9 ms·

The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules. When DVDs and H

The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules. When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on. But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions... After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless. Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era. EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules. As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.

Sharlin 4y ago
> or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. To be fair, realtime synthesis just became obsolete for most purposes once CD quality digitized audio became cheap enough to store (and later, to stream). And for musicians, once CPUs became fast enough, SW synthesis with its limitless possibilities took over from HW synthesis.
- gnramires 4y ago
  Something like (fragment?) shaders for audio would be amazing though. Or maybe just an embedded low power CPU (running realtime). I think there's a lot of room for generative audio still (or various degrees of "rendering audio"), or applying distortions like doppler, various reverbs, or just generating things on the fly via synthesis, you can do things like make each effect unique and have various custom parameters (material pairs, impact velocity, room conditions, etc.). I think full 3d audio is a different problem though because it, at least, requires a version of the rendering problem (for waves). It's harder in some ways than light rendering (because phase/coherence matters sometimes, the wave equation is harder to solve), but easier in others (no need as much detail as light, wavelength is large), or just plain weird (nonlinear effects from rattling and such).
  - EnigmaCurry 4y ago
    Generating sound on the GPU via shaders is definitely a thing. There's a bunch on shadertoy that do just that : https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=popular&filter=soundoutput https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=popular&filter...
  - Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
    There’s still sound card with programmable DSP, quite often used to replicate high end effects. They cost a lot - and every plug-in are specialized to a brand. Still quite useful because the quality of those are very high, and don’t impact the recording process. Or there’s still some “generic” box (I mean that you can program yourself) like the Symbolic Sound Kyma Capybara. They’re quite niche thought, like modular synth.
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    Sounds kinda like ray tracing and physically based rendering to me
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  Also, disk space became cheap enough that the game could store audio files (such as MP3s) instead of generating the audio on the fly by the sound card. I remember Age of Empires (released 1997) music were MIDI files and the "instruments" would be changed by the game's code to make the music sound much better. EverQuest (1999) also started with MIDI files but later expansions replaced the music with MP3 files.
PaulKeeble 4y ago
The best of competitive sound now is the Sennheiser GSX which is an external USB DAC/Amp. It has a good 7.1 to headphones mode that gets you about the best surround sound on headphones for games/movies you can get, it impacts the tone the least and has one of the best HRTF's I have heard in eyars. But it pales in comparison to the cards we had 20 years ago, I miss my Aureal A3D.
- wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  Is it better than Dolby Atmos you think?
  - PaulKeeble 4y ago
    In Overwatch it was when I tried that a few years ago. While Atmos gave you some sense of vertical positioning generally it wasn't correct and I struggled with positioning. Theoretically Atmos ought to be miles better, its object based like the sound cards of the early 2000s but in practice they have got something wrong in the headphones implementation and positioning is hard to pick out. Its better than just stereo but the positioning is a lot better on the Sennheiser device. Whether Dolby Atmos has improved since then or other games have implemented it better I don't know. I feel like we probably need an open source implementation middleware for object sound to headphone/surround speakers to really fix the situation.
- Terr_ 4y ago
  Ditto, I can't say how much of it is pure nostalgia, but I feel like Counter Strike 1.x on my old Turtle Beach Montego II gave better positional sound than any game/hardware does nowadays.
- scovetta 4y ago
  The differences may be all in my head, but I've been very happy with a USB Dragonfly DAC and a pair of quality headphones, along with high/master quality input.
Pulcinella 4y ago
The PS5 has an audio chip loosely based on the design of the PS3’s Cell CPU. It’s used to compute HRTF 3D audio. It’s really cool, but it’s basically the only modern example (not sure what Apple is doing for it’s 3D audio) and of course it’s a console so it’s not a separate, user replaceable sound card. It’s a shame because I would love more audio sources to support HRTF (head related transfer function) and “ray traced” audio.
- vel0city 4y ago
  Games can have HRTF if the developers want to include it, it doesn't take a fancy sound card to make it happen. Counter-Strike Global Offensive had an update a few years ago to implement HRTF, its now labeled as the "3D Audio" option in the game. It works on pretty much any modern sound card.
  - julian_sark 4y ago
    +1. It may not he HRTF, but the game with by far the best positional audio at the moment appears to be Crytek's Hunt: Showdown. Sounds can be pin pointed with amazing accuracy. Often times, one can shoot blindly through a wall just based on the noise an opponent makes, and score hits. The game deliberately includes many sound sources to facilitate this such as stepping on various surfaces, glass shards on the ground, and wildlife making noise based on player proximity. This works amazingly well on regular, on-board PC sound chips, though headphones are quite mandatory. (Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a fan).
    - Pulcinella 4y ago
      Thank you. Are you able to adjust the positional audio to “better fit” your ears? The PS5 comes with a few presets but unfortunately it feels like my ears are somewhere between two of the presets, so for one sound sources feel lower than they should while the next the feel higher than they should (compared to a reference sound that is ear-level).
