Sound Blaster
Encyclopedia
Sound card
A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware...
s was the de facto standard
De facto standard
A de facto standard is a custom, convention, product, or system that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces...
for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level (eliminating the importance of backward compatibility
Backward compatibility
In the context of telecommunications and computing, a device or technology is said to be backward or downward compatible if it can work with input generated by an older device...
with Sound Blaster), and the evolution in PC design led to onboard motherboard-audio, which commoditized
Commodification
Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....
PC audio functionality.
The creator of Sound Blaster is the Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
-based firm Creative Technology
Creative Technology
Creative Technology Ltd. is a Singapore-based global company headquartered in Jurong East, Singapore. The principal activities of the company and its subsidiaries consist of the design, manufacture and distribution of digitized sound and video boards, computers and related multimedia, and personal...
, also known by the name of its United States subsidiary, Creative Labs.
Creative Music System
The history of Creative sound cardSound card
A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware...
s started with the release of the Creative Music System ("C/MS") board in August 1987. It contained two Philips SAA 1099
Philips SAA 1099
The Philips SAA1099 sound generator was a 6-voice sound chip used by some 1980's devices, notably:* The SAM Coupé British-made computer* The Creative Music System by Creative Labs, which was also marketed at RadioShack as the Game Blaster. They had 2 chips, for 12 voices.* Their Sound Blaster 1.0...
circuits, which, together, provided 12 voices of square-wave bee-in-a-box stereo sound plus some noise channels.
These circuits were featured earlier in various popular electronics magazines around the world. For many years Creative tended to use off-the-shelf components and manufacturers' reference designs for their early products. The various integrated circuits had white or black paper sheets fully covering their top thus hiding their identity. On the C/MS board in particular, the Philips chips had white pieces of paper with a fantasy CMS-301 inscription on them: real Creative parts usually had consistent CT number references.
Surprisingly, the board also contained a large 40-pin PGA (Creative Technology Programmable Logic) integrated circuit, bearing a CT 1302A CTPL 8708 serigraphed
Screen-printing
Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate...
inscription and looking exactly like the DSP of the later Sound Blaster. Presumably, this DSP could be used to automate some of the sound operations, like envelope control.
Game Blaster
A year later, in 1988, Creative marketed the C/MS via Radio ShackRadio shack
Radio shack is a slang term for a room or structure for housing radio equipment.-History:In the early days of radio, equipment was experimental and home-built. The first radio transmitters used a noisy spark to generate radio waves and were often housed in a garage or shed. When radio was first...
under the name Game Blaster. This card was identical in every way to the precursor C/MS hardware. Creative did not change any of the labeling or program names on the disks that came with the Game Blaster, but also included a later revision of the game Silpheed
Silpheed
is a video game series developed by Game Arts and designed by the late Takeshi Miyaji. It made its debut on the Japanese PC-8801 in 1986, and was ported to the Fujitsu FM-7 and MS-DOS formats soon after. It was later remade for the Mega-CD and has a sequel called Silpheed: The Lost Planet for the...
that added C/MS support.
Sound Blaster 1.0, CT1320A
The Sound Blaster 1.0, CT1320A, was released in 1989. In addition to Game Blaster features, it had an 11-voice FM synthesizerFrequency modulation synthesis
A 220 Hz carrier tone modulated by a 440 Hz modulating tone with various choices of modulation index, β. The time domain signals are illustrated above, and the corresponding spectra are shown below ....
using the Yamaha YM3812
Yamaha YM3812
The Yamaha YM3812 also known as the OPL2 is a sound chip created by Yamaha Corporation in 1985 and famous for its wide use in IBM PC-based sound cards such as the AdLib and Sound Blaster.It is backwards compatible with the OPL aka YM3526, to which it is very similar – in fact, it only adds 3 new...
chip, also known as OPL2. It provided perfect compatibility with the then market leader AdLib
AdLib
Ad Lib, Inc. was a manufacturer of sound cards and other computer equipment founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval...
sound card, which had gained support in PC games in the preceding years. Creative used the "DSP" acronym to designate the digital audio part of the Sound Blaster. This actually stood for Digital Sound Processor, rather than the more common digital signal processor
Digital signal processor
A digital signal processor is a specialized microprocessor with an architecture optimized for the fast operational needs of digital signal processing.-Typical characteristics:...
, and was really a simple micro-controller from the Intel MCS-51
Intel 8051
The Intel MCS-51 is a Harvard architecture, single chip microcontroller series which was developed by Intel in 1980 for use in embedded systems. Intel's original versions were popular in the 1980s and early 1990s. While Intel no longer manufactures the MCS-51, binary compatible derivatives remain...
family (supplied by Intel and Matra MHS
Matra
Mécanique Aviation Traction or Matra was a French company covering a wide range of activities mainly related to automobile, bicycles, aeronautics and weaponry. In 1994, it became a subsidiary of the Lagardère Group and now operates under that name.Matra was owned by the Floirat family...
