10 ms·

Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster

163 points by BirAdam 1y ago

lif 1y ago
the sound of PC gaming in the late 90s, e.g. with good old PCWorks FourPointSurround by Cambridge Soundworks (iykyk)
- bananaboy 1y ago
  I still use those speakers plus sub today!
- disillusioned 1y 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.
sillywalk 1y 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.
- bananaboy 1y ago
  Dr Sbaitso is etched into my brain! "My name is Doctor Sbaitso. I am here to help you" haha
  - acidburnNSA 1y ago
    Say whatever is in your mind freely.
- Cthulhu_ 1y 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)
duskwuff 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    Isn't Opus better than everything nowadays?
    - leeoniya 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
eduction 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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
    - pimlottc 1y ago
      Any GPU that got its own port of Quake can’t be that bad… of course, that’s the port that got Carmack to swear off doing another custom hardware port again!
exikyut 1y ago
I'm hijacking this comments section just a tiny bit to talk about Creative TextAssist. It can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/creative-sound-blaster-cd-software-voice-assist-text-assist-qsound-dos-windows-drivers-sb-16-wss-2.0 https://archive.org/details/creative-sound-blaster-cd-softwa... 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 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 1y 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!
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
  It looks like some work was done on the CT1748 but nothing was ever published: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=86739 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=86739
bigmattystyles 1y 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.
- ksec 1y 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.
- Beretta_Vexee 1y 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 1y 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.
  - pezezin 1y ago
    It was the other way around: that connector started as a game port that was then retrofitted as a MIDI port. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
- prawn 1y 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...
Mistletoe 1y ago
Creative is reviving the Sound Blaster. I’m unsure what that will entail. https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/ https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mparn1/creative_sound_blaster_reimagine/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...
- Podrod 1y ago
  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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster 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.
- unwind 1y ago
  Interesting! 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://teenage.engineering/products/op-1
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    Good catch yes it does look like that!
jnaina 1y 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 1y 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.
  - fodkodrasz 1y ago
    Maybe this was an inspiration for the Gavin Belson Signature Box III in the series Silicon Valley?
  - aleph_minus_one 1y 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. :-)
jonathanlydall 1y ago
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 1y 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 1y ago
    Soundblaster 16 was launched in 1992 and was the de-facto standard for several years, so I'd say it's a typo
  - postexitus 1y 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.
disillusioned 1y ago
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.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I used a CL USB dac for a while... it died after about a year... I've got cheap $10 (not CL) models that work as well and have lasted far longer. I thought the CL/SB model would be a better option, it wasn't.
Podrod 1y 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.
arnejenssen 1y ago
It made me think of this video - "This is rock'n roll" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofn2A1p13Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofn2A1p13Sg Asian Guy Plays Drums On A Keyboard
casenmgreen 1y 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.
- amiga-workbench 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      We've been using Microsoft's Triton[0] for a few years now on Call of Duty. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-triton/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-tri...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nifty3929 1y ago
    I think there aren't enough folks (including me) with sophisticated enough speaker setups to take advantage of it, limiting the market. There's only so much you can do with just a left and right speaker and MAYBE a sub. That said, it does seem like there's new interest in spatial audio, so we'll see. Maybe with some spatial audio headphones, and especially if they add head-tracking so that a sound to your left moves relative to your head (and stationary relative to your body) as you turn your head to face it.
Beretta_Vexee 1y 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 1y ago
  Borland => Roland
haspok 1y 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.
sohkamyung 1y 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.
- Daneel_ 1y ago
  If you worked on the Zen, then thank you. I had many good years of service from mine. Cheers!
liendolucas 1y 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.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I keep a few USB based DACs around, mostly when I want better than the front panel audio jacks offer. The FP audio is always noisy, and I don't want to run headphones around to the back... I mostly use my Bose QC3's these days over BT. I kind of wish the FP audio was replaced with a USB DAC header into the MB... the tiny cable that connects them just tends to suck imo. Aside from that, a minimal amount of gyro tech in headphones with a centering option could also go a long way toward positional audio support.
temp0826 1y 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 1y ago
  It does not. That old sound blaster had more input channels than your dongle.
  - temp0826 1y ago
    shrug Didn't need more channels then and don't need them now. Guess I could buy 6 of these for the same cost (probably less factoring in inflation) if I ever do
    - guappa 1y ago
      And if you are deaf you need 0 channels… I did use those channels, the fact that you personally do not is not as relevant as you might think.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
greener_grass 1y ago
In an alternate reality maybe Creative went from Audio cards to MP3 players to Smartphones and GPUs
- Cthulhu_ 1y 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.
hed 1y 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?
- BirAdam 1y ago
  Sales and support offices. I couldn’t find anything covering the reasoning of being in that location though.
kensai 1y ago
Trip down the memory line, this article. Serious question: does anyone care to have hardware audio cards nowadays, let alone from Creative?
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Only for professional audio applications, and nearly all are external USB/Thunderbolt devices. A few products still have a PCI Express component, like the Focusrite RedNet PCIeR and the Avid ProTools HDX.
sdh7kk7 1y ago
Anyone remember Ensoniq?
- mobilio 1y ago
  Yup! AudioPCI rebranded devices later sold as SoundBlaster cheaper edition.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Aldipower 1y ago
  Sure, I've an Ensoniq SD-1 Keyboard from 1990. It has 3.5 MB of sample rom. Ensonic was founded by Robert Yannes, who also co-invented the famous SID chip at Commodore. Here the built in demo songs of my SD-1 at action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtV5J6ZLKuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtV5J6ZLKuU I also have an Soundblaster AWE64 (not entirely sure) with an Ensoniq chip on it. But the noise level of every Sound Blaster card is that bad, that you cannot really use it for professional recordings.
apt-apt-apt-apt 1y 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?
patwolf 1y ago
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.
- squigg 1y ago
  EMU samplers used Soundfonts as well - I occassionally use them to load samples onto my ESI2000 sampler over ZuluSCSI ... so the format lives on! EXMP is the outstanding editor for all things Soundfont and EMU
- BirAdam 1y ago
  SoundFonts will get detailed when I get to covering the chips themselves. As Creative didn’t design or make most of their chips, that’ll be covered in articles of other companies.
amelius 1y ago
Funny that the entire thing now fits in a USB dongle that's $3 on AliExpress.
sombragris 1y 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...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sakesun 1y ago
Whenever I see the name Creative Technology or Sound Blaster, the first thing that comes to mind is gratitude for how my parents gave me such awesome childhood memories.
hudo 1y ago
Can't remember how many times I added this to AUTEXEC.BAT SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T6 good times.
arebop 1y ago
Who remembers Dr. Sbaitso, the tts eliza derivative and forerunner of chatgpt?
- pimlottc 1y ago
  Shoutout to the taking parrot!
DaleCurtis 1y ago
Thanks for writing this! It skips my favorite edgy product name though, the X-Fi Fatal1ty cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X-Fi :)
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
It was sad watching the world eat the Santa Cruz tech scene. Microsoft killing Borland, Linux eating SCO's lunch, Sound Blaster's purchase of EMU.
snvzz 1y ago
Creative sure had a lot of cards[0], surprisingly not limited to Sound Blasters. 0. https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/?manufacturerId=455&page=1&itemsPerPage=100 https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/?manufacturerId=455&p...

