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What made SB better?

Trixter said:
Glad to know my hatred towards Creative is still justified.
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I'm sure you've read about the Creative Labs vs Daniel_K debacle. It made me decide to never buy anything from CL ever again (I'm not a fan of forced obsolescence).
 
Why was the Thunderboard better than the SB 1.5? I thought they had the same specs.

Someone should turn these observations into a blog post. I nominate myself unless someone else would like to do it... speak up in the next few days if you want the "privilege" :)
 
Trixter said:
Why was the Thunderboard better than the SB 1.5? I thought they had the same specs.
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The Thunder Board has more advanced ADC capabilities, with a sampling range of 4kHz - 22kHz and automatic gain control. In the interest of being fair though, the original Thunder Board proper (rather than the later, OEM-based designs) has no MIDI interface whatsoever, so my claim of "superiority" is wildly subjective... :)
 
Krille said:
I'm sure you've read about the Creative Labs vs Daniel_K debacle. It made me decide to never buy anything from CL ever again (I'm not a fan of forced obsolescence).
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Daniel_K is still putting out driver packs though and keeping the older cards running. I got a SB Audigy Platnuim running on Windows 8.1 x64 with zero problems thanks to one of his packs.

Does anyone know what the heck happened to Creative Lab's driver development team after the original Soundblaster Live card came out in 1998? Their drivers and bundled software in the ISA era was pretty good and rarely did the drivers cause major problems. Once they moved to PCI, it seemed to go way down hill fast. I'm still wondering if the engineers inherited from the Ensoniq buyout had something to do with it. It amazes me that after 4-5 product generations they STILL can't get drivers that work properly most of the time on people's machines while other vendors seemingly have no problems. That and major releases of Windows seem to catch them by surprise. I remember waiting months for proper Windows 2000 drivers for the Live card.
 
Trixter said:
I remember the SB Live! card being so buggy (at a hardware design level) that it only worked in one of my systems. It would actively interfere with other hardware in the system, and play stuttering sound.
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VIA chipset and/or dual CPU machine? The card usually worked fine on Intel chipset machines, I never had a problem with it in my 440BX system and I had the original "Gold" release card from 1998. IRQ sharing was the only potential trouble, but I fixed that with BIOS settings to force the card onto its own dedicated interrupt. Later cards and driver releases didn't seem to have IRQ problems.

I have read that Creative's interpretation of the PCI bus standard was "different" from everyone else's. Most folks blamed it on VIA producing buggy products. They had enough other issues with their south bridges at the time that I completely wrote them off for consideration (hard drive data corruption anyone?). Ironically the machine I pulled that Audigy out of had the infamously buggy VIA 686B southbridge paired with an AMD 761 northbridge.
 
I figured creative engineers knew the ISA bus but didn't know the PCI bus very well especially PnP they didn't control. Aureal cards were better then anything Creative produced at the time. Heck the first Creative PCI card was actually a rebranded card from a company they swallowed (Ensoniq maybe).

The first sound cards I purchased were not soundblasters, they were Reveal SC400 (Forget the chipset they sold a few under that model) and SC600 (Ensonic Soundscape) cards. It was later I got a SB 16 PnP and a Yamaha DBX50 waveblaster (heaven).

Since those days I have pretty much all the decent cards sold (Aztech, Ensoniq, Creative from 8 bit ISA to awe32 and beyond, Mediavision, Ultrasounds, etc) and they all have good points and bad points. The early DOS era games supported anything creative sold pretty well and later games supported other cards or at least the ones that did midi well. This support is why gamers went with soundblasters. Didn't ID's John Carmack want help with the awe32 drivers for DOOM or Quake and Creative pissed him off and he didn't support that card?

I do think the stereo SB pro 2.0 was a good card for the era, makes me wonder why they didn't emulate it with the SB16 line.
 
Trixter said:
I remember the SB Live! card being so buggy (at a hardware design level) that it only worked in one of my systems. It would actively interfere with other hardware in the system, and play stuttering sound.
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You probably had a VIA chipset motherboard with AHCI enabled. For some reason SB-Crackle was a huge problem if the CPU went to an idle state on that BIOS. Was a HUGE problem on early Athlons. (like the 1ghz Thunderbird I had at the time)

I actually wrote a program that 'fixed it' by simply preventing the CPU from being allowed to idle (by basically running an endless loop in a low priority task)... then I found out all you had to do was disable AHCI to get around the problem.

As many have said I wouldn't say SB was "better", they were just ubiquitous. In many ways they were in the right place at the right time with the right formula. Adlib put Yamaha FM on the PC, but Creative had the price point to put it in the hands of consumers -- once it started being cloned driving the price point down for those who couldn't do it, it became free advertising. When EVERYTHING says "Soundblaster compatible" people are just going to think that's the "best" as it's what's being copied the most.

