The 6 Most Important Moments in PC Audio History

Posted 10/04/2010 at 5:36pm | by Loyd Case

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Before I actually talk about PC audio itself, it’s worth mentioning a couple of important dates in audio history, pre-PC.

The first really practical application of stereophonic sound was patented by record company EMI in the 1930s, aimed at creating stereo recordings for music playback using vinyl record. The actual implementation didn’t happen until the early 1950s, when LP and 45 RPM stereo records started being sold.

Stereo became the norm in home audio systems for decades, despite the ill-fated consumer experiment with quadrophonic sound in the early 1970s. During the 1970s and 80s, Dolby Labs began experimenting with multichannel audio for film. This wasn’t for home audio, but for movie theaters. Most of the early efforts were analog, using magnetic stripes on the film itself. Later, Dolby created a stereo optical format. Despite the use of “stereo”, this was actually multichannel audio, supporting four or more channels, but was known as stereo because there were no surround or rear channels.

In the late 1980s, Dolby Digital was born, and fully digital soundtracks for both movies and, later, DVDs came to pass. People everywhere become more comfortable with multichannel audio, even the matrix versions used in techniques like Dolby ProLogic and its successors. Digital Theater Systems (DTS) became Dolby’s leading competitor, particularly in home theater audio reproduction.

Now let’s rewind to the 1960s. Researchers at NASA began experimenting with the idea that sounds arrive at your ear from different places at different times. The shape of your ear has an effect on how those different sound waves are channeled into your inner ear. Your brain interprets the delays and directionality to build positional cues, so you can figure out where and how far away a particular sound is.

They took this idea a step further, using some sophisticated math to model those sound delays, shaping the audio using something called “head related transfer functions” or HRTFs. In other words, different audio streams that may come from a single source could be manipulated to seem to the listener like they were coming from different directions and distances.

Years later, HRTF for positional audio began arriving for PCs; we’ll talk about that shortly. Okay, let's get on with the list.

6. The First PC Sound Card: The Ad Lib Music Synthesizer

When the IBM PC arrived on the scene in the early 1980s, its CGA graphics option could, in theory, handle low resolution games. But unlike its home computing competitors from Apple, Commodore, and Atari, there was no provision for any kind of audio beyond diagnostic beeps. That’s probably because IBM’s original target for its first PC was small businesses.

Game developers and gamers wanted better sound from their games. Along came Ad Lib, Inc., founded by a former music professor named Martin Prevel. Ad Lib, a Canadian company, was the first hardware manufacturer to ship a dedicated add-in PC sound card: the Ad Lib Music Synthesizer.

                                  Ah, the Ad Lib. Unfortunately, first doesn’t always mean forever.

The Ad Lib used the Yamaha YM3812, an FM synthesizer chip. FM synthesis builds sounds in a completely procedural manner, similar to the early Moog synthesizers, rather than using digitized samples of actual audio. Good FM synthesis can actually generate reasonably good quality music. The real problem with the Ad Lib was the complete lack of any digital audio support. That precluded the use of voice samples for dialog, for example.

The first game to actually support the Ad Lib was Sierra On-Line’s King’s Quest IV. Our first encounter with the Ad Lib was in an early LucasArts flight sim, Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. The game used FM synthesis for sound effects (gunfire, engine sounds), and the level of immersion was startling. So being a classic early adopter, we ordered an Ad Lib after watching the demo.

So, what happened to Ad Lib? Sadly, the company made one of the classic errors of technology startups: it didn’t respond in a timely manner to new competition. That competition came from a company familiar to gamers everywhere: Creative Labs, and the Sound Blaster card. In 1992, Ad Lib filed for bankruptcy, while Creative’s Sound Blaster family continues to exist today.

5. Sierra Online Sells Its Own

Sierra On-Line’s Ken Williams wanted better music in Sierra’s line of adventure games. So the company hired musicians to compose lush soundtracks, and then included MIDI files of those soundtracks in the games. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files consist of short messages that tell a particular piece of hardware the pitch, intensity, and other information about a particular sound. It’s up to the hardware to decode the file into something resembling music.

               Imagine what Sierra’s games would have been like without those cheesy MIDI scores.

To better facilitate music, Sierra On-Line sold a Roland MT-32 and Roland LAPC-I MIDI synthesizer hardware. The MT-32 was a rather bulky external box, while the LAPC-I was a very long, 8-bit ISA card. Other game companies began supporting the higher quality Roland MIDI for games. I used an LAPC-I for about a year, and the music it generated was certainly a cut above what the Yamaha OPL chips built into the various Sound Blasters (and the original Ad Lib) could generate. But the LAPC-I was over $200, and the MT-32 was a cool $550–very large chunks of change just to get a better soundtrack.

The prohibitively high cost of the Roland hardware turned a lot of users off. When Creative Labs shipped the Sound Blaster 16 in 1992, it included a connector for daughter cards with built in wavetables capable of delivering higher quality MIDI. A mini-industry boomed for a short period of time, with different companies selling MIDI daughter cards for the Sound Blaster 16 and similar cards.

                          MIDI daughter cards attempted to bring higher quality music to PC gaming

Eventually, wavetable support was built into the basic sound card itself, and later into Windows, so the need for additional external hardware faded away.