- michaelrmmiller 4y ago
  That chip is responsible for much more than HRTFs too. It can handle a huge amount of 3D audio-related DSP effects and decoding which are all way more compute intensive than the HRTF, which is performed once at the very end of the signal chain for the headphones.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
>Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card. Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2. The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away: 1. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards. 2. Gamers who want 3d/positional audio either use headphones, find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use case in the gaming world for sound cards. Dolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for surround audio nowadays. Decent positional audio can be experienced using a laptop and headphones-- no sound card required. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Surround_sound https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Surround_sound Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask "is this creative 3d? aureal?" nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).
- 0xfaded 4y ago
  This might be due to computers and headphones becoming portable. When I was a kid my PC had a soundblaster connected to a hacky 7.1 setup in my room, and counterstrike supported it.
- xhevahir 4y ago
  I don't know. I didn't think a mere audio interface plus soundfonts was an adequate replacement for a really good soundcard like the Yamaha SW100XG: https://www.musicradar.com/news/blast-from-the-past-yamaha-sw1000xg https://www.musicradar.com/news/blast-from-the-past-yamaha-s... . Then there's Korg's Oasys PCI, which was so powerful that for a long time people kept using Windows 98 after Korg stopped making drivers: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/korg-oasys-pci https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/korg-oasys-pci
majormajor 4y ago
This seems very off base from my recollection and the state of tech availability at the time. The "analog hole" was around for long after the release of Vista, with Vista maintaining support for direct multi-channel analog audio out as well as VGA/component video out at HD resolutions, but that was not a hugely mainstream thing because going analog meant by definition non-perfect results - decoding a digital stream, sending analog, then re-encoding on capture. They started laying the groundwork, but 2007 PCs and laptops didn't commonly have digital output, so playing a DVD over VGA, for instance, was extremely common still and allowed. And beyond that, this is the first I'm seeing a claim that "doing 3d audio calculations" was restricted and that this had anything to do with intercepting pre-encoded multi-channel DVD/digital media streams. They seem completely separate from each other as far as technical pipelines go. Sound cards as a general consumer product were dead long before Vista. The last hurrah I remember was the SBLive!/Turtle Beach Santa Cruz era 1998-2001 stuff, Vista didn't come out until 2007 (Longhorn was famously botched, etc...). CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs, could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs immediately.
- MAGZine 4y ago
  I had a decent gaming machine in 2007-2008, and, in particular I remember that Battlefield 2 sounded a LOT better with a soundcard. The difference was night and day. In particular, EAX (environmental audio extensions), which was a feature of the X-Fi cards, were definitely EOL'd due to Vista's changes around the DirectSound3D APIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- isleyaardvark 4y ago
  My recollection as well, and supported by the chart on this page showing a huge drop in sales from 2001-2003: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560... (It’s not a great chart but shows a general trend.)
naikrovek 4y ago
ok you are SUPER misinformed about the motivation for the driver architecture change. drivers live in the kernel, and prior to Windows Vista, they had the same rights as the kernel. pre-Windows Vista, a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted. the driver architecture change fixed this gaping security hole, while still allowing drivers to exist. drivers needed to be rewritten to accommodate LARGE changes to how they needed to do their work, and the result of that is that drivers which interacted with hardware directly no longer could, they had to ask the kernel to do stuff, and the kernel could say “no.” imagine being a driver maintainer and needing to react to this change. this change often required a complete rewrite of the driver. this is why drivers of the era were so feature-limited. this architecture change allowed kernel-level DRM drivers to become a thing, but DRM would have happened with or without any changes to driver arch, i assure you. everyone suddenly needing to rewrite their drivers is what caused drivers to appear limited in the new paradigm. it simply took time to reimplement everything that existed in the old driver model, and people wanted working drivers before everything was implemented in the new drivers.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted This is a thing too, but the main problem was what a kernel level drivers not only could, but WOULD crash the kernel (ie cause a BSOD) if something goes wrong. And things gone wrong very, very often. People like to bitch about changes in NT6+, but I have seen waaay less BSODs (not related to the botched hardware) after that.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    thank you, i forgot to mention that.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on. If you never seen a system BSODing from the sound drivers - I'm glad for you. I've seen enough sound card drivers crashes to tell you what that WAS a problem. Along with network cards, video cards, TV-tuner cards and almost anything what needed a driver. > After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless. Discrete sound cards became pointless because by 2001 almost every consumer motherboard had an AC'97 compatible audio coded on board. So if you didn't need super extra fidelity 5.1235435 sound system AND didn't want to shell out additional ~$100 (SB Live! in 1999) or $2-300 (SB Audigy 2 in various variants, 2003) - you just could use the onboard one. > having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. NO THANKS: https://youtu.be/3AZI07_qts8?t=9 https://youtu.be/3AZI07_qts8?t=9 And this is a Creative card! I had my share of good synthesized music (because computers couldn't yet do a proper digitized sounds yet), but the tech should had die and it did.