I've been doing MIDI since '87, and actually worked transcribing orchestrations to MIDI and having said transcriptions sold both as MIDI and as karaoke recordings. (hangs head in shame). For me, AWE32 and even more so the "LIVE" cards with their soundfont support took thousand dollar midi hardware as standalone rackmounts and put it into the PC form factor. The LIVE and the first few Audigy cards allowed amateur musicians to have access to synthesizers that were several thousand dollars just years before.

In '99 I was doing all my recording work with an EMU Morpheus (4x EMU8K w/32 megs of RAM on-board) -- a multi-thousand dollar expansion board. Just a few years later I had better sound capabilites from a single Audigy 2 ZS for what I was doing for a fraction the cost.

It's actually funny -- Adlib is what gave most people their first taste of MIDI, and in the process completely ruined MIDI's reputation. MT-32 was better, but actually not by as much as we'd have hoped and even OPL4/later wavetable suffered from crappy samples and piss-poor default settings. That few people took the time to program in pitch benders and channel aftertouch, much less a lot of hardware not even having consistent bender ranges, programmable bender ranges, or even SUPPORT for aftertouch further gave MIDI a bad rep.

Just for laughs, here's a sample from the Morpheus:
http://www.cutcodedown.com/music/sexBomb_morpheus_demo.wma
(excuse the WMA format, it's an old, old file)

It's funny as today we've got enough CPU to be doing this stuff entirely in software. Softsynths have spelled the death of the standalone hardware synth.
This is all softsynths:
http://www.cutcodedown.com/music/hardTimesEwi_take3.mp3

... but still MIDI. It's actually scary how far we've gone with MIDI tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIGXcMZ0WnE

for example. Sample modeling's sax's are mind-blowing... especially when combined with a wind controller like the EWI or Yamaha WX series.

Bottom line, to me prior to the 16 bit audio and MP3's being commonplace SB's really weren't better than the competition, they were just the media darling. Turtle Beach, Mediavision, they all did a better job. It wasn't until the AWE32 and later that they became better hardware than the competition.

But as others have mentioned, driver support has been total garbage in the post XP era. (and even some of the XP stuff was trash compared to working in Win98). Laugh is even their cheapo consumer models are far better HARDWARE with cleaner signals and better rates than anything that's ever been made for the Mac -- but on windows it still sucks because the driver support for professional level stuff like ASIO is nowhere to be found (and even when it is it's buggy as hell)... hence why kludges like ASIO4ALL exist. It's why pro audio tends to still stay on the Mac is that between driver changes and removal of certain tools, as well as missing drivers for what used to be the most basic of functionality, it's a train wreck on modern Windows.

... and it bites companies like Creative, Asus, Yamaha and Akai when they try to make consumer level / enthusiast products. See the EWI USB which lists windows compatibility on the box, but doesn't put enough emphasis on the fact you need working ASIO drivers to actually use it -- something not found on 99.99% of Windows machines.
 
deathshadow said:
You probably had a VIA chipset motherboard with AHCI enabled. For some reason SB-Crackle was a huge problem if the CPU went to an idle state on that BIOS. Was a HUGE problem on early Athlons. (like the 1ghz Thunderbird I had at the time)
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Give that man a cigar. Was exactly my configuration.
 
Trixter said:
Give that man a cigar. Was exactly my configuration.
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The laugh is it wasn't (entirely) Creative's fault, it was a bug in the AHCI implementation from VIA. They tried to idle the bus when the CPU went into idle/low power mode -- WITHOUT checking to see if any DMA operations were going on first. The device trying to do DMA would go "hey, I'm using that" and turn things back on -- if a sound card happened to be using the audio during that time, you'd have a gap... The reason it was so noticeable on creative hardware is that when DMA was interrupted it sent the outputs low until signal resumed instead of sustaining level.

You switched back to APM by turning off AHCI, the VIA chipset stopped doing that.

Some games also had their timings screwed up by this. Most notable was "Crimson Skies" which would refuse to run at anything more than 3fps on VIA chipset Socket A / Slot A Athlons... was so bad you could barely exit the program from the menu.

Though like a lot of former FASA properties computer game offshoots, buggy as sin and made one question if the people writing said games had any clue what they were doing. Between Microprose and Microsoft Games all the "FASA Studios" games were just... bad from a programming standpoint.

-- edit -- SIDE NOTE, part of why I'm pissed off at the lack of proper APM support on any version of the Linux kernel newer than 2.4, particularly when on most P3 era laptops 2.6/newer won't turn the CPU fans on... ever.
 
cthulhu said:
I get the feeling you're actually talking about ACPI, not AHCI.
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Yer right... damn, funny flub on my part. I seem to be doing that a lot lately, AHCI instead of ACPI, Gigs instead of megs, AT instead of PC/XT...

I think senility is setting in.
 
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