A few days ago we brought you the evolution of sound cards, this time we bring you a list of what we consider to be the best sound cards in history. We do it in the form of a historical review of what we consider to be the most outstanding sound cards in history and the ones that scored the most in the hardware market.
Today sound cards are peripherals designed for music professionals, but there was a time when they were as important as a graphics card, that is why we have selected what we consider to be the most important sound cards in history , the ones that most marked their users.
Adlib Music Synthesizer, the first of the sound cards
The first sound card with a face and eyes on the PC was the Adlib Music Synthesizer, which came with Yamaha’s YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2, which offered 9 channels of FM synthesis. It was a card that marked a before and after in the PC market, not by jumping from the sound of a speaker or a sound card of three square waves, if you were lucky enough to have the sound card of Tandy.
Its greatest peculiarity was the fact of including the MPU-401, which was for years the MIDI processor par excellence, which made it the sound card par excellence not only for games but also for those who wanted to make music in the PC. With this, the multimedia era on the PC began and it was shown that the PC was much more than a boring office computer.
It didn’t take long for games to adopt this sound card as an option to play the audio of their games, but the reason it became famous is the fact that the MIDI port could be used as a Joystick port, allowing gameplay. in the computer.
Sound Blaster, the beginning of a standard in sound cards
The first Sound Blaster was released in 1989 also using the YM3812 chip, which is the same as the one on the Adlib sound card that we have seen above. It was a card that was connected to an 8-bit ISA port, the forerunner of PCI, and that offered sound in mono quality, this means that it could only reproduce one channel of sound.
As a curiosity, the card stands out for the fact that it has a volume control on the back of it, since it does not have a single digital element and it is not possible to raise or lower the volume to which it transmits the sound. In general it is a sound card similar to the Adlib in its technical specifications, but it had an element that differentiated it.
Over time, Sound Blaster became synonymous with graphics card and it is paradoxical that what was a clone of the first standard became a standard in itself. Although much of the “blame” was for the later models that Creative Labs released to the market that became standard.
Sound Blaster 2 and Sound Blaster Pro
In 1991, Creative released an improved version of the original Sound Blaster under the name Sound Blaster 2, this time with two Yamaha OPL2s instead of one, allowing it to play on two channels and therefore broadcast through two speakers in stereo.
Looking at the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0, Creative Labs decided to use the Yamaha OPL3 or also known as Yamaha YMF262, which at first glance looked like two YM3812s together, but had certain performance improvements that made it a little better than these. .
The biggest peculiarity of the first Sound Blaster Pro was the fact that it was the first sound card with a CD-ROM interface included as standard, which was nothing more than an additional IDE port integrated into the sound card.
Sound Blaster 16, the most classic
The first sound card in Creative’s Sound Blaster family to be compatible with the 16-bit ISA standard, this allowed it to reproduce sound at 44 KHz and 16-bit, which was necessary to take full advantage of the CD-ROM. In addition, the increase in the communication bus meant an improvement in sound quality, but I still made use of the Yamaha OPL3 of the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0.
A version called Sound Blaster 16 ASP came out, which carried with it a DSP processor, the CT-1748 QSound Advanced Signal Processor (ASP), later renamed the Creative Signal Processor (CSP). This processor gave it the ability to process PCM sound and wavetables, allowing it to reproduce digitized sound instead of using FM synthesis. In addition, it would allow in combination with the OPL3 to add special effects such as
The Sound Blaster 16 had not just one, but several different models with different features, some could even have additional RAM added, but Creative left this option only for the more professional models in the range. What’s more, Creative came to sell a daughterboard that was connected to the Sound Blaster 16 called Wave Blaster and that included the DSP of the Sound Blaster 16 ASP in it.
Gravis Ultrasound, the first with wavetable
After the Sound Blasters string, we have to talk about the Gravis UltraSound, which was the sound card that exposed the Creative Sound Blasters in 1992 and forced them to launch their Sound Blaster AWE32. The particularity of the Gravis UltraSound? To be the first PC sound card with native support for PCM sound and wave tables in the history of the PC, which is why it marked a before and after in PC sound cards.
It used the GF1 chip and carried 256 KB of RAM for samples, it could reproduce by itself a polyphony of up to 32 voices at 19 KHz quality or 14 channels at 44.1 KHz quality. As a curiosity, the classic from Id Software, Doom, brought serial compatibility with this sound card.
Sound Blaster AWE32, final goodbye to FM
The Sound Blaster AWE32 was the first sound card in which Creative Labs put FM synthesis aside by adopting as its main sound processor the same sound DSP that they had added as an expansion option for the Sound Blaster 16. But for maintaining compatibility with previous Sound Blasters also carried the OPL3 for games that required it, so technically the AWE32 was a Sound Blaster 16 ASP.
What differentiated it is that it was a 2 in 1, since in the other half of the sound card I have a synthesizer with the EMU8000 and EMU8011 chips. What made it the reference sound card for a good part of the musicians of the time.
Its name was not due to the use of a 32-bit bus, since it still used the 16-bit ISA bus that the Sound Blaster 16 did, but to the fact that this sound card supported up to 32 simultaneous voices. Years later the AWE64 was released with a new DSP that allowed it to play up to 64 voices at the same time, but made use of expensive and proprietary memory expansions, so we decided to discard it.
