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What made SB better?

S

Smack2k

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What made Soundblaster considered so much "better" than other cards of the early - late 90s?

Were the clones just as good?

Were any Better but less expensive due to not having the SB name?
 
Sound Blaster was just the standard in compatibility terms. Of course there were better and cheaper sound cards (later Gravis Ultrasound for example) but the compatibility was not 100%.
 
Sound Blaster was the established brand for sound cards. Nobody was able to compete with them. They had the market penetration / marketing and were leading massive consumer market development. There were many cards that were a lot worse, some the same, some a little better and all cheaper. There were a few that were much better but also a lot more expensive.

And again: a sound card is not necessarily a sound card. A MIDI card is separate from a FM / samples card. Most valuable are the MIDI card: MPU-401s, daughterboards (DB(50/51/60)XG, SCD-10/15, SCB-7/55) / wavetable cards (RAP-10, SCC-1(A/B), LAPC-I, SW60XG) and RAM based MIDI cards with special chips (GUS / Mediatrix). Early FM / sample based cards are also valuable: CT1300/10/30/50, CT1600/10/20/80/90, CT2600, CT5320/30.

Once you get to the Windows 95 generation cards the value usually drops because so many were produced / are still available. Plus sound became generic and standardized through Windows 95 drivers. And HDD / CD-ROM / DVD space became so cheap that MIDI was no longer required for good music in games: it was just recorded / sampled.

A good rule of thumb is that the early sound cards that were produced in lower volume with high quality are the most valuable. Other early sound cards without a brand name (e.g. generic clones) or those produced in large volume (CT1600 comes to mind) are less valuable. Other mid period sound cards with exceptional quality and/or cult following (GUS: demo scene) with low volume are also somewhat valuable. Cards made in high volume in the mid and late period (and especially generic cards with "Crystal" chipsets for example) have little to no value. SB16 with ASP/CSP chips are somewhat more valuable than regular SB16s for bragging rights.
 
PeterLI said:
Sound Blaster was the established brand for sound cards. Nobody was able to compete with them. They had the market penetration / marketing and were leading massive consumer market development.
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That's an interesting view of things.

To paraphrase a post I made on Trixter's blog a few years ago:

...it’s pretty obvious that Media Vision was Creative’s main threat, and to whom they played catch-up on and off for a number of years. Consider the following:

  • Nov 1989 – Creative releases the Sound Blaster 1.0
  • Apr 1991 – MediaVision ships the MPC-compliant, stereo, 2xOPL2-based Pro AudioSpectrum
  • May 1991 – Creative announces the MPC-compliant, stereo, 2xOPL2-based Sound Blaster Pro
  • Aug 1991 – Creative ships the Sound Blaster Pro
  • Apr 1992 – MediaVision ships the 16-bit, OPL3-based Pro AudioSpectrum16
  • Jun 1992 – Creative announces the 16-bit, OPL3-based Sound Blaster 16
  • Nov 1992 – Creative ships the Sound Blaster 16

So, yeah, you can thank Media Vision for driving all of Creative's early "innovations."
 
I love Cloudschatze's insight then and now. The catch-up is hilarious and humiliating; it is a shame that Media Vision didn't survive, because they had better products.

Creative was a company that survived despite itself (they made many early blunders) because they stumbled onto a winning product at the right time: A clone of Adlib, plus a digital output channel, plus a joystick port. You could run existing Adlib software, you could save a slot building your joystick-enabled PC, and the cost was the same as Adlib. Being the only digital card for any standard PC, they had a corner on that aspect of the market, and as soon as a few games started supporting the digital channel (Tongue of the Fatman, Prince of Persia, King's Quest V, Stellar 7, and Rise of the Dragon being among the earliest examples), all subsequent cards had to support Creative's interface.