, among others). It could play back monaural
Monaural
Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...
sampled sound
Sampling (signal processing)
In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous signal to a discrete signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of samples ....
at up to 23 kHz sampling frequency (approx. FM radio quality) and record at up to 12 kHz (approximately AM radio quality). The sole DSP-like feature of the circuit was ADPCM decompression.
In spite of these limitations, in less than a year, the Sound Blaster became the top-selling expansion card for the PC. It achieved this by providing a fully AdLib-compatible product, with additional features, for the same, and often a lower price. The inclusion of the game port, and its importance to its early success, is often forgotten or overlooked. PCs of this era did not include a game port. Game port cards were costly (around $50) and used one of the few expansion slots PCs had at the time. Given the choice between an AdLib card or a fully compatible Sound Blaster card that came with a game port, saved a slot, and included the "DSP" for not much more in price, many consumers opted for the Sound Blaster. In-game support for the digital portion of the card did not happen until after the Sound Blaster had gained dominance.
Sound Blaster 1.5, CT1320C
Released in 1990, the Sound Blaster 1.5, CT1320C, dropped the C/MS chips, which were no longer popular with game developers. Instead, the board had two empty sockets, which could be user upgraded by purchasing the C/MS chips directly from Creative. Otherwise the card is similar to the Sound Blaster 1.0.Sound Blaster 2.0, CT1350
The final revision of the original Sound Blaster, the Sound Blaster 2.0, CT1350, added support for "auto-init" DMADirect memory access
Direct memory access is a feature of modern computers that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory independently of the central processing unit ....
, which assisted in producing a continuous loop of double-buffered sound output. The maximum sampling rate was increased to 44 kHz for playback, and 22 kHz for record. The Sound Blaster 2.0's PCB
Printed circuit board
A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...
-layout used more highly integrated components, both shrinking the board's size and reducing manufacturing cost.
Owners of previous revision Sound Blaster boards could upgrade their board by purchasing the V2.00 DSP chip from Creative Labs, and swapping the older DSP with the newer replacement. The upgraded board gained the same capabilities as the Sound Blaster 2.0.
Sound Blaster MCV, CT5320
Sound Blaster MCV, CT5320, was a version created for IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
PS/2
IBM Personal System/2
The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBM's third generation of personal computers. The PS/2 line, released to the public in 1987, was created by IBM in an attempt to recapture control of the PC market by introducing an advanced proprietary architecture...
model 50 and higher and their ISA-incompatible MicroChannel
Microchannel
Microchannel can refer to* Basic structure used in microtechnology, see Microchannel .* Micro Channel architecture in computing...
bus.
Sound Blaster Pro, CT1330
The Blaster Pro, CT1330, announced in May 1991, was the first significant redesign of the card's core features. The Sound Blaster Pro supported faster digital sampling rates (up to 22.05 kHz stereo or 44.1 kHz mono), added a "mixerSound card mixer
A sound card mixer is the analog part of a sound card that routes and mixes sound signals. This circuit receives inputs from both external connectors and the sound card's digital-to-analog converters...
" to provide a crude master volume control (independent of the volume of sound sources feeding the mixer), and a crude high pass or low pass filter. The Sound Blaster Pro used a pair of YM3812
Yamaha YM3812
The Yamaha YM3812 also known as the OPL2 is a sound chip created by Yamaha Corporation in 1985 and famous for its wide use in IBM PC-based sound cards such as the AdLib and Sound Blaster.It is backwards compatible with the OPL aka YM3526, to which it is very similar – in fact, it only adds 3 new...
chips to provide stereo music-synthesis (one for each channel). The Sound Blaster Pro was fully backward compatible with the original Sound Blaster, and by extension, the AdLib
AdLib
Ad Lib, Inc. was a manufacturer of sound cards and other computer equipment founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval...
sound card. The Sound Blaster Pro was the first Creative sound card to have a built-in CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
interface. Most Sound Blaster Pro cards featured a proprietary interface for a Panasonic
Panasonic
Panasonic is an international brand name for Japanese electric products manufacturer Panasonic Corporation, which was formerly known as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd...
(Matsushita MKE
Panasonic CD interface
The Panasonic CD interface, also known as the MKE CD interface , SLCD or simply Panasonic, is a proprietary computer interface for connecting a CD-ROM drive to an IBM PC compatible computer...
) drive.
Sound Blaster Pro 2, CT1600
MPU-401
The MPU-401, where MPU stands for MIDI Processing Unit, was an important but now obsolete interface for connecting MIDI-equipped electronic music hardware to Personal Computers...
interface used by professional MIDI equipment. The Sound Blaster Pro 2 was fully backward compatible with the original Sound Blaster, and by extension, the AdLib
AdLib
Ad Lib, Inc. was a manufacturer of sound cards and other computer equipment founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval...
sound card. Shortly after the release of the Sound Blaster Pro 2 version, Creative discontinued the original Sound Blaster Pro.
