Noise and Heat

By Jerry Pournelle

February 23, 2004

(Noise and Heat :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 283 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Sound Cards

Years ago, AdLib dominated the sound card market. Then two Americans named Brown and Waugh began promoting a Singapore company's sound cards, and the Creative SoundBlaster story began. In those days sound cards were both expensive and tricky to install. Creative did a lot to simplify installation, and also worked with various game and other sound source companies to provide interface hooks and sound drivers. The result was that Creative took over and dominated the sound card market, and there was a period in which the company had no effective rivals other than very high end products like Roland. The best sound card for the money in those days was made by Turtle Beach, but this wasn't well known.

Moore's Law affected sound cards just as it did every other aspect of computing. Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips got smaller and more complex, to the extent that what used to take a large card now fits into a couple of chips. The result has been more than good enough sound native to motherboards. Meanwhile, SIIG and other companies moved in at the low price end, and Creative no longer dominates the market.

Creative set a number of standards during its period of dominance, and it is still easier to set up a system to play legacy games on systems with Creative SoundBlaster cards. "Easier" is a relative term: It's still hard work involving major arcana to get many old DOS and early Windows games to run. If you have to do it, look in at www.epanorama.net for background information and then do a Google search for your particular legacy problem. There will be a lot of information, some of it useful. You may also find out that what you want to do is impossible, and be advised to dual boot into Windows 98, or even Windows 95.

We've looked at a number of sound cards recently. Most work all right, some better than others, but one crucial test is their ability to play DVD movies with synthesized 5.1

 Page 1 of 1