The 6 Most Important Moments in PC Audio History

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

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4. Competitors to the 900lb. Gorilla

As we noted, Creative Labs dominated the sound card business by releasing countless products, some very similar to others. That didn’t prevent a number of companies from trying to compete. Some competed on the basis of compatibility with the Sound Blaster de-facto standard, while others tried to pioneer different approaches. We can’t possibly touch on all competitors, but let’s talk about some of the more important ones. Some, like Ensoniq, offered interesting innovations, but never really had much market presence.

The Gravis Ultrasound

Perhaps the most interesting alternative to the Sound Blaster was the flawed, but innovative, Gravis Ultrasound and its successors. Developed by Canadian company Advanced Gravis, the Ultrasound’s real claim to fame was its high quality music authoring and playback capabilities. It was the first consumer level sound card to support MIDI wavetable synthesis.

The Ultrasound’s music playback capability was astonishingly robust for the time. This being the era of DOS gaming, the Ultrasound tried to position itself as an alternative to Creative. Back then, developers had to either use third party middleware to talk to sound cards, or write directly to the hardware. The Ultrasound appealed to quite a few game developers, but it proved to be a difficult platform to develop for.

Gravis also attempted to build compatibility with the Sound Blaster by emulation, through the use of a TSR (terminate-and-stay resident) known as “Mega-Em.” This particular piece of software was a pain to run, and caused problems with games that consumed large amounts of system RAM and often needed to use extended memory on their own.

Media Vision

Media Vision arrived on the scene in the early 1990s, replete with substantial venture capital funding. The original Pro AudioSpectrum card featured ostensibly better hardware than Creative Labs, but always had minor compatibility problems that didn’t make them 100% Sound Blaster compatible. Media Vision also helped drive the multimedia revolution, being one of the first companies to bundle a sound card with a CD-ROM drive, and even helped develop and sell several multimedia games.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Media Vision was its meteoric growth and equally rapid tumble, due to a massive financial scandal due to securities fraud charges against the founders. According to Wikipedia, this securities fraud case cost investors and bond holders $200,000,000. Eventually, Media Vision sold off all its assets and inventory, and morphed into a new company: Aureal Semiconductor.

Aureal A3D

While Aureal Semiconductor rose from the ashes of Media Vision, it was a very different company. Its business model was similar to graphics chip companies: it was a fabless chip company that designed its audio chips, farmed the manufacturing out to external fab facilities and sold the chips to other companies to make boards.

The first chip was the Aureal Vortex, but its real secret sauce was A3D. A3D was an early implementation of HRTF (hear related transfer functions), which could procedurally synthesize positional audio. A3D was built on the original NASA research into HRTFs. While HRTFs aren’t perfect, the tech as it pertained to PC gaming was better than anything else that existed at the time. Game developers like LucasArts and iD software engineered A3D support into their titles.

Aureal eventually fell victim to patent infringement litigation filed by Creative Labs. Despite winning all claims brought against it, the cost of the litigation drove Aureal out of business, and the company’s intellectual property and assets were, in the ultimate irony, bought by Creative Labs.

3. The DirectX Era

Even though the Sound Blaster de-facto standard owned a vast majority of the market, game developers were growing tired of writing to bare metal. While middleware suppliers existed, they tended to be small and lacked the ability to support more than a handful of existing audio suppliers.

Windows 95 arrived in summer of 1995, and along with Windows 95 came the promise of DirectX. DirectX was a fully supported middleware layer built into Windows, supported by Microsoft and aimed at the hearts and minds of game developers. DirectX offered an abstraction layer for underlying hardware, enabling game developers to write to a single, albeit sometimes complex, API. This API included DirectSound. Windows 95 also brought a standardized software-based wavetable based on Roland’s implementation of the 128-voice general MIDI sample set.

                                   It’s hard to believe that DirectX and Windows 95 happened 15 years ago.

DirectX and Windows laid the groundwork for what would eventually spell the end of sound cards as a required piece of hardware for PCs and PC gamers. While sound cards are still sold, they’re no longer an essential part of the PC gaming mix. Why did sound cards become more of a luxury accessory than a necessity?

Two things happened: multicore, high performance CPUs, and bad drivers.

Real-time, multichannel positional audio processing could consume significant amounts of a CPU’s available horsepower in the era of single core processors. But as PC processor floating point capabilities became more robust, core clock frequencies increased, and dual and quad core processors became commonplace, the CPU could handle most of the audio processing chores. The need to offload audio processing to an external DSP (digital signal processor) was no longer a necessity.