The Sound Blaster Pro 2 was also sold with the following on-board CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
controllers:
- Sound Blaster Pro 2, SCSISCSISmall Computer System Interface is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives, but it...
, CT1610 - Sound Blaster Pro 2, LMSI, CT1620
- Sound Blaster Pro 2, SonySony, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
, CT1690 - Sound Blaster Pro 2, MitsumiMitsumiis a Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronic components, founded in 1954.-Products:One of the company's most noticeable product lines are video game console controllers...
, CT2600
Packaged Sound Blaster cards were initially marketed and sold into the retail-channel. Creative's domination of the PC audiocard business soon had them selling the Sound Blaster Pro 2 OEM
Original Equipment Manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
, CT1680, to customers for integration into pre-assembled PCs.
Creative also sold Multimedia Upgrade Kits containing the Sound Blaster Pro. The kit bundled the sound card, a Matsushita CD-ROM drive (model 531 for single-speed, or 562/3 for the later double-speed (2x) drives), and several CD-ROMs of multimedia software titles. As CD-ROM technology was then new, the kit included CD-ROM software, representing a tremendous value to consumers. One such kit, named "OmniCD", included the 2x Matsushita drive along with an ISA controller card and software, including Software Toolworks Encyclopedia and Aldus
Aldus
Aldus Corporation, named after the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, was the inventor of the groundbreaking PageMaker software, a program that is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing field. The company was founded by Jeremy Jaech, Mark Sundstrom, Mike Templeman,...
PhotoStyler
PhotoStyler
Aldus PhotoStyler was developed by the Taiwanese company Ulead. The Aldus Prepress group identified the product as a potential acquisition for Aldus since they did not have an imaging product that could compete with Adobe Photoshop. The acquisition was completed in 1992 and Aldus PhotoStyler was...
SE. It was compliant with the MPC Level 2
Multimedia PC
The Multimedia PC, or MPC, was a recommended configuration for a PC with a CD-ROM drive. The standard was set and named by the "Multimedia PC Marketing Council", which was a working group of the Software Publishers Association . The MPMC comprised companies including Microsoft, Creative Labs,...
standard.
Sound Blaster Pro 2 MCV, CT5330
The Sound Blaster Pro 2 MCV, CT5330, was a version created for IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
PS/2
IBM Personal System/2
The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBM's third generation of personal computers. The PS/2 line, released to the public in 1987, was created by IBM in an attempt to recapture control of the PC market by introducing an advanced proprietary architecture...
model 50 and higher and their MicroChannel
Microchannel
Microchannel can refer to* Basic structure used in microtechnology, see Microchannel .* Micro Channel architecture in computing...
bus.
Sound Blaster 16
- 16-bit CD-quality digital audioDigital audioDigital audio is sound reproduction using pulse-code modulation and digital signals. Digital audio systems include analog-to-digital conversion , digital-to-analog conversion , digital storage, processing and transmission components...
sampling; - An MPU-401MPU-401The MPU-401, where MPU stands for MIDI Processing Unit, was an important but now obsolete interface for connecting MIDI-equipped electronic music hardware to Personal Computers...
compatible UART; - A socket for the optional Advanced Signal Processor or Creative Signal Processor chip (ASP or later CSP); and
- A connector for the Wave BlasterCreative Wave BlasterThe Wave Blaster was an add-on MIDI-synthesizer for Creative Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster AWE32, and AWE64 family of PC soundcards. It was a sample-based synthesis General MIDI compliant synthesizer...
, a wavetable daughterboard.
The Sound Blaster 16 retained the Yamaha OPL-3 for FM synthesis and a backward compatible programming interface, so most software titles written for the older Sound Blasters and Sound Blaster Pros would run without modification.
Eventually this design proved so popular that Creative made a PCI version of this card. Moving the card off the ISA bus, which was already approaching obsolescence, meant that no line for host-controlled ISA DMA was available, as the PCI slot offers no such line. Instead, the card used PCI bus mastering
Bus mastering
In computing, bus mastering is a feature supported by many bus architectures that enables a device connected to the bus to initiate transactions...
to transfer data from the main memory to the D/A converters. Since existing DOS programs expected to be able to initiate host-controlled ISA DMA for producing sound, backward compatibility with the older Sound Blaster cards for DOS programs required a software driver work-around; since this work-around necessarily depended on the virtual 8086 mode
Virtual 8086 mode
In the 80386 microprocessor and later, virtual 8086 mode allows the execution of real mode applications that are incapable of running directly in protected mode while the processor is running a protected mode operating system.VM86 mode uses a segmentation scheme identical to that of real mode In...
of the PC's CPU in order to catch and reroute accesses from the ISA DMA controller to the card itself, it failed for a number of DOS games that either were not fully compatible with this CPU mode or needed so much free conventional memory
Conventional memory
In DOS memory management, conventional memory, also called base memory, is the first 640 kilobytes of the memory on IBM PC or compatible systems. It is the read-write memory usable by the operating system and application programs...
that they could not be loaded with the driver occupying part of this memory. In Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, there was no problem, as Creative's Windows driver software could handle both ISA and PCI cards correctly.