By "early blunders", I am referring to the following (which is only a partial list):


  • Having a truly horrible software development kit. They expected everyone to use CT-VOICE.DRV instead of program the card directly. (Adlib also expected people to use their SOUND.COM driver, but unlike Creative, their SDK was great.) The Creative SDK omits so much information that reverse-engineered textfile docs on BBSes were more useful. To this day, their ADPCM modes are undocumented.
  • Having all tech support out of Singapore for the first few years staffed with people who barely spoke English (I have "fond" memories of calling tech support to ask exactly what the hi- and low-pass filter cutoffs were on the Sound Blaster Pro hi/low filter mixer setting were, and having the support person "hiss" and "blow into the speaker" as audible examples of what they do).
  • Early revisions of cards not supporting an "auto-init DMA" mechanism, which meant playing sound continuously had a "click" every time a buffer switchover occurred. Took them nearly two years to add this functionality.
  • Sound Blaster 16 -- Where do I start? Despite using "16-bit" as major marketing maneuver to crush the Adlib Gold (and Adlib as a company), the actual ADC/DACs were 12-bit internally -- same as Adlib Gold. (Tragically, the Adlib Gold had much cleaner output). Also, no Sound Blaster Pro backward compatibility in stereo because they omitted the "stereo" bit from the hardware mixer. ASP/CSP DSP add-on was a ton of hype without any actual product support other than Creative's own drivers and bundled utils, which did very little with it (mostly ADPCM encoding/decoding which all 486s were powerful enough to do in software anyway).

Argh.
 
Purely from a volume of sales perspective I do not believe MediaVision ever came close to Creative. I am not talking about innovation / originality. There have been many: including AdLib, MediaVision, Gravis and so on that did better. Obviously Sound Blaster was not technically better but they were a lot stronger at sales / marketing and product pricing for the massive market.
 
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Smack2k said:
What made Soundblaster considered so much "better" than other cards of the early - late 90s?
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Not "better", just ubiquitous.

Were the clones just as good?
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Depends on what you mean. If you mean features-wise, most clones offered additional functionality that added some very attractive features. For example, the Aztech line combined Sound Blaster, Covox Speech Thing, and Disney Sound Source compatibility onto a single card. The Gravis Ultrasound was a wavetable card with it's own RAM that could play up to 32 (!) stereo voices simultaneously, with some limitations.

But... if you mean compatibility-wise, that was a mixed bag. Some clones were extremely compatible (Media Vision Thunderboard comes to mind, which IIRC was a drop-in replacement that didn't need any drivers); others were kindly described as "acceptably compatible", such as the Gravis Ultrasound which saw no less than two completely different SB emulation packages come out for it in its lifetime.
 
Yes the Thunderboard is a drop in replacement for 8-bit SB cards without the need for special drivers. It was considered a budget product though with no midi support. It worked rather well in dos and windows. Still have the one I bought.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Yes the Thunderboard is a drop in replacement for 8-bit SB cards without the need for special drivers. It was considered a budget product though with no midi support. It worked rather well in dos and windows. Still have the one I bought.
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I can vouch for that. My Thunderboard has been up and running in my SX since the early 90's.
 
I never read about anybody ever getting passionate about the generic Sound Blaster standard (outside of Creative). Creative didn't invent the Adlib (Ad Lib & Yamaha), the game port (IBM) and they were not the first to come up with a workable MIDI solution for the PC (Roland) or even a DMA driven digital audio input and output function (Tandy). Its greatest claim to fame prior to the Sound Blaster was the Game Blaster, which impressed no one and was not a great success. However, it did have one stroke of genius in combining all those features into one affordable expansion card, even if the digital audio took time for it to be widely adopted, the Game Blaster chips were soon dropped and few programs used the MIDI function.

As Cloudschatze said, Creative was more reactive after the release of the Sound Blaster. I believe the next big impact the company had was the sound font technology, which really came into its own once Windows 95 was released and the standard was open in 2.0. Then Media Vision had been reincarnated as Aureal and released its 3D audio API, A3D, and Vortex PCI sound chip. Creative was again forced to play catch up with EAX and the Sound Blaster Live!, lawsuits were filed and Creative ended up buying Aureal and ended the last of the great sound card wars.
 
Cloudschatze said:
...it’s pretty obvious that Media Vision was Creative’s main threat, and to whom they played catch-up on and off for a number of years. Consider the following:

  • Nov 1989 – Creative releases the Sound Blaster 1.0
  • Apr 1991 – MediaVision ships the MPC-compliant, stereo, 2xOPL2-based Pro AudioSpectrum
  • May 1991 – Creative announces the MPC-compliant, stereo, 2xOPL2-based Sound Blaster Pro
  • Aug 1991 – Creative ships the Sound Blaster Pro
  • Apr 1992 – MediaVision ships the 16-bit, OPL3-based Pro AudioSpectrum16
  • Jun 1992 – Creative announces the 16-bit, OPL3-based Sound Blaster 16
  • Nov 1992 – Creative ships the Sound Blaster 16
Click to expand...

