Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

Trip down the memory line, this article. Serious question: does anyone care to have hardware audio cards nowadays, let alone from Creative?

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?).

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.

> 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?

> 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.

> 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.