Sound Blaster ViBRA16
The Sound Blaster ViBRA16 was an inexpensive single-chip implementation of the Sound Blaster 16 for the OEMOriginal Equipment Manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
market. Creative Labs also used this chip for the Sound Blaster 32, Phone Blaster 28.8 (VIBRA + modem) and many other value-edition cards. This series included the ViBRA16 (CT2501), ViBRA16s (CT2504), ViBRA16c (CT2505) PnP and ViBRA16XV (CT2511) chips. The primary advantage of the ViBRA16 was the inclusion of a 14.4 kbit/s telephony Modem, it also functioned as a telephone.
Sound Blaster AWE32
Released in March 1994, the Sound Blaster AWE32 (Advanced Wave Effects) introduced an all new MIDI synthesizer section based on the EMU8000. The AWE32 consisted of two distinct audio sections; the Creative digital audio section (audio codecCodec
A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...
, optional CSP/ASP chip socket, Yamaha OPL3), and the E-mu MIDI synthesizer section. The synthesizer section consisted of the EMU8000 sampler and effects processor, an EMU8011 1 MB
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
sample ROM, and 512 KB
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
of sample RAM (expandable to 28 MB). To fit the new hardware, the AWE32 was a full-length ISA
Industry Standard Architecture
Industry Standard Architecture is a computer bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers introduced with the IBM Personal Computer to support its Intel 8088 microprocessor's 8-bit external data bus and extended to 16 bits for the IBM Personal Computer/AT's Intel 80286 processor...
card, measuring 14 in (355.6 mm).
Sound Blaster 32
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
, the Wave Blaster
Creative Wave Blaster
The Wave Blaster was an add-on MIDI-synthesizer for Creative Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster AWE32, and AWE64 family of PC soundcards. It was a sample-based synthesis General MIDI compliant synthesizer...
header, and the CSP port. The SB32 used the Vibra chip to reduce component count, which meant bass/treble/gain control was limited compared to the AWE32. The loss of onboard RAM is offset by the inclusion of 30-pin SIMM
SIMM
A SIMM, or single in-line memory module, is a type of memory module containing random access memory used in computers from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. It differs from a dual in-line memory module , the most predominant form of memory module today, in that the contacts on a SIMM are redundant...
RAM sockets, which allow up to 8 MB RAM to be installed and used by the EMU engine.
Sound Blaster AWE64
Industry Standard Architecture
Industry Standard Architecture is a computer bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers introduced with the IBM Personal Computer to support its Intel 8088 microprocessor's 8-bit external data bus and extended to 16 bits for the IBM Personal Computer/AT's Intel 80286 processor...
card" (that term is misleading — see the pictures for size comparison). It offered similar features to the AWE32, but also had a few notable improvements, including support for greater polyphony
Polyphony
In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....
, although this was a product of 32 extra software emulated channels. The 30-pin SIMM
SIMM
A SIMM, or single in-line memory module, is a type of memory module containing random access memory used in computers from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. It differs from a dual in-line memory module , the most predominant form of memory module today, in that the contacts on a SIMM are redundant...
slots from AWE32/SB32 were replaced with a proprietary memory format which could be (expensively) purchased from Creative.
The main improvements were better compatibility with older SB models, and an improved signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise...
. The AWE64 came in three versions: A Value version (with 512KB of RAM), a Standard version (with 1 MB of RAM), and a Gold version (with 4 MB of RAM and a separate S/PDIF output).
Ensoniq AudioPCI-based cards
Original Equipment Manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
s at the time. AudioPCI offered a full-featured solution, being a PCI sound card with wavetable MIDI, and offering 4-speaker DirectSound3D surround sound, A3D
A3D
A3D was a technology developed by Aureal Semiconductor for use in their Vortex line of PC sound chips to deliver three-dimensional sound through headphones, two or even four speakers. The technology used head-related transfer functions , which the human ear interprets as spatial cues indicating...
emulation, and full DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
legacy support. Creative's acquisition filled a market segment where Live! was too expensive, and it gave them excellent DOS support, a feature that was proving difficult for companies to get working with PCI cards (as described above in the Sound Blaster 16 section, early PCI audio cards had to work around the missing ISA-DMA lines of the PCI slot to run with existing DOS software, and often the work-arounds did not function well, or worked only in DOS boxes within Microsoft Windows).
Creative released many cards using the original AudioPCI chip, Ensoniq ES1370, and several boards using revised versions of this chip (ES1371 and ES1373), and some with relabeled AudioPCI chips (they say Creative on them.) Boards using AudioPCI tech are usually easily identifiable by the board design and the chip size because they all look quite similar. Such boards include Sound Blaster PCI64 (April 1998), PCI128 (July 1998), Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI, Vibra PCI and Sound Blaster 16 PCI.
