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.
> 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.
late 90s is a whole different thing than mid 90s.
The 97 in AC'97 is there for a reason.
Would still say that Audigy 2001 front panel was peak consumer audio experience. Good access for headphone out and ASIO support, so for anyone wnating to connect you a midi keyboard for first excursion into digital music creation everything was there for a reasonable price point.
Even firewire for your DV imports.
A digital media entry point like no others existed at the time at that price point.
I agree that mid-90s is a bit early but I would say mid 00's is too late.
I'm pretty sure it's a rapid change almost immediately after AC97. In 1998 it's cool if your new PC has built in CD quality audio. In 2000 that's a basic feature like colour graphics, if your PC doesn't then it sucks.
From my memory, AC97 was rough early on. It seemed to be consistently plagued with crosstalk and other interference issues as well as driver issues. By the time WinXP dropped these issues were mostly sorted out, though.
I don't remember too much interference, but then I've never had excellent hearing. Driver issues were definitely a thing but I think that same period around 2000 is when games are shifting from "(Most games work in DOS but) Some games need Windows" to "Some games still need DOS". AC97 was not great for DOS
Looks like my memory is wrong, all of the DOS games I was thinking of "from this era" are late 90s. Carmageddon for example was 1997. Quake 2 was never officially a DOS game. Nothing I bought new in 2000 was primarily or only a DOS game.
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.
> 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.
The moment average 16 bit DAC become cheap and games stopped using builtin synths/MIDI it was over, CPUs were fast enough that offloading audio was not a big deal any more and anyone could make good enough one. EAX was fun gimmick but exclusivity probably hurt the idea in the end
I still remember the immersive positional audio from using a Soundblaster while playing Thief The Dark Project in the 90's. Nothing short of amazing! Kudos to the Looking Glass Studios for taking advantage of the technology to its full potential
Setting up the audio propagation in the Thief level editor is super tedious but it’s hard to argue with the results. You draw “Room brushes” (basically boxes) to encompass space and sound will propagate across where they intersect with each other. An Environmental audio setting is applied to a room brush and will be applied to all the audio heard by the player when inside the room brush.
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.
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!
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.
Back when I was playing with my Aureal Vortex 2 card, locating enemies via sound was easy peasy through footsteps. That system (and card unfortunately) is now long gone. On my current day system, sound location doesn't work nearly as well, I can't tell if something is in front or behind me, I have to move my head (in-game) to figure that out. I really miss my Vortex 2 :-(.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
>> I look back fondly to kid years when I took shots in the dark with IRQ and DMA settings on my boot diskette
I look back on this fondly. I got some weird brand of soundcard that claimed SB-compatibility but was clearly different. I felt so proud the first time I got sound out of a game and no crashes. The same card was supported very well by Windows 95 a few years later.
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.
My dad had an office PC that I secretly put a sound card and graphics card in. He would have gone mad if he knew I had done that to his work machine! I had very little idea what I was doing, but firing up Carmageddon 2 and having it run buttery smooth is something that sticks in my mind still.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :-)
Worth to note those Creative devices were not sold, they were given away as a prize in a contest.
And it wasn't a total of 10 units, the winner received a collector's package with ALL TEN autographed Creative "Zen Micro" , one in each color available. 2nd~10th place won one "normal" Zen Micro respectively.
Frankly, could be worse. Imagine being a teenager back then and winning 10 MP3 players...
> 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.
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?).
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
> 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.
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.
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.
Well, you definitely won't gain any quality if you're transcoding from a lossy format. You also wouldn't notice the difference in performance, but you might notice it in battery life.
If you're transcoding from FLAC, I think your best bet nowadays is just Opus, really.
The idea is rather that someone with a large FLAC library, who has already transcoded some of it to MP3 for listening on a portable player, has little interest in transcoding their FLAC files to Vorbis again.
The battery life of an MP3 player, even with a ten-year-old battery, is still more than ten hours of continuous playback regardless of the format, which is more than enough.
The real limiting factor is the maximum size supported by microSD cards. If the player wasn't limited to 64GB, I wouldn't even bother transcoding.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
> 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.
Soundblaster 16 was launched in 1992 and was the de-facto standard for several years, so I'd say it's a typo
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.
late 90s is a whole different thing than mid 90s. The 97 in AC'97 is there for a reason. Would still say that Audigy 2001 front panel was peak consumer audio experience. Good access for headphone out and ASIO support, so for anyone wnating to connect you a midi keyboard for first excursion into digital music creation everything was there for a reasonable price point. Even firewire for your DV imports. A digital media entry point like no others existed at the time at that price point.
Motherboard audio started to become more common with the AC'97 spec/standard.
So that makes sense.
I agree that mid-90s is a bit early but I would say mid 00's is too late.
I'm pretty sure it's a rapid change almost immediately after AC97. In 1998 it's cool if your new PC has built in CD quality audio. In 2000 that's a basic feature like colour graphics, if your PC doesn't then it sucks.
From my memory, AC97 was rough early on. It seemed to be consistently plagued with crosstalk and other interference issues as well as driver issues. By the time WinXP dropped these issues were mostly sorted out, though.
I don't remember too much interference, but then I've never had excellent hearing. Driver issues were definitely a thing but I think that same period around 2000 is when games are shifting from "(Most games work in DOS but) Some games need Windows" to "Some games still need DOS". AC97 was not great for DOS
Looks like my memory is wrong, all of the DOS games I was thinking of "from this era" are late 90s. Carmageddon for example was 1997. Quake 2 was never officially a DOS game. Nothing I bought new in 2000 was primarily or only a DOS game.
Yes, I meant mid 00's, thank you.
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.
> 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.
Well, it's only way they could stay afloat.