Now you've got me wondering -- what was the timeline of the Gravis Ultrasound and the AWE32? If the GUS came first, then we have yet another example of Creative playing catch-up.
 
Trixter said:
Now you've got me wondering -- what was the timeline of the Gravis Ultrasound and the AWE32? If the GUS came first, then we have yet another example of Creative playing catch-up.
Click to expand...
Gravis Ultrasound - Announced 10/1991, Released 10/1992
Creative AWE32 - Announced ??/????, Released 03/1994
 
Marketing. Nothing more. I had a Stereo/F-X which ran circles round the Soundblaster.
 
Cloudschatze said:
Gravis Ultrasound - Announced 10/1991, Released 10/1992
Creative AWE32 - Announced ??/????, Released 03/1994
Click to expand...

Glad to know my hatred towards Creative is still justified.

I was a fan, ignorant of alternatives, until I bought an SB 16 ASP and waited years for something to support the ASP, which nothing ever did. Disappointment turned to loathing when I learned its ADC/DAC internals were 12-bit.
 
Trixter said:
Glad to know my hatred towards Creative is still justified.
Click to expand...

I too, disliked Creative, because of course, I had the superiour Stereo-F/X, but like you, that turned to loathing: I bought a Creative CD-ROM drive (for my Amiga no less) and it turned out to be a piece of refuse.
 
Never had to hit my head using other sound cards. Only recently, last 5 years or so, actualy own SB products. Guess I was lucky
 
A few more musings...

  • Ad Lib had nearly three years of almost no competition prior to the debut of Creative's Sound Blaster. Perhaps perceptions were different back then, but that's an unreasonably long time to go without a follow-up product. Idle hands are the Devil's workshop, after all, and the "Killer Card" certainly earned its nickname in another sense. While design work for the Ad Lib Gold began as early as 1990, chipset production delays pushed its release into 1992. During the interim, Ad Lib really should have issued some sort of response to the Sound Blaster, but blew what (in my opinion) could have been a perfect opportunity...

    Ad Lib could have immediately offered a stereo MSC option. This wouldn't have required anything but fitting newly-produced MSC cards with the address selection jumper block (that's already part of the design), as well as some additional programming documentation for stereo support. A pair of cards could have been marketed as a set, or the additional, "stereo-enabling" card could have been pitched to existing card owners. Granted, this wouldn't have been much of a response to the Sound Blaster, but it would have at least been something.

  • The Sound Blaster wasn't yet a standard by the time Media Vision designed and released the original Pro AudioSpectrum. By at least one account, Wing Commander II was what tipped the scales in favor of the Sound Blaster. Granted, Media Vision realized very early on that they needed an SB-compatible product, and hence released the Thunder Board in July 1991 - a scant THREE MONTHS after the release of the original PAS. It should also be noted that the Thunder Board was superior to Creative's then singular product - the Sound Blaster 1.5. (And, as everyone knows, Creative's response was to have their SDK drivers crash upon detecting a Thunder Board card, through use of the latter's twice-read identification byte, resulting in lawsuits from both sides. Brilliant stuff!)

  • The acquisition of E-MU Systems was arguably the smartest thing Creative ever did, period, with Dave Rossum being of exceptional importance. Consider for a moment what fate might have befallen Creative Labs without the EMU8K/10K/20K chips, which are largely (if not entirely) his designs.

  • Waveguide Synthesis. Remember when that was going to succeed General MIDI as the next big thing? No...?

    Media Vision was working with John Chowning (whose name should be familiar to you), as early as 1993, on an integrated waveguide synthesis chip/solution. That product never materialized, but it didn't stop Creative from once again playing the catch-up game by licensing Seer Systems software-based waveguide/wavetable solution in 1996. This was, of course, a huge hit with consumers, and a product for which everyone today has fond memories <sarcasm>.
 
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