Creative founder Sim Wong Hoo, the man behind Sound Blaster, has died.

I remember the big debate back in the day: Do I go with the Soundblaster 16 or do I go with the SoundBlaster Pro! I went with a Gravis Ultrasound I think and immediately returned it because nobody supported it easily (great Midi, terrible digital compared to SB offerings). I still have two Soundblaster Live 5.1 cards in box of PC parts around here somewhere.......Thanks Mr. Hoo, you saved us all from the Curse of the AdLib boards!
 
HeadRusch said:
Thanks Mr. Hoo, you saved us all from the Curse of the AdLib boards!
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More like Creative used market manipulation and strong arm tactics to get everyone else out of the market, and force consumers to use shitty sound cards for the better part of a decade.

Where did you get the idea that Adlib was worse than Creative? Creative literally ctrl+c / ctrl+v'd Adlib, and in the process, screwed up so badly that they made a perfectly functioning product garbage.

ALL of the Sound Blaster cards on ISA had bad problems. PCM audio was ridiculously noisy due to their crappy chipset. It was further exacerbated by poor design of the filtering circuitry, resulting in bus noise coming through the speakers in the form of annoying hissing, beeps, ticking and "wahwah" effects.

They also couldn't be bothered to take a perfectly good FM chip and leave it well enough alone. Their OPLx implementation suffered from wonky sound fonts and some cards had the highly annoying "hanging note bug." I don't know about you, but I hate loud random high pitched FM notes stuck in the audio output until you reboot the computer.

And if you tried to use both PCM and FM audio at the same time... lol. Be prepared for bad times. Creative made trash sound cards.

I'll take my Yamaha YMF724F sound card over any SB card from that era.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
More like Creative used market manipulation and strong arm tactics to get everyone else out of the market, and force consumers to use shitty sound cards for the better part of a decade.

Where did you get the idea that Adlib was worse than Creative? Creative literally ctrl+c / ctrl+v'd Adlib, and in the process, screwed up so badly that they made a perfectly functioning product garbage.

ALL of the Sound Blaster cards on ISA had bad problems. PCM audio was ridiculously noisy due to their crappy chipset. It was further exacerbated by poor design of the filtering circuitry, resulting in bus noise coming through the speakers in the form of annoying hissing, beeps, ticking and "wahwah" effects.

They also couldn't be bothered to take a perfectly good FM chip and leave it well enough alone. Their OPLx implementation suffered from wonky sound fonts and some cards had the highly annoying "hanging note bug." I don't know about you, but I hate loud random high pitched FM notes stuck in the audio output until you reboot the computer.

And if you tried to use both PCM and FM audio at the same time... lol. Be prepared for bad times. Creative made trash sound cards.

I'll take my Yamaha YMF724F sound card over any SB card from that era.
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Weird. Outside of a single Turtle Beach card, all I used were SB cards until decent 5.1 started coming on motherboards and I never had an issue.

I did start in the pentium era (90mhz) though, so I might have missed all that madness.
 
HeadRusch said:
I remember the big debate back in the day: Do I go with the Soundblaster 16 or do I go with the SoundBlaster Pro!
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And now "I'd rather save the money and use the onboard audio on my motherboard" (for non-professionals of course)
 
GiGaBiTe said:
More like Creative used market manipulation and strong arm tactics to get everyone else out of the market, and force consumers to use shitty sound cards for the better part of a decade.
Click to expand...

Back in the day you had literally two options...I'm talking 1989, 90, 91: AdLib cards that had no digital sound processing whatsoever (it was all bloops and bleeps based on their midi sample set, but they were cheap enough that a lot of people bought them), you had Soundblaster which was digital sample capable but $$$, and if you had big bucks you had the Roland offering which I believe was an external processor if I'm not mistaken....but that didn't have digital sound either it just had exceptionally good MIDI samples. AdLib cards *sucked* if you wanted to hear voice clips, speech from the Wing Commander games, and so forth. Not sure what era you're talking about but AdLib was strictly for "it came with my Packard Bell" pc's.....
 
rip. I had a sb live 5.1 --> audigy zs --> titanium hd. Now I just run onboard optical out to a cheap dac.
 
AWE 32 salute
 

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I remember I had a CL Voip phone in the early-mid 90's - this was in the 'golden age of telcom' with all the long-distance phone commericials - you could use the internet to make phone calls and I believe I had it BEFORE we had broadband at our house. I always thought it was such a big deal (and it worked) but it never caught on.
 