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  The sound market was always a mess. Games ended up congealing around the Sound Blaster standard, which put Creative in the centre of the sound universe. Everyone else was always just "SB compatible", which meant they were playing for the "$10 placeholder sound card" market in the Pentium days. By the time we were getting onboard audio (I think my first board with it was Socket A), it was all hidden behind DirectX, and the market became the "90 cent placeholder chip soldered onto the mobo" market, and then they're all undercut by Realtek. Unfortunately, Creative is a mediocre steward of the premium-sound landscape. Their product matrix is complicated, support is all over the place, and the drivers are sketchy. I have an Audigy RX that I pulled out of circulation because it could crash two different boards (B550 and X570) and the general consensus was just "they're not that compatible." I suppose that market technically didn't crush everyone else, there was still the pro-audio market, but that had entirely different needs than a typical home enthusiast. If you're building a studio PC to run specific studio software, you can put up with a narrow compatibility list and finickiness. But it feels like there's a reasonable niche there for the "eager to throw money around" audiophile crowd. Cards full of high-markup capacitors and filters so you can claim to offer cleaner power and a lower noise floor seem tailor-made to unlocking those wallets. Where is that card? Although I suspect for that audience, they just pipe out stuff via optical to an external DAC because the inside of the PC must be full of RFI.
com2kid 4y ago
> The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules. Creative drivers were a double digit % of all Windows BSODs. Microsoft gave Creative plenty of time to fix their drivers, creative never did, so sound drivers got booted from the kernel.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
michaelrmmiller 4y ago
Very true for PCs but it’s starting to shift with both consoles and receivers with Atmos decoders. For example, the PS5 has a custom audio DSP chip with 3D sound capabilities for reverberation, spatialization and more.
joe91 4y ago
This is nonsense. The main reason behind the demise of dedicated sound cards: motherboard sound chipsets got "good enough". The value add wasn't adding enough value any more because you can get decent sound quality just by using the default sound output provided by your motherboard. 3D sound and other processing got baked into middleware for games because it became trivial to do all of the processing in software - and the processing became more advanced than anything that the sound card vendors were offering (and they didn't move quickly enough anyway). Pro audio vastly progressed past anything that is possible to provide in fixed silicon. For input, dedicated USB (and ethernet) audio interfaces progressed to the point where it would be ridiculous to provide such functionality on a general "sound card". It's just evolution - there just isn't a compelling enough niche for a dedicated sound card any more.
- ideashower 4y ago
  This is the answer. The only people buying dedicated sound cards these days are those doing audio engineering or production work, needing access to dedicated inputs and interfaces. Motherboard sound chipsets cover nearly every other use case.
- retrac 4y ago
  Correct. Same thing has happened with GPUs. The vast majority of general purpose computers sold today come with integrated graphics. Only those who have unusually heavy 3D graphics needs, like CAD or the latest games at full quality, still buy a discrete video card.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    - sexy_panda 4y ago
      I know bashing crypto currencies is well established on HN, but can we please not mention this every time. This gets annoying.
- 4y ago
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
It had nothing to do with DRM. 3D audio on the PC was deliberately killed by Creative. They sued Aureal into bankruptcy, bought it in the court auction, and the day the sale closed they nuked the support website and took the drivers offline. They used similar scummy tactics to decapitate any other competitors. Then they considered their reverb based spatial audio solution sufficient, and promptly sat on their heels doing zero innovation while collecting a rent. And them as chip technology improved, a basic "Soundblaster 64" chip became so cheap that motherboard manufactures started bundling it in as a selling point (which made a ton of sense for non gaming PC users btw). Additionally MS stepped in and provided some software spatial functionality within DirectX, as processors had improved to the point where dedicated hardware for it wasn't necessary. Back then I worked in gamedev, and I briefly considered going into competition with MILES et all with a 3D audio library after the Aureal fiasco, after I stumbled on some interesting papers doing Fresnel Zone Tracing variations as low overhead spatial audio, but ultimately wasn't serious about it vs other options at the time.
- dleslie 4y ago
  FWIW, nowadays those libraries are quite mature and free to use; with deep integration to game engines available. Ie, Steam Audio: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/ https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  > Back then I worked in gamedev, and I briefly considered going into competition with MILES et all with a 3D audio library after the Aureal fiasco, after I stumbled on some interesting papers doing Fresnel Zone Tracing variations as low overhead spatial audio, but ultimately wasn't serious about it vs other options at the time. Which papers were they, if you recall?
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
So funny you mention the whole 3D sound thing because I recall at least two computers I bought in the 90s having demo "games" where you flew a bee or something around in order to hear how 3D it was
mehdix 4y ago
I think the same applied to 3.5mm audio jacks being removed from smartphones and similar products.

