Sound Blaster

File:Sound Blaster Logo.png

The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was for many years the de facto standard for audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, before PC audio became commoditized. The creator of Sound Blaster is the Singapore-based firm Creative Labs.

The pre-Sound Blaster years

The history of Creative Labs sound boards started with the release of the Creative Music System ("C/MS") board in August 1987. It contained two Philips SAA 1099 circuits, which, together, provided 12 voices of square-wave bee-in-a-box stereo sound plus some noise channels.

It is interesting to note that these circuits were featured earlier in various popular electronics magazines around the world. For many years Creative tended to use off-the-shelf components and manufacturers' reference designs for their early products. The various integrated circuits had white or black paper sheets fully covering their top thus hiding their identity... On the C/MS board in particular, the Philips chips had white pieces of paper with a fantasy CMS-301 inscription on them; real Creative parts usually had consistent CT number references.

Surprisingly, the board also contained a large 40-pin integrated circuit, bearing a CT 1302A CTPL 8708 serigraphed inscription and looking exactly like the DSP of the later Sound Blaster. Presumably, it could be used to automate some of the sound operations, like envelope control.

A year later, in 1988, Creative marketed the C/MS via Radio Shack under the name Game Blaster. This card was identical in every way to the precursor C/MS hardware. Creative did not even bother to change any of the labeling or program names on the disks that came with the Game Blaster.

First Sound Blasters: the right bundle

The first board bearing the Sound Blaster name appeared in November 1989. In addition to Game Blaster features, it had a 11-voice FM synthesizer using the Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2. It provided perfect compatibility with the competing Adlib sound card, which had gained support in PC games in the preceding years. Creative used the "DSP" acronym to designate the digital audio part of the Sound Blaster. This actually stood for Digital SOUND Processor, rather than for the more common digital signal processor meaning, and was really a simple microcontroller from the Intel MCS-51 family (supplied by Intel and Matra MHS, among others). It could play back monaural sampled sound at up to 23 kHz sampling frequency (AM radio quality) and record at up to 12 kHz (slightly better than telephone quality). The sole DSP-like feature of the circuit was ADPCM compression and decompression. The card probably lacked an anti-aliasing filter, as it had a characteristic "metal junk" sound. Finally, it featured a joystick port and a proprietary MIDI interface. This interface lacked simultaneous input and output capabilities, so music software had to use eg. the FM synthesizer in order to play the input received from a MIDI keyboard.

It is difficult to tell what microcontroller was used as "DSP" on the first Sound Blaster models, since not only did Creative stick a black label with a fantasy (C) COPYRIGHT 1989 CREATIVE LABS, INC. DSP-1321 inscription on the top, but also carefully scratched two thirds of the plastic surface underneath. Analysis of the device pinout suggests that it was an Intel 8051 microcontroller with a custom mask ROM. The labels on the FM synthesizer circuit and on the companion Yamaha 3014B digital-to-analog converter said FM1312 and FM1314 respectively, but luckily the manufacturer references remained intact below. Later models do away with the obfuscation, and the manufacturer's identity (and, usually, an Intel mask copyright notice) is retained on the DSP.

In spite of these limitations, in less than a year, the Sound Blaster became the top-selling expansion card for the PC.

The premature usage of the DSP word backfired at Creative when they finally included some real digital signal processing features in later Sound Blaster models and were obliged to coin a new term for them, ASP, for Advanced Signal Processing.

Sound Blaster 1.5 released in 1990 dropped the "C/MS chips". They could be purchased separately from Creative and inserted into two sockets on the board. This change was probably related to Philips having discontinued the design, and to the lack of enthusiasm among users; the chips could be bought mail-order from Creative until 1993.

Sound Blaster 2.0 provided better support for multitasking operating systems, presumably thanks to the introduction of its own timer interrupt. It was the earliest Sound Blaster supported by OS/2.

Sound Blaster MCV was a version created for IBM PS/2 model 50 and higher, which had a MicroChannel bus instead of the more traditional ISA one. It was little used.

Improved quality: stereo and 16 bits

Sound Blaster Pro

The Sound Blaster Pro (May 1991) added stereo capabilities, but not yet at CD quality level, since it still had only 8-bit sampling. The first version of the Pro also used two YM3812 chips (one for left audio channel and the other one for the right one; both chips had to be programmed identically to get sound in the middle). Version 2.0 switched to the improved Yamaha YMF262 chip, also known as OPL3. MIDI support became full-duplex and offered time stamping features, but was not yet industry-standard MPU-401 compatible.