Sound Blaster 32 PnP
The Sound Blaster 32 was Creative Labs’ bet for 1995, it was a low-cost version of the Sound Blaster AWE32, which had all the capabilities of the Sound Blaster AWE32, but the Sound Blaster 16 compatibility circuitry was reduced to a single chip called Vibra.
The really impressive thing? Despite being a low-cost sound card, it had much better sound quality than the Sound Blaster 16 and had Plug and Play support, in which it was not necessary to configure the card manually for the PC to recognize it, but the trade-off is which lacked the additional RAM slots to expand the RAM on the AWE32 card
Multi-channel sound cards, beyond stereo
Starting in the mid-90s, people began to talk about multimedia configurations composed of several speakers at the same time, the idea was to deliver the same feeling as cinema on a PC, all accompanied by the appearance of 3D games. Suddenly there was a demand for sound cards with more than two channels. This would eventually allow the adoption of multi-channel sound standards, but at the same time required that the sound cards be adapted to have several speaker outputs and not just two.
The arrival of these cards coincided with the release of Windows 95 and with it the DirectSound and Direct3D APIs, which broke compatibility with the way in which audio was made in MS-DOS. This led to cards that were capable of playing audio in Windows 9x but unable to play it with MS-DOS games.
Ensoniq Audio PCI, the first of the multichannel sound cards
The Ensoniq Audio PCI has the particularity of having been in history the first sound card compatible with Microsoft‘s Direct3DSound API, which is the DirectX section for multi-channel audio and with 3D positioning. The card supported up to 128 simultaneous voices at the same time with 48KHz sampling quality.
It became very famous among PC assemblers, who began to include it as standard in their computers, its backwards compatibility with the Sound Blaster 16 made it an excellent option for Windows users who wanted to play MS-DOS games .
As a fun fact, Ensoniq was bought in 1997 by Creative Labs and its range of AudioPCI sound cards was renamed Sound Blaster PCI.
MaxiSound Dynamic 3D
Guillemot was a PC hardware brand that many will remember for being the first brands to bring us the 3DFx Voodoo Graphics, but among other things the sound card that we are going to talk about now. By the way, Guillemot still exists and owns companies such as Hercules, Thrustmaster and DJuced, which have become his trademarks.
The MaxiSound Dynamic 3D was a graphics card that around 1997 began to be promoted as a multi-channel sound card, having the ability to process up to 48 simultaneous voices on 4 different channels. But for those who were not interested in positional sound, it was capable of playing up to 64 voices simultaneously.
Its built-in DSP was rated at 50 million instructions per second, allowing it to not depend on the CPU to process sound, freeing the CPU from that task.
Intel Audio Codec 97: “the beginning of the end” of sound cards
In 1997, Intel developed what is called Audio Codec 97, an audio codec created internally at Intel that was devised for the creation of hardware for the reproduction of audio integrated in motherboards and sound cards. Its specifications include:
- High quality sound with 16 or 20 bit precision.
- Support for 5.1 surround sound, this is 5 channels and a sub-woffer.
- Sampling rate at 96 KHz in stereo and up to 48 KHz in multichannel.
The AC97 consisted of two components, the first of which was the DSP that was included as standard in the architecture chipset and grouped all the digital components of the architecture, but the analog components had to be purchased separately and these could come from serial on the motherboard. What’s more, when Intel started adding serial modems to their motherboards, many of them used modem hardware to have a sound card included as standard on the motherboard.
It was the beginning of the end of sound cards, because by integrating the serial component for many, it was no longer necessary to buy a sound card when buying a PC, although it was not the end point, since being its two halves not all motherboards were separately supported as standard.
Sound Blaster Live!
In 1998 the first multi-channel Sound Blaster appeared under the name Sound Blaster Live !. Although to do so, the Intel AC97 standard was adopted with all its technical characteristics in full, also in that same year the people of Creative began to sell a kit with a DVD player for PC, so they decided to give it the ability to decode Dolby Digital 5.1, being the only sound card of the time that could do it.
Its first version however did not have multi-channel support, although it brought with it the EMU10K1 DSP. The most powerful of its times with a total power of 1000 MIPS, which allows you to implement the DirectSound 3D EAX system without the need for the CPU to process it.
The successors to the Sound Blaster Live were the Sound Blaster Audigy. Which did not offer major changes except the fact of increasing the base specifications.
NVIDIA SoundStorm
There was a time when NVIDIA made motherboards and not just graphics cards, which were called NForce on PCs and had built-in hardware for audio.
The first version of SoundStorm or also known as MCPX, had the ability to reproduce up to 256 simultaneous voices without positioning and 64 voices with 3D positioning, it was also capable of decoding the sound of Dolby Digital 5. It became famous for being the sound hardware from the first Xbox.
Intel HD Audio, sound cards leave the home market
In 2004 Intel released the successor to the AC97, Intel HD Audio, which was not backward compatible but was the end of sound cards outside of the professional market.
All hardware that is based on this specification is capable of reproducing audio with 192 Khz sampling in stereo and up to 96 Khz and 32 bits in 8 channels. Apart from that it supports 7.1 decoding. It was adopted in unison in the industry, especially by Intel and AMD that began to integrate it into their sound cards already integrated into motherboards.
Unlike the AC97, it has support for the decoding of Dolby multi-channel audio systems and has been updated from 2004 to now adding support for these formats. If the AC97 was the beginning of the end for home sound cards, Intel HD Audio completely eliminated them from the market.