Sharlin 4y ago

> or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. To be fair, realtime synthesis just became obsolete for most purposes once CD quality digitized audio became cheap enough to store (and later, to stream). And for musicians, once CPUs became fast enough, SW synthesis with its limitless possibilities took over from HW synthesis.

gnramires 4y ago
Something like (fragment?) shaders for audio would be amazing though. Or maybe just an embedded low power CPU (running realtime). I think there's a lot of room for generative audio still (or various degrees of "rendering audio"), or applying distortions like doppler, various reverbs, or just generating things on the fly via synthesis, you can do things like make each effect unique and have various custom parameters (material pairs, impact velocity, room conditions, etc.). I think full 3d audio is a different problem though because it, at least, requires a version of the rendering problem (for waves). It's harder in some ways than light rendering (because phase/coherence matters sometimes, the wave equation is harder to solve), but easier in others (no need as much detail as light, wavelength is large), or just plain weird (nonlinear effects from rattling and such).
- EnigmaCurry 4y ago
  Generating sound on the GPU via shaders is definitely a thing. There's a bunch on shadertoy that do just that : https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=popular&filter=soundoutput https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=popular&filter...
- Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
  There’s still sound card with programmable DSP, quite often used to replicate high end effects. They cost a lot - and every plug-in are specialized to a brand. Still quite useful because the quality of those are very high, and don’t impact the recording process. Or there’s still some “generic” box (I mean that you can program yourself) like the Symbolic Sound Kyma Capybara. They’re quite niche thought, like modular synth.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  Sounds kinda like ray tracing and physically based rendering to me
Tangurena2 4y ago
Also, disk space became cheap enough that the game could store audio files (such as MP3s) instead of generating the audio on the fly by the sound card. I remember Age of Empires (released 1997) music were MIDI files and the "instruments" would be changed by the game's code to make the music sound much better. EverQuest (1999) also started with MIDI files but later expansions replaced the music with MP3 files.