HeadRusch said:
Back in the day you had literally two options...I'm talking 1989, 90, 91: AdLib cards that had no digital sound processing whatsoever (it was all bloops and bleeps based on their midi sample set, but they were cheap enough that a lot of people bought them), you had Soundblaster which was digital sample capable but $$$, and if you had big bucks you had the Roland offering which I believe was an external processor if I'm not mistaken....but that didn't have digital sound either it just had exceptionally good MIDI samples. AdLib cards *sucked* if you wanted to hear voice clips, speech from the Wing Commander games, and so forth. Not sure what era you're talking about but AdLib was strictly for "it came with my Packard Bell" pc's.....
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You're forgetting the Covox Speech Thing, and later the Disney Sound Source. Both had very wide support in games for a very long time. The Covox was released in 1987, the same year as Adlib. And since it occupied the LPT port, you could use it in conjunction with the Adlib to get both PCM and FM synthesis, without the problems of the Sound Blaster.

What's baffling is that the OPL/2/3 all had the ability to play PCM samples, yet PC games never used it. That means that both the Adlib and the Sound Blaster that used the YM3812 could play PCM audio with it, but never did. Arcade boards and game consoles that used the OPL/OPN readily used this feature.

Then there's the lesser known PC Speaker driver for Windows 3.x/95 that bit-banged the 8253 PIT to output PCM audio to the PC speaker. Linux still has the driver today, snd_pcsp. If you build a preamp for the PC SPeaker header on the motherboard, you can get decent sounding audio out of the PC Speaker. Nice to use on servers to make custom sounds/tones for diagnostic purposes, instead of annoying loud beeping.
 
Blakestr said:
I remember I had a CL Voip phone in the early-mid 90's - this was in the 'golden age of telcom' with all the long-distance phone commericials - you could use the internet to make phone calls and I believe I had it BEFORE we had broadband at our house. I always thought it was such a big deal (and it worked) but it never caught on.
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There was some dial-up based voice chat, but it was either really banking on silence, or had very restrictive codecs, or both. Maybe cell phone quality in real time, if your phone line is real clean and the software guys were on their game audio wise and network wise. Maybe with more latency than a cell phone though... although cell phone calling is high latency too. If you had a lot of long distance calling, I bet you saved some decent money, although that was a time when even more everybodies were entering the discount long distance market.
 
RIP, I was looking for something the other day in the old parts bin and came across this. I do miss the dedicated sound card days.
 

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Raising a SoundBlaster AWE32 in salute! I can remember the days in the 90s of having to select "SoundBlaster compatible" in a DOS or Win95's games settings to get the "good sound"; how the difference in hardware at the time could mean either no sound at all, MIDI only beeps and bloops, or something more realized with a PCI card! Even more important would be when CD-ROM would start appearing and there would be "talkie" versions of Lucasarts games (ie Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, back when conspiracies were just kinda fun! Gold CD versions of the Xwing and TIE fighter series Collector's Editions!) and other expanding sound options! Of course I didn't know it at the time but , in addition to engineering decent sound cards, Creative also fought the battle by being litigious and patent-mongering which of course was less desirable overall.

Creative was pretty much "the" soundcard to have until the PCI-E era where sound cards started going away, though there was a period where Asus' Xonar line and a few others reigned supreme, before going away for onboard + external DACs. Its really kind of unique that these days even a mid grade and certainly a high end motherboard will include good sound hardware, the kind that could have taken its own card in the past, all while being somewhat universally compatible (including Linux!) . Audiophiles can still buy their own external DACs and the like, and sound cards DO exist, but its less a necessary part of building a PC with good quality sound and more a niche item for very specific needs or desires.
 
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Loved my SBs back in the days! Far superior sound to on-board but now, as I've gotten older, on-board works just fine for me. I really hated the driver issues though. RIP.
 
Had a SB Audigy Platinum bought 2000, came with the 5-1/4 I/O box, paid 200usd for it from Best Buy I think. Used it from my Athlon Thunderbird pre-built to my Athlon XP builds. Looks like I shelved it once I went multi core 2006 with the Athlon X2 and Intel Q6600, switching to onboard audio. Not sure why I stopped using it tho.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
You're forgetting the Covox Speech Thing, and later the Disney Sound Source. Both had very wide support in games for a very long time. The Covox was released in 1987, the same year as Adlib. And since it occupied the LPT port, you could use it in conjunction with the Adlib to get both PCM and FM synthesis, without the problems of the Sound Blaster.
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Not forgetting, just wasn't trying to make a comprehensive list :) Man we have come a long, long way from the days when the only sound we got out of a PC was based on the quality of the MIDI samples contained within your audio card's ROM's.......I had an Amiga 500 in the late 80's so I was used to stellar digital audio by that point....
 
