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Intel came with AC'97 as a "good enough" onboard solution for audio, with standard drivers and all mainstream capabilities. No MIDI-port, no fancy spatial audio

Intel came with AC'97 as a "good enough" onboard solution for audio, with standard drivers and all mainstream capabilities. No MIDI-port, no fancy spatial audio, just good-enough stereo out and mic/line-in. It forced the dedicated soundcard vendors to justify the add-on price by pushing features like multichannel, Surround sound codecs, hardware controls etc, but none of those features were of mainstream interest. Total sales volume for dedicated soundcards dropped, economics of scale dropped, prices had to increase, pushing the products even more into niche...

echelon 4y ago
> no fancy spatial audio That's disappointing. Where can we go if we want spatial audio? It feels like spatial audio would be a huge boon to games instead of calculating and modeling sound directionality on the CPU.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  Spatial Audio came back later (late 90s) in a standardized way with Microsoft DirectSound. Before that, most spatial audio was either some very specific codec of the soundcard vendor a game had to explicitly support, or some psychoacoustic post-processing which added little benefit and was mostly there for the wow-effect in bundled demo apps... I vaguely remember CreativeLabs pushing a custom 3D Sound API with "EAX" to justify their dedicated HW, with dedicated logo and everything, and several games supporting it. It worked well for a while but gaming was a much smaller market back then so it probably wasn't sustainable to target a niche of an already small market... It's the typical story of an industry where providing the mainstream needs funded development for providing the exceptional, and then someone came along to undercut by providing only the mainstream needs
  - rickdeckard 4y ago
    > That's disappointing. Where can we go if we want spatial audio? You could build a Dolby Atmos PC setup for those handful of games which support it (history repeating). Or you get yourself a PS5...
__david__ 4y ago
This is correct but there's one other part—most of the cards used to have built in midi synthesizers, but those became more or less obsolete when storage got past a certain point. Games on CD-ROMs could just ship redbook quality audio and that's infinitely more flexible than canned standard midi sounds. CPUs got fast enough so that mixing multiple audio channels and even running effects on them wasn't taxing enough to warrant any sort of hardware acceleration, and so the AC'97 standard of just a plain stereo DAC is really all anyone ever needed at that point.
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  Yeah, that's part of the "good enough" onboard audio. But I doubt that gaming was the key driver at that point, it surely was the demand for work PCs to play the new .wav soundeffects of Win95, which led to mediocre onboard audio with Software MIDI-synths. I vividly remember VIA onboard Audio everywhere, with gamers still putting Soundblasters in their PCs (fighting the BIOS to free up the IRQ and DMA ports) for the better quality and games still being developed for "Soundblaster 16". Good times :)

echelon 4y ago

> no fancy spatial audio That's disappointing. Where can we go if we want spatial audio? It feels like spatial audio would be a huge boon to games instead of calculating and modeling sound directionality on the CPU.

rickdeckard 4y ago
Spatial Audio came back later (late 90s) in a standardized way with Microsoft DirectSound. Before that, most spatial audio was either some very specific codec of the soundcard vendor a game had to explicitly support, or some psychoacoustic post-processing which added little benefit and was mostly there for the wow-effect in bundled demo apps... I vaguely remember CreativeLabs pushing a custom 3D Sound API with "EAX" to justify their dedicated HW, with dedicated logo and everything, and several games supporting it. It worked well for a while but gaming was a much smaller market back then so it probably wasn't sustainable to target a niche of an already small market... It's the typical story of an industry where providing the mainstream needs funded development for providing the exceptional, and then someone came along to undercut by providing only the mainstream needs
- rickdeckard 4y ago
  > That's disappointing. Where can we go if we want spatial audio? You could build a Dolby Atmos PC setup for those handful of games which support it (history repeating). Or you get yourself a PS5...

__david__ 4y ago

This is correct but there's one other part—most of the cards used to have built in midi synthesizers, but those became more or less obsolete when storage got past a certain point. Games on CD-ROMs could just ship redbook quality audio and that's infinitely more flexible than canned standard midi sounds. CPUs got fast enough so that mixing multiple audio channels and even running effects on them wasn't taxing enough to warrant any sort of hardware acceleration, and so the AC'97 standard of just a plain stereo DAC is really all anyone ever needed at that point.

rickdeckard 4y ago
Yeah, that's part of the "good enough" onboard audio. But I doubt that gaming was the key driver at that point, it surely was the demand for work PCs to play the new .wav soundeffects of Win95, which led to mediocre onboard audio with Software MIDI-synths. I vividly remember VIA onboard Audio everywhere, with gamers still putting Soundblasters in their PCs (fighting the BIOS to free up the IRQ and DMA ports) for the better quality and games still being developed for "Soundblaster 16". Good times :)