PaulKeeble 4y ago

The best of competitive sound now is the Sennheiser GSX which is an external USB DAC/Amp. It has a good 7.1 to headphones mode that gets you about the best surround sound on headphones for games/movies you can get, it impacts the tone the least and has one of the best HRTF's I have heard in eyars. But it pales in comparison to the cards we had 20 years ago, I miss my Aureal A3D.

wellthisisgreat 4y ago
Is it better than Dolby Atmos you think?
- PaulKeeble 4y ago
  In Overwatch it was when I tried that a few years ago. While Atmos gave you some sense of vertical positioning generally it wasn't correct and I struggled with positioning. Theoretically Atmos ought to be miles better, its object based like the sound cards of the early 2000s but in practice they have got something wrong in the headphones implementation and positioning is hard to pick out. Its better than just stereo but the positioning is a lot better on the Sennheiser device. Whether Dolby Atmos has improved since then or other games have implemented it better I don't know. I feel like we probably need an open source implementation middleware for object sound to headphone/surround speakers to really fix the situation.
Terr_ 4y ago
Ditto, I can't say how much of it is pure nostalgia, but I feel like Counter Strike 1.x on my old Turtle Beach Montego II gave better positional sound than any game/hardware does nowadays.
scovetta 4y ago
The differences may be all in my head, but I've been very happy with a USB Dragonfly DAC and a pair of quality headphones, along with high/master quality input.

Pulcinella 4y ago

The PS5 has an audio chip loosely based on the design of the PS3’s Cell CPU. It’s used to compute HRTF 3D audio. It’s really cool, but it’s basically the only modern example (not sure what Apple is doing for it’s 3D audio) and of course it’s a console so it’s not a separate, user replaceable sound card. It’s a shame because I would love more audio sources to support HRTF (head related transfer function) and “ray traced” audio.

vel0city 4y ago
Games can have HRTF if the developers want to include it, it doesn't take a fancy sound card to make it happen. Counter-Strike Global Offensive had an update a few years ago to implement HRTF, its now labeled as the "3D Audio" option in the game. It works on pretty much any modern sound card.
- julian_sark 4y ago
  +1. It may not he HRTF, but the game with by far the best positional audio at the moment appears to be Crytek's Hunt: Showdown. Sounds can be pin pointed with amazing accuracy. Often times, one can shoot blindly through a wall just based on the noise an opponent makes, and score hits. The game deliberately includes many sound sources to facilitate this such as stepping on various surfaces, glass shards on the ground, and wildlife making noise based on player proximity. This works amazingly well on regular, on-board PC sound chips, though headphones are quite mandatory. (Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a fan).
  - Pulcinella 4y ago
    Thank you. Are you able to adjust the positional audio to “better fit” your ears? The PS5 comes with a few presets but unfortunately it feels like my ears are somewhere between two of the presets, so for one sound sources feel lower than they should while the next the feel higher than they should (compared to a reference sound that is ear-level).
michaelrmmiller 4y ago
That chip is responsible for much more than HRTFs too. It can handle a huge amount of 3D audio-related DSP effects and decoding which are all way more compute intensive than the HRTF, which is performed once at the very end of the signal chain for the headphones.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

>Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card. Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2. The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away: 1. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards. 2. Gamers who want 3d/positional audio either use headphones, find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use case in the gaming world for sound cards. Dolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for surround audio nowadays. Decent positional audio can be experienced using a laptop and headphones-- no sound card required. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Surround_sound https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Surround_sound Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask "is this creative 3d? aureal?" nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).

0xfaded 4y ago
This might be due to computers and headphones becoming portable. When I was a kid my PC had a soundblaster connected to a hacky 7.1 setup in my room, and counterstrike supported it.
xhevahir 4y ago
I don't know. I didn't think a mere audio interface plus soundfonts was an adequate replacement for a really good soundcard like the Yamaha SW100XG: https://www.musicradar.com/news/blast-from-the-past-yamaha-sw1000xg https://www.musicradar.com/news/blast-from-the-past-yamaha-s... . Then there's Korg's Oasys PCI, which was so powerful that for a long time people kept using Windows 98 after Korg stopped making drivers: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/korg-oasys-pci https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/korg-oasys-pci

