with that bit of kit.
AudioPCI rebranded devices later sold as SoundBlaster cheaper edition.
https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...
The first image which looks like some kind of music-making hardware ("instrument") looked a lot like the OP-1 by Teenage Engineering [1]. That would be an interesting partnership, right?
[1]: https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster
Guessing the kickstarter is for some retro thing judging by the image of their old talking parrot on that announcement page.
This whole thing just drowns in jargon and quick technical assertions that are never explained. It is skimming the surface (as though clipped together from various poorly understood sources) rather than explaining things with any depth. The heart of this story is how PC sound worked and how it evolved. Instead you have recitations of speeds and feeds.