These cards were full-featured, but the features were limited in capability. MIDI, for example, was rather poor in quality and there was no ability to customize the sample sets beyond the three pre-made sets (2, 4, and 8 MB) included with the cards. The chips do not support hardware acceleration
Hardware acceleration
In computing, Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the general-purpose CPU...
of any kind as they are entirely software-driven. These cards also did not support SoundFont
SoundFont
SoundFont is a brand name that collectively refers to a file format and associated technology designed to bridge the gap between recorded and synthesized audio, especially for the purposes of computer music composition...
s.
Sound Blaster Live! (Original)
Digital signal processor
A digital signal processor is a specialized microprocessor with an architecture optimized for the fast operational needs of digital signal processing.-Typical characteristics:...
in consumer PC-audio was unprecedented. The Live was built around Creative's own programmable audio DSP, the EMU10K1, and represented a paradigm shift
Paradigm shift
A Paradigm shift is, according to Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , a change in the basic assumptions, or paradigms, within the ruling theory of science...
in PC audio. With a transistor count of 2.44 million, EMU10K1 was capable of 1,000 MIPS. The EMU10K1's advertised capabilities had previously been limited to professional audiocards (such as those made by Turtle Beach
Turtle Beach Systems
Turtle Beach Systems is a sound card and headphone manufacturer and direct competitor with Creative Labs-branded Sound Blaster. In 1995, the company merged with Voyetra, a company that made custom software for sound cards, to form Voyetra Turtle Beach Inc which is headquartered in Elmsford, New...
).
The EMU10K1 (and its successors) did not use on-card RAM/ROM storage for instrument samples, instead it used a high-speed PCI DMA interface to access sample-data stored in the host-PC's system memory. The EMU needed only a single extra chip to interface with the PCI bus. Not only did this arrangement eliminate the need for on-card storage, it also raised instrument-sample and sound-effect size from the AWE64's 8 MB, to the size of host system memory. The EMU10K1 and FX8010 chips offloaded functions previously handled by separate custom chips.
All members of the SB Live! family were built on the EMU10K1, came standard with four-channel analog audio outputs, and the ubiquitous 15-pin MIDI/Joystick multiport, and similar AC'97 architecture (isolation of ADC/DAC functionality into a separate codec chip.) For game titles, EAX 1.0 (and later 2.0) (environmental audio extensions
Environmental audio extensions
The environmental audio extensions are a number of digital signal processing presets for audio, present in Creative Technology's later Sound Blaster sound cards and the Creative NOMAD/Creative ZEN product lines...
, which briefly competed with the now defunct A3D
A3D
A3D was a technology developed by Aureal Semiconductor for use in their Vortex line of PC sound chips to deliver three-dimensional sound through headphones, two or even four speakers. The technology used head-related transfer functions , which the human ear interprets as spatial cues indicating...
) was hardware-accelerated, adding acoustic audio-effects at the cost of some host-CPU cycles. The EMU10K1 provided high-quality 64-voice sample-based synthesizer
Sample-based synthesis
Sample-based synthesis is a form of audio synthesis that can be contrasted to either subtractive synthesis or additive synthesis. The principal difference with sample-based synthesis is that the seed waveforms are sampled sounds or instruments instead of fundamental waveforms such as the saw waves...
(a.k.a. wavetable), with self-produced or third-party customized patches or "Soundfonts", and the ability to resample the audio output as input and apply a range of real-time DSP effects to any set of audio subchannels present in the device.
The first model and flagship of the SB/Live family was the SB Live! Gold. Featuring gold tracings on all major analog traces and external sockets, an EMI
Electromagnetic interference
Electromagnetic interference is disturbance that affects an electrical circuit due to either electromagnetic induction or electromagnetic radiation emitted from an external source. The disturbance may interrupt, obstruct, or otherwise degrade or limit the effective performance of the circuit...
-suppressing printed circuit board substrate
Printed circuit board
A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...
and lacquer
Lacquer
In a general sense, lacquer is a somewhat imprecise term for a clear or coloured varnish that dries by solvent evaporation and often a curing process as well that produces a hard, durable finish, in any sheen level from ultra matte to high gloss and that can be further polished as required...
, the Gold came standard with a daughterboard that implemented a separate 4-channel alternative mini-DIN
Mini-DIN connector
The mini-DIN connectors are a family of multi-pin electrical connectors used in a variety of applications. Mini-DIN is similar to the larger, older DIN connector...
digital output to Creative-branded internal-DAC
Digital-to-analog converter
In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter is a device that converts a digital code to an analog signal . An analog-to-digital converter performs the reverse operation...
speaker sets, a S/P-DIF digital audio Input and Output with separate software mappings, and a fully decoded MIDI interface with separate Input and Output (along with on mini-DIN converter.) The Gold highlighted many features aimed at music composition; ease-of-use (plug-and-play
Plug-and-play
In computing, plug and play is a term used to describe the characteristic of a computer bus, or device specification, which facilitates the discovery of a hardware component in a system, without the need for physical device configuration, or user intervention in resolving resource conflicts.Plug...
for musicians), realtime loopback-recording of the MIDI-synthesizer (with full freedom of Soundfonts, and environmental effects such as reverb, etc.), and bundled MIDI-software.
