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.

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.

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.

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).

Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.

This was really the primary way to get any sort of good sound. And when it came time to upgrade my computer late last year to an AM5 chipset, I realized that my Klipsch 5.1 system wasn't going to cleanly plug into the on-motherboard outputs. You have to split and use your front panel audio out in order to feed the rear channel, which is kludgy and stupid, so off I went again, and found I could still buy a Sound Blaster: this time, the AE-7. It's been pretty reliable, has a little volume knob/input guy for my headset, and the desktop software and drivers aren't as nightmarish as the internet had led me to believe they'd be, even on Windows 11.

It did lead me down this path of wondering how CL was doing nowadays, so it's funny to come across this piece outlining their history in detail and where they are today.

I was also one of the people who worked on the Nomad II MP3 player.

A genuinely down-to-earth person. An engineer’s engineer, somewhat like the Woz. If he had only found his "Steve Jobs", someone who had the vision and marketing savvy, Creative would be have a been major tech player.

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.

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.

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.

I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.

(iykyk)

How did Creative end up with offices there? Was there some kind of research going on at Oklahoma State University?

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T6

good times.

https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/

https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...

This whole thing just drowns in jargon and quick technical assertions that are never explained. It is skimming the surface (as though clipped together from various poorly understood sources) rather than explaining things with any depth. The heart of this story is how PC sound worked and how it evolved. Instead you have recitations of speeds and feeds.