majormajor 4y ago

This seems very off base from my recollection and the state of tech availability at the time. The "analog hole" was around for long after the release of Vista, with Vista maintaining support for direct multi-channel analog audio out as well as VGA/component video out at HD resolutions, but that was not a hugely mainstream thing because going analog meant by definition non-perfect results - decoding a digital stream, sending analog, then re-encoding on capture. They started laying the groundwork, but 2007 PCs and laptops didn't commonly have digital output, so playing a DVD over VGA, for instance, was extremely common still and allowed. And beyond that, this is the first I'm seeing a claim that "doing 3d audio calculations" was restricted and that this had anything to do with intercepting pre-encoded multi-channel DVD/digital media streams. They seem completely separate from each other as far as technical pipelines go. Sound cards as a general consumer product were dead long before Vista. The last hurrah I remember was the SBLive!/Turtle Beach Santa Cruz era 1998-2001 stuff, Vista didn't come out until 2007 (Longhorn was famously botched, etc...). CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs, could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs immediately.

MAGZine 4y ago
I had a decent gaming machine in 2007-2008, and, in particular I remember that Battlefield 2 sounded a LOT better with a soundcard. The difference was night and day. In particular, EAX (environmental audio extensions), which was a feature of the X-Fi cards, were definitely EOL'd due to Vista's changes around the DirectSound3D APIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
isleyaardvark 4y ago
My recollection as well, and supported by the chart on this page showing a huge drop in sales from 2001-2003: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560... (It’s not a great chart but shows a general trend.)

naikrovek 4y ago

ok you are SUPER misinformed about the motivation for the driver architecture change. drivers live in the kernel, and prior to Windows Vista, they had the same rights as the kernel. pre-Windows Vista, a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted. the driver architecture change fixed this gaping security hole, while still allowing drivers to exist. drivers needed to be rewritten to accommodate LARGE changes to how they needed to do their work, and the result of that is that drivers which interacted with hardware directly no longer could, they had to ask the kernel to do stuff, and the kernel could say “no.” imagine being a driver maintainer and needing to react to this change. this change often required a complete rewrite of the driver. this is why drivers of the era were so feature-limited. this architecture change allowed kernel-level DRM drivers to become a thing, but DRM would have happened with or without any changes to driver arch, i assure you. everyone suddenly needing to rewrite their drivers is what caused drivers to appear limited in the new paradigm. it simply took time to reimplement everything that existed in the old driver model, and people wanted working drivers before everything was implemented in the new drivers.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted This is a thing too, but the main problem was what a kernel level drivers not only could, but WOULD crash the kernel (ie cause a BSOD) if something goes wrong. And things gone wrong very, very often. People like to bitch about changes in NT6+, but I have seen waaay less BSODs (not related to the botched hardware) after that.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  thank you, i forgot to mention that.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on. If you never seen a system BSODing from the sound drivers - I'm glad for you. I've seen enough sound card drivers crashes to tell you what that WAS a problem. Along with network cards, video cards, TV-tuner cards and almost anything what needed a driver. > After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless. Discrete sound cards became pointless because by 2001 almost every consumer motherboard had an AC'97 compatible audio coded on board. So if you didn't need super extra fidelity 5.1235435 sound system AND didn't want to shell out additional ~$100 (SB Live! in 1999) or $2-300 (SB Audigy 2 in various variants, 2003) - you just could use the onboard one. > having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. NO THANKS: https://youtu.be/3AZI07_qts8?t=9 https://youtu.be/3AZI07_qts8?t=9 And this is a Creative card! I had my share of good synthesized music (because computers couldn't yet do a proper digitized sounds yet), but the tech should had die and it did.