The mainstream model was the Sound Blaster Live! Like the Gold, the Live featured multi-speaker analog output (up to four channels), and identical music/sound generation capabilities (without the bundled MIDI software and interfacing-equipment.)
Sound Blaster PCI512
The Sound Blaster PCI512 is an EMU10K1-based sound card designed to fill a lower cost segment than the Live! Value. It is capable of most of the Live! Value's features aside from being limited to 512 MIDI voice polyphony (a software-based limitation), lacking digital I/OInput/output
In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...
, removal of expansion headers
Electrical connector
An electrical connector is an electro-mechanical device for joining electrical circuits as an interface using a mechanical assembly. The connection may be temporary, as for portable equipment, require a tool for assembly and removal, or serve as a permanent electrical joint between two wires or...
, and only stereo or quadraphonic
Quadraphonic
Quadraphonic sound – the most widely used early term for what is now called 4.0 surround sound – uses four channels in which speakers are positioned at the four corners of the listening space, reproducing signals that are independent of one another...
output support. The card's circuit layout is somewhat simpler than that of the Live! series.
Sound Blaster Live! (later 5.1-channel revision)
Center channel
Center channel refers to an audio channel common to many surround sound formats. It is the channel that is mostly, or fully, dedicated to the reproduction of the dialogue of an audiovisual program...
speaker and LFE subwoofer output, most useful for movie watching. The Live! 5.1 could also use one of the 3.5 mm jack ports as an SPDIF out, which allowed the connection of an external decoder.
Sound Blaster Audigy series
Environmental audio extensions
The environmental audio extensions are a number of digital signal processing presets for audio, present in Creative Technology's later Sound Blaster sound cards and the Creative NOMAD/Creative ZEN product lines...
support, and supported up to 5.1-channel output.
The Audigy was controversially advertised as a 24-bit sound card. The EMU10K2's audio transport (DMA engine) was fixed at 16-bit sample precision at 48 kHz (like the EMU10K1 in the original Live!), and all audio had to be resampled to 48 kHz in order to be accepted by the DSP (for recording or rendering to output.)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (September 2002) featured an updated EMU10K2 processor, sometimes referred to as EMU10K2.5, with an improved DMA engine capable of 24-bit precision. Up to 192 kHz was supported for stereo playback/record, while 6.1 was capped at 96 kHz. In addition, Audigy 2 supported up to 6.1 (later 7.1) speakers and had improved signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise...
(SNR) over the Audigy (106 vs. 100 decibels (A
A-weighting
A Weighting curve is a graph of a set of factors, that are used to 'weight' measured values of a variable according to their importance in relation to some outcome. The most commonly known example is frequency weighting in sound level measurement where a specific set of weighting curves known as A,...
)). It also featured built-in Dolby Digital EX
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. It was originally called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994. Except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints...
6.1 and 7.1 decoding for improved DVD play-back.
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (2003) is essentially an Audigy 2 with updated DAC and opamps
Operational amplifier
An operational amplifier is a DC-coupled high-gain electronic voltage amplifier with a differential input and, usually, a single-ended output...
. Audigy 2 ZS uses the Cirrus Logic CS4382 DAC together with the opamps and can produce an output SNR of 108 dB. There were a few slight printed circuit board
Printed circuit board
A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect electronic components using conductive pathways, tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also referred to as printed wiring board or etched wiring...
modifications and 7.1 audio support was added.
Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro was an Audigy 2 ZS with updated DACs and ADCs
Analog-to-digital converter
An analog-to-digital converter is a device that converts a continuous quantity to a discrete time digital representation. An ADC may also provide an isolated measurement...
, the new DAC being the Cirrus Logic CS4398, boosting the output SNR to 113 dB. Other than a breakout box
Breakout box
A breakout box is an electrical device, usually housed in a box, in which a compound electrical connector is separated or "broken out" into its component connectors. Compound connectors are used where sufficient space for connections is unavailable...
, it has no distinguishable difference from the Audigy 2 ZS. The DSP is identical to the Audigy 2 ZS's but Creative put an "Audigy 4" sticker to cover the chip, making it appear as if it is a new chip. The Audigy 4 Pro is not to be confused with the Audigy 4 (Value) which contains lower quality DACs and does not have golden plated jacks. The Audigy 4 (Value) is more in line with the Audigy 2 Value series. The Audigy 4 had a shorter life span than its predecessors, due to the short window between it and the next-generation Sound Blaster X-Fi.
Sound Blaster X-Fi
Transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...
s. The computational power of this processor, i.e. its performance, is estimated as 10,000 MIPS, which is about 24 times higher than the estimated performance of its predecessor, the Audigy processor. Beginning with the 2008 Titanium models, newer X-Fi cards switched from PCI to PCI Express
PCI Express
PCI Express , officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards...
x1 connectors. With the X-Fi's "Active Modal Architecture" (AMA), the user can choose one of three optimization modes: Gaming, Entertainment, and Creation; each enabling a combination of the features of the chipset. The X-Fi uses EAX
Environmental audio extensions
The environmental audio extensions are a number of digital signal processing presets for audio, present in Creative Technology's later Sound Blaster sound cards and the Creative NOMAD/Creative ZEN product lines...