The Sound Blaster Pro was the first Creative sound card to have a built-in CD-ROM interface. Most had an interface for a Panasonic (Matsushita MKE) drive, prior to the popularity of IDE CD-ROM drives. After the release of the Sound Blaster Pro, Creative also began to sell Multimedia Upgrade Kits, typically including a sound card, Panasonic CD-ROM drive (model 531 for single-speed, or 562 for the later 2x drives), and a large selection of multimedia software titles on the revolutionary CD-ROM media.

Sound Blaster cards were also sold to PC manufacturers and third-parties. Many of these so-called OEM cards have different types of CD-ROM interfaces or other unusual features.

Sound Blaster 16

The next model, Sound Blaster 16 (June 1992) introduced 16-bit sampling to the Sound Blaster line. The cards also featured a connector for add-on daughterboards with wavetable synthesis capabilities complying to the General MIDI standard. Creative offered such daughterboards in their Wave Blaster line. Finally, the MIDI support now included MPU-401 emulation (in dumb UART mode only, but this was sufficient for most MIDI applications). The Wave Blaster was simply a MIDI peripheral internally connected to the MIDI port, so any PC sequencer software could use it.

Sound Blasters with onboard wavetable synthesis

Sound Blaster AWE32

The Sound Blaster AWE32 (March 1994) introduced the EMU8000 processor which supported 30-channel wavetable synthesis. The AWE32 didn't use its General MIDI (GM) port to access the wavetable module—Creative decided to use a non-standard port. As with the Gravis Ultrasound, software designers had to write special AWE32 support into their programs. To support older software, the AWE32 still featured OPL-3 FM synthesis, and came with the AWEUTIL program which attempted to provide GM/MT-32/GS redirection to the native AWE hardware, however the compatibility wasn't great and it used a lot of precious DOS conventional memory. Its usage on Windows was simplified by the fact that Windows 3.1x had drivers which made the FM synthesizer appear like just another MIDI peripheral, on its own MIDI interface.

The Sound Blaster AWE32 was a full-length ISA card, measuring 14 inches (356 mm) in length. It needed to be this large because of the number of features included (the most available at the time), and the lack of an integrated controller (an ASIC). The AWE32 included two sound processors (the Creative controller and the E-mu EMU8000), an analog processing section with resonant filtering, a Panasonic/Sony/Mitsumi CD-ROM interface (for accessing old, non-ATAPI CD-ROM drives which were still in use at the time), 512 KB built-in memory, and two 30-pin SIMM slots (with their own memory controller) for adding sample memory. The AWE32 supported up to 28 MB of additional SIMM memory. 32MB could be added to the board, but the synthesizer couldn't address all of it.

Before the advent of ATAPI interfaces for CD-ROM drives, three main manufacturers—Panasonic/Matsushita, Mitsumi, and Sony—each had their own interfaces with differing pin connections. Modern ATAPI drives are connected to the IDE controller (on the motherboard or an expansion controller), but these older drives had to be accessed via special interfaces which were typically included on sound cards at the time.

In 1996 this card was sold by Creative renamed as "Sound Blaster 32" in Multimedia kits. Is the same card, but have different device drivers.

Sound Blaster AWE64

The AWE32's successor, the Sound Blaster AWE64 (November 1996), was significantly smaller, being a half-length ISA card (meaning it was only half the length of the AWE32). It offered similar features to the AWE32 (replacing the old CD-ROM interfaces with an IDE compatible one), but has a few notable improvements, including support for greater polyphony. However, these additional voices were achieved via software emulation using host CPU resources, rather than being processed on the card, and were thus of questionable value in some situations.

The main improvement was better compatibility with older SB models, and an improved SNR. The AWE64 came in 3 versions: A Value version (with 512KB of RAM), a Standard version (with 1MB of RAM), and a Gold version (with 4 MB of RAM and SPDIF ports). The 30-pin SIMM slots were replaced with a proprietary memory format which could be (expensively) purchased from Creative.