163 points by BirAdam 1y ago

lif 1y ago

the sound of PC gaming in the late 90s, e.g. with good old PCWorks FourPointSurround by Cambridge Soundworks (iykyk)

bananaboy 1y ago
I still use those speakers plus sub today!
disillusioned 1y 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.

sillywalk 1y 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.

bananaboy 1y ago
Dr Sbaitso is etched into my brain! "My name is Doctor Sbaitso. I am here to help you" haha
- acidburnNSA 1y ago
  Say whatever is in your mind freely.
Cthulhu_ 1y 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)

duskwuff 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  Isn't Opus better than everything nowadays?
  - leeoniya 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

eduction 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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
  - pimlottc 1y ago
    Any GPU that got its own port of Quake can’t be that bad… of course, that’s the port that got Carmack to swear off doing another custom hardware port again!

exikyut 1y ago

I'm hijacking this comments section just a tiny bit to talk about Creative TextAssist. It can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/creative-sound-blaster-cd-software-voice-assist-text-assist-qsound-dos-windows-drivers-sb-16-wss-2.0 https://archive.org/details/creative-sound-blaster-cd-softwa... 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 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 1y 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!
EvanAnderson 1y ago
It looks like some work was done on the CT1748 but nothing was ever published: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=86739 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=86739

bigmattystyles 1y 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.

ksec 1y 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.
Beretta_Vexee 1y 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 1y 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.
- pezezin 1y ago
  It was the other way around: that connector started as a game port that was then retrofitted as a MIDI port. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
prawn 1y 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...

Mistletoe 1y ago

Creative is reviving the Sound Blaster. I’m unsure what that will entail. https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/ https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mparn1/creative_sound_blaster_reimagine/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...

Podrod 1y ago
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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster 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.
unwind 1y ago
Interesting! 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://teenage.engineering/products/op-1
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  Good catch yes it does look like that!

jnaina 1y 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 1y 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.
- fodkodrasz 1y ago
  Maybe this was an inspiration for the Gavin Belson Signature Box III in the series Silicon Valley?
- aleph_minus_one 1y 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. :-)

jonathanlydall 1y ago

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 1y 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 1y ago
  Soundblaster 16 was launched in 1992 and was the de-facto standard for several years, so I'd say it's a typo
- postexitus 1y 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.

disillusioned 1y ago

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.

tracker1 1y ago
I used a CL USB dac for a while... it died after about a year... I've got cheap $10 (not CL) models that work as well and have lasted far longer. I thought the CL/SB model would be a better option, it wasn't.