5.0 which supports up to 128 3D-positioned voices with up to four effects applied to each. This release also included the 24-bit crystallizer, which is intended to pronounce percussion elements by placing some emphasis on low and high pitched parts of the sound. The X-Fi, at its release, offered some of the most powerful mixing capabilities available, making it a powerful entry-level card for home musicians. The other big improvement in the X-Fi over the previous Audigy designs was the complete overhaul of the resampling engine on the card. The previous Audigy cards had their DSPs locked at 48/16, meaning any content that didn't match was resampled on the card in hardware; which was done poorly and resulted in a lot of intermodulation distortion. Many hardcore users worked around this by means of resampling their content using high quality software decoders, usually in the form of a plugin in their media player. Creative completely re-wrote the resampling method used on the X-Fi and dedicated more than half of the power of the DSP to the process; resulting in a very clean resample.
Sound Blaster Recon3D
The Recon3D series were released in August 2011 and include PCI ExpressPCI Express
PCI Express , officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards...
x1 cards such as Recon3D PCIe, Recon3D Fatal1ty Professional and Recon3D Fatal1ty Champion. The cards use the new integrated Sound Core3D chip, which features the Quartet DSP from the X-Fi series as well as integrated DAC, ADC and I/O interface in a 56-pin package.
Connectors
Sound Blaster cards since 1999 conform to Microsoft's PC 99 standard for color coding the external connectors as follows:| Color | Function | |
|---|---|---|
| Pink | Analog microphone Microphone A microphone is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. In 1877, Emile Berliner invented the first microphone used as a telephone voice transmitter... input. |
|
| Light blue | Analog line level Line level Line level is a term used to denote the strength of an audio signal used to transmit analog sound between audio components such as CD and DVD players, TVs, audio amplifiers, and mixing consoles, and sometimes MP3 players.... input. |
|
| Lime green | Analog line level output for the main stereo signal (front speakers or headphones). | |
| Black | Analog line level output for rear speakers. | |
| Silver | Analog line level output for side speakers. | |
| Orange | S/PDIF S/PDIF S/PDIF is a digital audio interconnect used in consumer audio equipment over relatively short distances. The signal is transmitted over either a coaxial cable with RCA connectors or a fiber optic cable with TOSLINK connectors. S/PDIF interconnects components in home theaters and other digital high... digital output (sometimes used as an analog line output for a center Center channel Center channel refers to an audio channel common to many surround sound formats. It is the channel that is mostly, or fully, dedicated to the reproduction of the dialogue of an audiovisual program... and/or subwoofer speaker instead) |
|
Up until the AWE line, Creative cards has short text inscriptions on the backplane of the card, indicating which port does what (i.e. Mic, Spk, Aux In, Aux Out). On later cards, the text inscriptions were changed to icons. With the latest cards from Creative, the cards were changed to use numbers as the ports are flexi-jacks and can have different functions assigned to them at run-time (i.e. changed from speaker output to mic in), but a color overlay sticker is included with retail units to help consumers identify the commonly used functions of the ports in their default modes.
Driver software modification (soft mod)
Some drivers from the Audigy 2 ZS have been soft-modded by enthusiasts. These can be installed on Creative's older cards, including Sound Blaster Live!, Audigy, and Audigy 2. It has been claimed to offer improved sound quality, hardware acceleration of higher EAX versions in games, 64-channel mixing for Audigy 1, and an overall improvement in the card's performance. Several forum posts across the web have reported favorable results with this technique, excepting Live! users where the drivers only add the ability to use the newer software applications (i.e. the newer mixer applet). Comments on forums from developers of the software mod have said that Live!'s hardware is not capable of EAX3 nor 64-channels of hardware sound mixing.Later, in 2004, Creative released updated drivers top-to-bottom for the Audigy through Audigy 4 line that put these cards basically at feature parity on a software level. As of 2006, the entire Audigy lineup uses the same driver package. DSP decoding at the driver level on other cards than Audigy 2 ZS and 4 is still not supported by official drivers, but it works with soft-modded drivers on the other cards with hardware DSP (like Audigy 2 6.1).
When Windows Vista was released, there was only a single beta driver for the Creative Audigy series that was usable on the operating system with minimal functionality and frequent instability reported by users. A Creative Forum activist named Daniel K. (His real name is Daniel Kawakami who is from Brazil) modified drivers from the X-Fi and applied it to the Audigy and Live! series, restoring most if not all of the features that came with the original XP setup CD in Vista. X-Fi drivers have noticeably better sound quality under Vista, and more bug fixes because of the newer build (last modified version is 2.15.0004EQ April). He managed to enable the X-Fi Crystallizer to work on Audigy series cards in software, however because of the patents involved, he was forced to remove all the modified drivers and DLL patch. The event ended as a PR disaster for Creative as they put legal pressure on a user who had succeeded in creating working Vista drivers where Creative had failed, especially on the Creative Forum and technical blog sites. It is possible that many previously loyal customers refused to buy Creative products and turned to other brands as a result.