A fourth version - a PCI version of the AWE64 - was introduced shortly after. It offered the features of the original ISA AWE64, but it had the PCI interface and was built around an ASIC so it had drastically fewer components on the board and ended up being much cheaper than its predecessors. Unfortunately, at this time the issue of compatibility with older legacy DOS applications had not been ideally addressed. Creative created a motherboard port called the SB-Link which assisted the PCI bus in working with software that looked for ISA sound cards. Without this motherboard port the card was incompatible with DOS software.

AWE64 PCI was followed by the AWE64D, which was a variant of the PCI AWE64 that was developed for OEMs. It offered the same features as the retail PCI AWE64, but had an architecture that was distinct enough to prevent the standard PCI AWE64 drivers from working with it.

AWE64, in the end, was basically a revision of the AWE32. Quality of components and output was improved and cost of manufacturing was lessened. Functionality of the hardware was nearly identical. The boards were based around the AWE32's E-mu 8000 wavetable chipset, E-mu effects processor, and a Creative audio DSP and codec for digital sound playback.

Multi-channel sound and F/X

Sound Blaster PCI64 and PCI128

The Sound Blaster PCI64 (April 1998) added four-speaker support (quadraphonic sound). Next in that series was the Sound Blaster PCI128 (July 1998). The PCI64/128 were lighter on features than the AWE series, but were basically one-chip cards that were quite inexpensive and attractive to most people who did not require the advanced MIDI features of an AWE card. The number suffix in the name (64 and 128) represented the number of MIDI channels the card had. Unfortunately all of these channels were rather rudimentary in capability and quality, and were entirely software-based.

The cards were actually rebranded Ensoniq AudioPCI's, a card and technology which was acquired from the merge of E-mu, Creative Labs, and Ensoniq in 1998. Creative did continue development of the drivers and added features. The boards use variants of the Ensoniq ES1370 audio chip (ES1371 and ES1373). These boards were incredibly popular with PC OEMs for their capable functionality and extremely low-cost design.

Sound Blaster PCI512

The Sound Blaster PCI512 was basically a lower-priced version of the Sound Blaster Live! Series. It also used the EMU10K1 processor but the firmware could not be flashed unlike the Live! Series to accommodate future EAX extensions.

Sound Blaster Live!

Sound Blaster Live! (August 1998) saw the introduction of the EMU10K1 processor, a 2.44 million transistor DSP. The EMU10K1 featured DirectSound acceleration, General MIDI wavetable output, EAX (environmental audio extensions, which competed with A3D before the demise of the latter), a high-quality 64-voice wavetable synthesizer, and the FX8010 DSP chip for real-time digital audio effects processing.

A major design change from its predecessor (the EMU8000) was that the EMU10K1 used system memory over the PCI bus for the wavetable samples, rather than using expensive on-board memory. The FX8010 is actually a 32-bit programmable processor (with 1 KB of instruction memory). Effect algorithms are created by a development system that integrates into Microsoft Developer Studio. The effects are written in a language similar to C, and compiled into native FX8010 object code by its compiler, fxasm.

The Sound Blaster Live! features higher audio quality than previous Sound Blasters, as it processes the sound digitally at every stage. It has an internal fixed sample rate of 48 kHz, meaning that any recording done at lower sample rates (such as 44.1 kHz or 32 kHz) is first upsampled to 48 kHz and then downsampled. In a production environment with a Sound Blaster Live!, it is generally recommended to use 48 kHz sampling to maintain sound integrity. The later versions of the Sound Blaster Live! featured support for 5.1 surround sound.

From a users perspective, the Live! adds realtime multi-layer effects processing similar to guitar pedal modules, plus pitch changing. Each effect can be custom modified. Operation is nearly flawless. Plus the effects are programmable at the setting level to add Rooms, Halls, Metallic Rooms, etc.. It's the cheapest card of the Soundblaster family, selling for about 25 dollars at "Best Buy" and one of the best on the market. The only thing lacking is a way to export effects to XML file so users can share their settings.

Sound Blaster Audigy

The Sound Blaster Audigy (August 2001) featured the Audigy processor (EMU10K2) and supported 16-bit play-back at up to 48 kHz, and recording at up to 16-bit, 48 kHz. The Audigy's DSP had a fixed rate of 48/16 (sampling rate/bit rate) meaning audio not in that format had to be upsampled. The card did not support 24-bit playback/processing or have 96/24 DAC's despite what it may look like from reading the spec sheets. The Audigy could process up to 4 EAX environments simultaneously with its native EAX 4.0 ADVANCED HD support, and supported up to 5.1 speakers. The audio processor could support up to 64 DirectSound3D sound channels in hardware, up from Live!'s 32 channels.

