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.
> 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.
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.
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If I remember correctly it was a SB Live's drivers that kept on crashing playing Quake 3 on my dual Celeron 533 MHz setup (Abit BP6).
Had some mails going back and forth with the Creative support about this specific multi CPU setup and they rejected fixing their drivers because it totally was a niche back then. 18 year old me swore to never buy Creative again and I did so. Today I agree with the support's response but it quite upset me back then.
I had a coworker who was very loud about how most of the perceived instability of Windows was actually kernel panics caused be Creative’s godawful windows drivers.
My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.
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.
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.
I have a very distinct memory of going to a local independent PC shop with my dad to buy a Sound Blaster 16 for my PC back in 1994. It's odd because I have a really poor memory and don't actually remember much from my childhood,but my brain decided buying a sound card was worth holding on to. I don't remember my dad installing it or what games I first experienced that glorious SB16 sound with, just buying the thing. That said it was probably Doom. I still have that SB16 in its box somewhere.
I 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.
I came here to say this. Creative did more to set back audio in video gaming than anyone other company. It boggles my mind that they killed Aureal through unsuccessful but costly-to-defend litigation, bought its assets in bankruptcy, and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with A3D.
This 1000x - Aureal and their A3D tech was amazing.
I remember ages ago when it was new, my brother and I were shoveling snow for people to get pocket money to upgrade our PC. We settled on a Turtle Beach Montego II and I adored the thing.
Of course, it was short lived since the update in Windows driver model, and the bankruptcy of Aureal, ended things.
I actually got into retro computing a few years ago and got another Montego II off Ebay cheap and I have to say, the magic is still there.
Frankly, playing something like the original Unreal is my favorite example of a vintage experience that I can't replicate any other way - 3DFX Glide has an aesthetic and responsiveness that's hard to match, analog ps/2 keyboard and mouse with no latency, VGA CRT monitor, Aureal A3D audio with some headphones.
It's a singular experience that is impossible to replicate today. And I love it.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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?).
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?
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.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 84.9 ms ] thread(iykyk)
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.
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.
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.
https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...
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.
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.
If I remember correctly it was a SB Live's drivers that kept on crashing playing Quake 3 on my dual Celeron 533 MHz setup (Abit BP6). Had some mails going back and forth with the Creative support about this specific multi CPU setup and they rejected fixing their drivers because it totally was a niche back then. 18 year old me swore to never buy Creative again and I did so. Today I agree with the support's response but it quite upset me back then.
My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.
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.
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.
I remember ages ago when it was new, my brother and I were shoveling snow for people to get pocket money to upgrade our PC. We settled on a Turtle Beach Montego II and I adored the thing.
Of course, it was short lived since the update in Windows driver model, and the bankruptcy of Aureal, ended things.
I actually got into retro computing a few years ago and got another Montego II off Ebay cheap and I have to say, the magic is still there.
Frankly, playing something like the original Unreal is my favorite example of a vintage experience that I can't replicate any other way - 3DFX Glide has an aesthetic and responsiveness that's hard to match, analog ps/2 keyboard and mouse with no latency, VGA CRT monitor, Aureal A3D audio with some headphones.
It's a singular experience that is impossible to replicate today. And I love it.
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).
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.
I was also one of the people who worked on the Nomad II MP3 player.
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.
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.
How did Creative end up with offices there? Was there some kind of research going on at Oklahoma State University?
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.