The moment average 16 bit DAC become cheap and games stopped using builtin synths/MIDI it was over, CPUs were fast enough that offloading audio was not a big deal any more and anyone could make good enough one. EAX was fun gimmick but exclusivity probably hurt the idea in the end
I still remember the immersive positional audio from using a Soundblaster while playing Thief The Dark Project in the 90's. Nothing short of amazing! Kudos to the Looking Glass Studios for taking advantage of the technology to its full potential
Setting up the audio propagation in the Thief level editor is super tedious but it’s hard to argue with the results. You draw “Room brushes” (basically boxes) to encompass space and sound will propagate across where they intersect with each other. An Environmental audio setting is applied to a room brush and will be applied to all the audio heard by the player when inside the room brush.
Any docs or talks about this somewhere?
Turtle Beach cards were my go to back in the day...
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-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
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.
It looks like some work was done on the CT1748 but nothing was ever published: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=86739
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!
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.
Back when I was playing with my Aureal Vortex 2 card, locating enemies via sound was easy peasy through footsteps. That system (and card unfortunately) is now long gone. On my current day system, sound location doesn't work nearly as well, I can't tell if something is in front or behind me, I have to move my head (in-game) to figure that out. I really miss my Vortex 2 :-(.
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.
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.
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-tri...
The A3D tech was orgininally developed by Crystal River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_Engineering) for NASA
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.
Yep, and I remember also buying a Cambridge Soundworks 4-speaker setup and it was awesome!
I sont know whqt Half Life 1 was doing, but thr 3d sound in that game was an incredible step forward
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).
Borland => Roland
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
>> I look back fondly to kid years when I took shots in the dark with IRQ and DMA settings on my boot diskette
I look back on this fondly. I got some weird brand of soundcard that claimed SB-compatibility but was clearly different. I felt so proud the first time I got sound out of a game and no crashes. The same card was supported very well by Windows 95 a few years later.
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.
My dad had an office PC that I secretly put a sound card and graphics card in. He would have gone mad if he knew I had done that to his work machine! I had very little idea what I was doing, but firing up Carmageddon 2 and having it run buttery smooth is something that sticks in my mind still.
Not to mention when you had multiple devices you had to piddle with physical jumpers so no two devices shared an IRQ. Good ol' ISA.
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.
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.
If you worked on the Zen, then thank you. I had many good years of service from mine. Cheers!
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :-)
My late 90s Micron PC has a front panel easter egg - it is signed by what I assume to be the team that designed it, molded into the plastic.
It's cool enough for me that Ive kept it.
Worth to note those Creative devices were not sold, they were given away as a prize in a contest.
And it wasn't a total of 10 units, the winner received a collector's package with ALL TEN autographed Creative "Zen Micro" , one in each color available. 2nd~10th place won one "normal" Zen Micro respectively.
Frankly, could be worse. Imagine being a teenager back then and winning 10 MP3 players...
Maybe this was an inspiration for the Gavin Belson Signature Box III in the series Silicon Valley?
> 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.
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 does not. That old sound blaster had more input channels than your dongle.
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
It made me think of this video - "This is rock'n roll" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofn2A1p13Sg Asian Guy Plays Drums On A Keyboard
> 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.
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.
Isn't Opus better than everything nowadays?
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.
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.
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.
Well, you definitely won't gain any quality if you're transcoding from a lossy format. You also wouldn't notice the difference in performance, but you might notice it in battery life.
If you're transcoding from FLAC, I think your best bet nowadays is just Opus, really.
The idea is rather that someone with a large FLAC library, who has already transcoded some of it to MP3 for listening on a portable player, has little interest in transcoding their FLAC files to Vorbis again. The battery life of an MP3 player, even with a ten-year-old battery, is still more than ten hours of continuous playback regardless of the format, which is more than enough.
The real limiting factor is the maximum size supported by microSD cards. If the player wasn't limited to 64GB, I wouldn't even bother transcoding.
Sure, there's no massive gain from replacing mp3 with Opus. For new files, though, mp3/Vorbis doesn't make sense any more.
It took more than 10 years for Vorbis support to become widespread. It will take a few more years before we can hope to play Opus easily everywhere.
We are at a stage where current solutions are just good enough in most case. Change is therefore becoming increasingly slow.
Even for music streaming, many services continue to use MP3 and AAC.
i still use a RockBox'd Sansa Clip+ with SuperMix 4 iems :)
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.
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)
Dr Sbaitso is etched into my brain! "My name is Doctor Sbaitso. I am here to help you" haha
Say whatever is in your mind freely.
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.
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.
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.
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
the sound of PC gaming in the late 90s, e.g. with good old PCWorks FourPointSurround by Cambridge Soundworks
(iykyk)
I still use those speakers plus sub today!
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.
> 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?
Sales and support offices. I couldn’t find anything covering the reasoning of being in that location though.
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 :)
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...
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?
Trip down the memory line, this article. Serious question: does anyone care to have hardware audio cards nowadays, let alone from Creative?
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.
Who remembers Dr. Sbaitso, the tts eliza derivative and forerunner of chatgpt?
Shoutout to the taking parrot!
Anyone remember Ensoniq?
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
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.
Yup!
AudioPCI rebranded devices later sold as SoundBlaster cheaper edition.
In an alternate reality maybe Creative went from Audio cards to MP3 players to Smartphones and GPUs
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.
Funny that the entire thing now fits in a USB dongle that's $3 on AliExpress.
Can't remember how many times I added this to AUTEXEC.BAT
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T6
good times.
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.
Creative is reviving the Sound Blaster. I’m unsure what that will entail.
https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...
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
Good catch yes it does look like that!
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
Guessing the kickstarter is for some retro thing judging by the image of their old talking parrot on that announcement page.
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.
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.
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
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!