I remember using the joystick port on the back of my Sound Blaster for multiplayer games back in the Windows 98 days.
 
My heart goes out to Sim Wong Hoo's family.

Creative wasn't great in some respects; on top of the previously mentioned Sound Blaster shenanigans, it targeted Apple with a sour-grapes lawsuit after failing to compete with the iPod (Steve Jobs' "nuclear" approach to patent lawsuits was partly a reaction to the Creative settlement). But there's no doubt that the tech industry has been a richer place because of the company, and I'll still have fond memories of marvelling at Sound Blaster enabling gaming's equivalent of "talkies" in the 1990s.

On that note: I still remember how the dream setup was a Roland Sound Canvas for music and a Sound Blaster for effects. I'm also glad we're long past the days when you had to fret over buying a sound card!
 
RIP

I am using a Sound BlasterX AE-5 in my current PC. All onboard motherboard audio still sounds like shit. The AE-5 is the first good sound card Creative has put out since the Audigy 2. The X-Fi and Z series both had issues with clipping that annoyed the hell out of me. I would have continued using the Audigy 2 if it had driver support for Windows 7.
 
I just bought a Z , since realtek software just seems to cause issues every
few months..,
might get the AE-5 if I have any issues with this Z card...
 
ncjoe said:
I just bought a Z , since realtek software just seems to cause issues every
few months..,
might get the AE-5 if I have any issues with this Z card...
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The Z was pretty decent, it's just if I wanted to blast any music over my Z-5500 speakers I had to set the preamp to -2 to -3 dB. I didn't run into that kind of issue in games. I think my favorite thing with buying the Zx was the breakout pod for headphones, which I am still using with the AE-5. The newer Plus model has hardware Dolby and DTS encoders built-in.
 
The Mad Atheist said:
Had a SB Audigy Platinum bought 2000, came with the 5-1/4 I/O box, paid 200usd for it from Best Buy I think. Used it from my Athlon Thunderbird pre-built to my Athlon XP builds. Looks like I shelved it once I went multi core 2006 with the Athlon X2 and Intel Q6600, switching to onboard audio. Not sure why I stopped using it tho.
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If you tried to use it with Vista and 7, because no drivers.

https://techreport.com/news/14467/creative-under-fire-for-taking-down-custom-vista-drivers/

CL was in hot water with their customers back then, because they made several advertisements and promises about their existing hardware being "Vista Ready", yet the Vista drivers were VERY late (like a year after launch IIRC.) The Vista drivers were also crippled, missing several advertised features that existed only on the XP driver. DVD audio support, Software EQ, DTS and THX all were missing. The mess that was released was also very buggy.

They got into international hot water when they publicly shut down a community modder that had released fixed versions of Vista drivers with all of the missing features returned. That blew up in their face and they had to spend months trying to unsuccessfully backpedal from it.

I had a few Audigy and Audigy 2 cards myself, they never worked right. The drivers were a bloated mess, and laughably, they didn't even support Creative branded 5.1 surround speakers. The center channel always crapped out garbled static, I thought the speakers were defective until one day I plugged them into the onboard Realtek audio. The center channel then worked flawlessly. Trashed every one of those Audigy cards.

The original thread was thankfully archived, so we can forever see how CL put their foot in their mouth.
https://web.archive.org/web/2008040...hread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
 
I remember hearing midi played through an AWE32 when I was a kid and having it actually sound like an instrument was playing the notes.

I also remember the pcb of the card being so long, probably about the length of the 6800XT in my computer right now.
 
The KX modded drivers worked pretty well minus all the bloatware and some of the functionality but at least the audio was cleaner.
 
Armenius said:
RIP

I am using a Sound BlasterX AE-5 in my current PC. All onboard motherboard audio still sounds like shit. The AE-5 is the first good sound card Creative has put out since the Audigy 2. The X-Fi and Z series both had issues with clipping that annoyed the hell out of me. I would have continued using the Audigy 2 if it had driver support for Windows 7.
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Ohhh I have to check out that ae-5 card. Windows 10 really sucks supporting surround sound. They even make you download windows store apps for Dolby digital / dts to work at all.
 
blandead said:
Ohhh I have to check out that ae-5 card. Windows 10 really sucks supporting surround sound. They even make you download windows store apps for Dolby digital / dts to work at all.
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To be fair, you need to pay a license fee to use them, and Microsoft doesn't want to add to the price of Windows from my understanding. The newer AE-5 Plus has hardware Dolby and DTS encoders built in.
 
and today i learned that sound blaster still makes sound cards... i think the last SB card I had was an AWE 32. Do folks still use discrete sound cards?
 
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