hakfoo 4y ago
The sound market was always a mess. Games ended up congealing around the Sound Blaster standard, which put Creative in the centre of the sound universe. Everyone else was always just "SB compatible", which meant they were playing for the "$10 placeholder sound card" market in the Pentium days. By the time we were getting onboard audio (I think my first board with it was Socket A), it was all hidden behind DirectX, and the market became the "90 cent placeholder chip soldered onto the mobo" market, and then they're all undercut by Realtek. Unfortunately, Creative is a mediocre steward of the premium-sound landscape. Their product matrix is complicated, support is all over the place, and the drivers are sketchy. I have an Audigy RX that I pulled out of circulation because it could crash two different boards (B550 and X570) and the general consensus was just "they're not that compatible." I suppose that market technically didn't crush everyone else, there was still the pro-audio market, but that had entirely different needs than a typical home enthusiast. If you're building a studio PC to run specific studio software, you can put up with a narrow compatibility list and finickiness. But it feels like there's a reasonable niche there for the "eager to throw money around" audiophile crowd. Cards full of high-markup capacitors and filters so you can claim to offer cleaner power and a lower noise floor seem tailor-made to unlocking those wallets. Where is that card? Although I suspect for that audience, they just pipe out stuff via optical to an external DAC because the inside of the PC must be full of RFI.

com2kid 4y ago

> The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules. Creative drivers were a double digit % of all Windows BSODs. Microsoft gave Creative plenty of time to fix their drivers, creative never did, so sound drivers got booted from the kernel.

deleted 4y ago
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michaelrmmiller 4y ago

Very true for PCs but it’s starting to shift with both consoles and receivers with Atmos decoders. For example, the PS5 has a custom audio DSP chip with 3D sound capabilities for reverberation, spatialization and more.

joe91 4y ago

This is nonsense. The main reason behind the demise of dedicated sound cards: motherboard sound chipsets got "good enough". The value add wasn't adding enough value any more because you can get decent sound quality just by using the default sound output provided by your motherboard. 3D sound and other processing got baked into middleware for games because it became trivial to do all of the processing in software - and the processing became more advanced than anything that the sound card vendors were offering (and they didn't move quickly enough anyway). Pro audio vastly progressed past anything that is possible to provide in fixed silicon. For input, dedicated USB (and ethernet) audio interfaces progressed to the point where it would be ridiculous to provide such functionality on a general "sound card". It's just evolution - there just isn't a compelling enough niche for a dedicated sound card any more.

ideashower 4y ago
This is the answer. The only people buying dedicated sound cards these days are those doing audio engineering or production work, needing access to dedicated inputs and interfaces. Motherboard sound chipsets cover nearly every other use case.
retrac 4y ago
Correct. Same thing has happened with GPUs. The vast majority of general purpose computers sold today come with integrated graphics. Only those who have unusually heavy 3D graphics needs, like CAD or the latest games at full quality, still buy a discrete video card.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  - sexy_panda 4y ago
    I know bashing crypto currencies is well established on HN, but can we please not mention this every time. This gets annoying.
4y ago

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

It had nothing to do with DRM. 3D audio on the PC was deliberately killed by Creative. They sued Aureal into bankruptcy, bought it in the court auction, and the day the sale closed they nuked the support website and took the drivers offline. They used similar scummy tactics to decapitate any other competitors. Then they considered their reverb based spatial audio solution sufficient, and promptly sat on their heels doing zero innovation while collecting a rent. And them as chip technology improved, a basic "Soundblaster 64" chip became so cheap that motherboard manufactures started bundling it in as a selling point (which made a ton of sense for non gaming PC users btw). Additionally MS stepped in and provided some software spatial functionality within DirectX, as processors had improved to the point where dedicated hardware for it wasn't necessary. Back then I worked in gamedev, and I briefly considered going into competition with MILES et all with a 3D audio library after the Aureal fiasco, after I stumbled on some interesting papers doing Fresnel Zone Tracing variations as low overhead spatial audio, but ultimately wasn't serious about it vs other options at the time.

dleslie 4y ago
FWIW, nowadays those libraries are quite mature and free to use; with deep integration to game engines available. Ie, Steam Audio: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/ https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
Dracophoenix 4y ago
> Back then I worked in gamedev, and I briefly considered going into competition with MILES et all with a 3D audio library after the Aureal fiasco, after I stumbled on some interesting papers doing Fresnel Zone Tracing variations as low overhead spatial audio, but ultimately wasn't serious about it vs other options at the time. Which papers were they, if you recall?

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

So funny you mention the whole 3D sound thing because I recall at least two computers I bought in the 90s having demo "games" where you flew a bee or something around in order to hear how 3D it was

mehdix 4y ago

I think the same applied to 3.5mm audio jacks being removed from smartphones and similar products.