Podrod 1y 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.

arnejenssen 1y ago

It made me think of this video - "This is rock'n roll" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofn2A1p13Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofn2A1p13Sg Asian Guy Plays Drums On A Keyboard

casenmgreen 1y 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.

amiga-workbench 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    We've been using Microsoft's Triton[0] for a few years now on Call of Duty. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-triton/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-tri...
- deleted 1y ago
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- Nifty3929 1y ago
  I think there aren't enough folks (including me) with sophisticated enough speaker setups to take advantage of it, limiting the market. There's only so much you can do with just a left and right speaker and MAYBE a sub. That said, it does seem like there's new interest in spatial audio, so we'll see. Maybe with some spatial audio headphones, and especially if they add head-tracking so that a sound to your left moves relative to your head (and stationary relative to your body) as you turn your head to face it.

Beretta_Vexee 1y 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 1y ago
Borland => Roland

haspok 1y 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.

sohkamyung 1y 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.

Daneel_ 1y ago
If you worked on the Zen, then thank you. I had many good years of service from mine. Cheers!

liendolucas 1y 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.

tracker1 1y ago
I keep a few USB based DACs around, mostly when I want better than the front panel audio jacks offer. The FP audio is always noisy, and I don't want to run headphones around to the back... I mostly use my Bose QC3's these days over BT. I kind of wish the FP audio was replaced with a USB DAC header into the MB... the tiny cable that connects them just tends to suck imo. Aside from that, a minimal amount of gyro tech in headphones with a centering option could also go a long way toward positional audio support.

temp0826 1y 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 1y ago
It does not. That old sound blaster had more input channels than your dongle.
- temp0826 1y ago
  shrug Didn't need more channels then and don't need them now. Guess I could buy 6 of these for the same cost (probably less factoring in inflation) if I ever do
  - guappa 1y ago
    And if you are deaf you need 0 channels… I did use those channels, the fact that you personally do not is not as relevant as you might think.
- deleted 1y ago
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greener_grass 1y ago

In an alternate reality maybe Creative went from Audio cards to MP3 players to Smartphones and GPUs

Cthulhu_ 1y 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.

hed 1y 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?

BirAdam 1y ago
Sales and support offices. I couldn’t find anything covering the reasoning of being in that location though.

kensai 1y ago

Trip down the memory line, this article. Serious question: does anyone care to have hardware audio cards nowadays, let alone from Creative?

CharlesW 1y ago
Only for professional audio applications, and nearly all are external USB/Thunderbolt devices. A few products still have a PCI Express component, like the Focusrite RedNet PCIeR and the Avid ProTools HDX.

sdh7kk7 1y ago

Anyone remember Ensoniq?

mobilio 1y ago
Yup! AudioPCI rebranded devices later sold as SoundBlaster cheaper edition.
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Aldipower 1y ago
Sure, I've an Ensoniq SD-1 Keyboard from 1990. It has 3.5 MB of sample rom. Ensonic was founded by Robert Yannes, who also co-invented the famous SID chip at Commodore. Here the built in demo songs of my SD-1 at action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtV5J6ZLKuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtV5J6ZLKuU I also have an Soundblaster AWE64 (not entirely sure) with an Ensoniq chip on it. But the noise level of every Sound Blaster card is that bad, that you cannot really use it for professional recordings.

apt-apt-apt-apt 1y 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?

patwolf 1y ago

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.

squigg 1y ago
EMU samplers used Soundfonts as well - I occassionally use them to load samples onto my ESI2000 sampler over ZuluSCSI ... so the format lives on! EXMP is the outstanding editor for all things Soundfont and EMU
BirAdam 1y ago
SoundFonts will get detailed when I get to covering the chips themselves. As Creative didn’t design or make most of their chips, that’ll be covered in articles of other companies.

amelius 1y ago

Funny that the entire thing now fits in a USB dongle that's $3 on AliExpress.

sombragris 1y 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...

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sakesun 1y ago

Whenever I see the name Creative Technology or Sound Blaster, the first thing that comes to mind is gratitude for how my parents gave me such awesome childhood memories.

hudo 1y ago

Can't remember how many times I added this to AUTEXEC.BAT SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T6 good times.

arebop 1y ago

Who remembers Dr. Sbaitso, the tts eliza derivative and forerunner of chatgpt?

pimlottc 1y ago
Shoutout to the taking parrot!

DaleCurtis 1y ago

Thanks for writing this! It skips my favorite edgy product name though, the X-Fi Fatal1ty cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X-Fi :)

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

It was sad watching the world eat the Santa Cruz tech scene. Microsoft killing Borland, Linux eating SCO's lunch, Sound Blaster's purchase of EMU.

snvzz 1y ago

Creative sure had a lot of cards[0], surprisingly not limited to Sound Blasters. 0. https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/?manufacturerId=455&page=1&itemsPerPage=100 https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/?manufacturerId=455&p...