2. The Sound Blaster

Creative Labs had made some attempts to enter the sound card business with something called the Creative Music System. The CMS was later relabeled “Game Blaster”, but it made little headway in either market. The Sound Blaster arrived on the scene in 1989, using the same Yamaha FM synthesizer chip as the Ad Lib.

However, the Sound Blaster also included the capability to play back digitized sound samples. The actual audio quality was pretty poor: monaural, 23KHz sampling frequency, with recording sample rates at up to 12kHz (roughly AM radio quality). It was able to decompress ADPCM encode audio, so game developers could ship sound files that were fairly compressed. Compression was a good thing – this was back in the day when most games still shipped on floppy disks.

                                     The AWE64 was the last ISA sound card from Creative Labs.

                        The Sound Blaster Live was an early effort to support multichannel PC audio.

In addition to the ability to handle digital audio, the Sound Blaster had an IBM-compatible analog game port, making it a one-stop solution for gamers. While Ad Lib was trying to build its response – the Ad Lib Gold – the Sound Blaster pretty much swept the market, garnering not only support from gamers but from game developers, as it allowed them to (finally) add digital audio effects to their titles.. Since the Sound Blaster was completely compatible with the Ad Lib, gamers could buy it and feel confident their existing games would work.

One of the first games to support the Sound Blaster’s digital audio capabilities was Wing Commander II, in the form of an expansion pack consisting of seven floppy disks. Those floppies contained all the digitized audio for in-game voice. So you not only got music, but your wingmen and opponents would talk to you, and some of the cut scenes were voiced as well.

The Sound Blaster went through numerous product iterations over the years, including multiple similar versions of some products. Eventually, Creative added support for digital signal processors to offload audio processing from the PC, integrated MIDI wavetable support, and support for newer PC interfaces (16-bit ISA, then PCI and, eventually, PCI Express). The steady stream of product releases, plus aggressive marketing and occasional litigation against competitors kept Creative Labs on top of the sound card market for two decades.

1. The Death of the Commodity Sound Card

As Windows XP arrived in 2001, Microsoft built into XP the capability to monitor events -- particularly system and software crashes -- and upload them to a centralized database with the permission of the user. The boys in Redmond collected vast amounts of data on system problems over XP’s lifetime. They also collected data from its support centers, as users called in to get help with various problems.

It seemed that audio hardware -- particularly sound cards with onboard hardware acceleration -- accounted for more problem issues than any other single piece of hardware. Even graphics drivers, often the bane of PC gamers, didn’t create as many problems.

So when Microsoft developed Windows Vista, it designed Vista with native support only for software audio solutions. Every motherboard has basic codec (compressor-decompressor) hardware built into it; this was required by the AC97 (Audio Codec ’97) standard developed for PCs jointly by Microsoft and major hardware suppliers. The company reasoned that given all those excess CPU cycles, it could remove one complication by removing built-in support for hardware accelerated audio.

The sound card industry – now mostly driven by Creative Labs – responded by developing OpenAL, an open audio API aimed mostly at game development. OpenAL is useful because of its operating system independence, and quite a few modern games support it. But OpenAL also has a fallback for systems without separate audio hardware, meaning that hardware acceleration isn’t needed.

               Did the Blue Screen of Death ultimately led to the downfall of the add-in soundcard?

                                                               It definitely played a role.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts to marginalize sound cards, Creative Labs developed perhaps the most robust PC sound card chip developed to date, the E-Mu 20K1, aka the X-Fi. The X-Fi was built on a 130nm manufacturing process, had 51 million transistors and a robust DSP architecture that could handle most types of PC audio. Creative had taken the lessons of its earlier driver problems to heart, and the X-Fi drivers were generally more robust than previous Creative drivers.

In some respects, though, the X-Fi and sound cards built on it, plus Creative’s revamped software effort, was too little, too late. On top of that, Creative didn’t jump on the PCI Express bandwagon for too long, and the PCI Express X-Fi cards ended up being pretty late to the party. It’s likely that history will look at the X-Fi as being interesting, but somewhat irrelevant, technology in the history of PC sound.

Most modern motherboards, particularly midrange and high end retail motherboards used in PC game systems, mostly support sound through CPU processing and output through simple hardware codecs. Since sound cards are no longer required, they’ve moved up the spectrum, offering richer capabilities but at generally higher prices. In the end, the PC sound card, which helped enriched gaming experiences for PC gamers since the original Ab Lib, are now really optional items for audiophiles and audio geeks rather than a necessary add-on just to hear high quality sound from your PC.