Some versions of Audigy also featured an external break out box with connectors for SPDIF, MIDI, SB1394, analog and optical signals. The significance of the break out box was that it was the first physical sign that the "home studio" was for the first time becoming a mainstream market.

Sound Blaster Audigy 2

The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (September 2002) featured an uprated EMU10K2 processor, sometimes referred to as EMU10K2.5, and supported 24-bit play-back at up to 192 kHz (2-channel only. 6.1 limited to 96 kHz) and recording at up to 96 kHz. The Audigy 2 supported up to 6.1 speakers and had improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over the Audigy (106 vs. 100 Decibels A). It also featured built-in Dolby Digital 5.1 EX (which is technically 7.1) decoding for improved DVD play-back. A IEEE-1394 (Firewire) connector was present in all modifications except Value.

Audigy 2's 3D audio capabilities received a boost when compared to its predecessors. Creative created the EAX 4.0 ADVANCED HD standard to coincide with Audigy 2's release. The chip again can process up to 64 DirectSound3D audio channels in hardware. It also has native support for the open source OpenAL audio API.

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value, and Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit

The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, improved upon the Audigy 2 by having a slightly improved SNR (108 vs. 106 dB) and added built-in DTS-ES (Extended Surround) for improved DVD play-back. The Audigy 2 ZS supported up to 7.1 speakers.

A cardbus version of Audigy 2 ZS was also created in Fall 2004, for the notebook market. It had nearly all of the capabilities of the PCI edition, but in a far smaller form factor. Reductions in capability included somewhat limited MIDI capability (compared to the PCI version) and the loss of Firewire. It was the first gaming-oriented sound hardware addon board for notebooks that offered full hardware acceleration of 3D audio along with high-fidelity audio output quality. The card struggled with compatibility due to quality issues with the cardbus host chipsets in many notebooks of the time, a problem also suffered with other companies products, such as Echo Digital Audio Corporation's Indigo product.

The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value was a stripped down version of the Audigy 2 ZS, with an SNR of 106 dB, no GamePort, no IEEE-1394 Firewire connector and no DTS-ES 6.1 playback.

The Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit was not actually a member of the Sound Blaster Live! family, because it lacked the EMU10k1/10k2 processor. It was a further stripped down version of the Audigy 2 Value, with an SNR of 100 dB, software based EAX, no advanced resolution DVD-Audio Playback, and no Dolby Digital 5.1 or Dolby Digital EX 6.1 playback.

The Soundblaster Audigy 2 NX was an external USB soundcard, supporting 24 bit playback.

Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro

The Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro improves on the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS by improving the SNR to 113 dB. It features much of the same core technology as the Audigy 2 ZS (it actually uses the same Audigy 2 chip), it however uses a new external I/O hub. It also allows for simultaneous recording of up to six audio channels in 96 kHz/24 bit. It's output is the same as the audigy 2. 7.1 up to 96 kHz/24bit and stereo at 192 kHz/24bit.

Sound Blaster X-Fi

Creative's latest sound card was called the X-Fi (for "Extreme Fidelity"). It was released in August 2005 and comes in XtremeMusic, Platinum, Fatal1ty FPS and Elite Pro configurations. The 130 nm core operated at 400 MHz and had 51 million transistors. With the X-Fi's "Active Modal Architecture" (AMA), the user could choose three optimization modes: gaming, entertainment, and creation; each enabling a combination of the features of the chipset. The X-Fi used EAX 5.0 which supported up to 128 3D-positioned voices with up to four effects applied to each. The X-Fi offered the most powerful mixing capabilities at its time, making it a powerful entry-level card for home musicians.

The X-Fi-series had been criticized for the way it had been marketed. The criticism mostly centered around the optional "Crystalizer" functionality - a DSP function which colored the sound to make it seem more clear and vibrant. While there is nothing wrong with that in and of itself, Creative claimed that this crystalizer could turn 16-bit audio into 24-bit quality, which is not just misleading, but also technically impossible.

The X-Fi chip was the first audio chip to use RAM to store sound effects for faster and improved processing. This feature, dubbed X-RAM by Creative, was claimed to offer quality improvement through audio processing capability enhancement, in addition to further reduction in audio processing host system CPU overhead.

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