Daniel K has since stopped developing modified support files for the above sound cards, however some of the files (as of July, 2008) may still be hosted on individual tech/blog sites. Creative has since then released a newer official Audigy Vista driver (2.18.0000 as of July 28, 2008) due to public and consumer pressure.
Audio DSP circuits
| Name | Bit depth | EAX | Transistors | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EMU10K1 | 16-bit | 2.0 | 2.44 million | 350 nm, 335 MIPS, 32 DirectSound3D sound channels |
| EMU10K2 | 16-bit | 3.0 | 4 million | 200 MHz, 64 DirectSound3D sound channels |
| EMU10K2.5 | 24-bit | 4.0 | 4,6 million | 180 nm, 200 MHz, 424+ MIPS, 64 DirectSound3D sound channels |
| EMU20K1 | 24-bit | 5.0 | 51 million | 130 nm, 400 MHz, 10,340 MIPS, 128 DirectSound3D sound channels |
| EMU20K2 | 24-bit | 5.0 | ? | Fixes bugs in EMU20K1, PCI Express |
| Sound Core3D | 24-bit | ? | ? | Integrated analog codec and digital I/O |
See also
- AdLibAdLibAd Lib, Inc. was a manufacturer of sound cards and other computer equipment founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval...
- AuzentechAuzentechAuzentech is a Korean computer hardware manufacturer, specialized in high-definition audio equipment, and in particular PC sound cards.Auzentech has its origins in March 2005, when under the company name HDA , they launched the X-Mystique 7.1, the first consumer add-in sound card to feature Dolby...
- C-MediaC-MediaC-Media Electronics, Inc. is a Taiwanese computer hardware company that manufactures processors for PC audio and USB storage, and wireless audio devices.-Products:-PCI audio:*CMI8338*CMI8738-SX*CMI8738-LX*CMI8738-MX*CMI8768...
- EnsoniqEnsoniqEnsoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid 1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.- Company history :...
- Gravis UltrasoundGravis UltrasoundGravis UltraSound or GUS is a sound card for the IBM PC compatible system platform, made by Canada-based Advanced Gravis Computer Technology Ltd...
- M-AudioM-AudioM-Audio is a business unit of Avid Technology that designs and markets digital audio and MIDI interfaces, keyboards and MIDI controllers, synthesizers, loudspeakers, studio monitors, digital DJ systems, microphones, and music software...
- Media VisionMedia VisionMedia Vision was an American electronics manufacturer of primarily computer sound cards and CD-ROM kits, operating from 1990 to approximately 1995 in Fremont, California...
- RealtekRealtekRealtek Semiconductor Corp. , a fabless IC design house situated in the Hsinchu Science Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan, was founded in October 1987, and subsequently approved as a listed company on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 1998...
- Roland CorporationRoland Corporationis a Japanese manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, electronic equipment and software. It was founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka on April 18, 1972, with ¥33 million in capital. In 2005 Roland's headquarters relocated to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. Today it has factories in Japan,...
- TerraTecTerraTecTerraTec Electronic GmbH is a German manufacturer of sound cards, computer speakers, webcams, computer mice, video grabbers and TV tuner cards....
- Turtle Beach SystemsTurtle Beach SystemsTurtle Beach Systems is a sound card and headphone manufacturer and direct competitor with Creative Labs-branded Sound Blaster. In 1995, the company merged with Voyetra, a company that made custom software for sound cards, to form Voyetra Turtle Beach Inc which is headquartered in Elmsford, New...
- VIA EnvyVIA EnvyThe VIA Envy24 audio chipset series delivers true 24-bit sound for personal computers. While available as a discrete card, it is sold in greatest volume as an integrated solution for motherboards....
- VDMSoundVDMSoundVDMSound is an open source emulator of legacy sound card devices, designed to allow video games and other applications written for MS-DOS to run on the Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP/95/98/Me operating systems...
- Yamaha sound chips
External links
- Programming the AdLib/Sound Blaster FM Music Chips
- Sound Blaster FM emulator and online player for AdLib/Sound Blaster FM music
- Setting the BLASTER environment variable
- Creative Labs - History and Milestones
- kX Project (independent WDM driver for EMU10K1 and EMU10K2-based soundcards)
- X-Fi Preview/Review: Creative X-Fi Fatality FPS is a funky piece of kit
- Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi 24-bit Crystalizer
- Technical information on the Creative Mini Din connector
- ALive! - The Sound Blaster Live! Resource
- Creative Labs Driver Download
- List of Sound Blaster Products
- Sound Blaster Legacy PCI Product Information and Troubshooting (including various model numbers used for each product)