Fun Creative Labs fact: the reason soundcards were popular in the '90s was that while most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers, the instrument sounds were created with a very cheap version of a synthesis technique known as FM (for frequency modulation) synthesis. The first synthesizers (e.g. the Moog) used analog circuits known as oscillators to produce sounds in the form of sin waves, square waves, triangle waves etc. These were really not able to mimic the complex waveforms generated by real instruments, even when multiple oscillators were combined into one sound - and in those days adding oscillators just increased the cost of the circuitry in a linear fashion. FM synthesis essentially used one oscillator to modulate (aka change the frequency of) another waveform-generating oscillator, and this produced much more complex waveform output that could (sometimes, at least) mimic real-world instruments. So much more realistic sounds could be produced by just doubling the number of oscillators in the circuitry, instead of multiplying the oscillators by 10 or 100 or whatever and still not achieving very much sonically.
When it came time to build sound generators into PC chips, FM synthesis was the natural technique since the manufacturers still wanted it to be as cheap as humanly possible, even though the circuits were now digital instead of analog. And so was born a generation of shitty, tinny-sounding PCs. Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM. Wavetable synthesis stored an actual digitally-sampled sound bank of a real instrument for each of the defined MIDI instruments, with added loop points for instruments (like flute, strings etc.) that needed to be able to produce an arbitrarily long note. By today's standards, the AWE32 sounded nearly as bad as the cheap FM stuff, but at the time it was fucking mind-blowing. It even had the capacity to load in your own instrument samples to replace the built-in ones, although this was a bit of a pain in the ass to do.
At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, and while it worked well, the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful and I had a lot of trouble convincing people it was a worthwhile endeavor (my parents were particularly prone to eye-rolling when listening to the chintzy notes). My first AWE32 improved things massively - the problem was that nobody out in the world had one so it was impossible to target it with my application. I dealt with the problem by essentially giving up until years later when PCs because powerful enough to do wavetable synthesis entirely in code using just the processor itself. And nowadays I can run the stuff on a first-generation iPhone!
And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one. And onboard audio at that time wasn’t great anyways.
My very first experience with a sound card was watching the Dune 2 intro on my dad's friend's computer. I was so amazed, I just sat in awe as that intro movie played.
On the drive home I tried to remember if what I heard was real, and I just couldn't imagine it. When I tried to recall what I saw and heard, I could only imagine hearing that tinny internal speaker making bleeps and bloops instead of the actual sounds. It just seemed so unreal at the time that I could not recall what I had heard only a few hours earlier :)
On a side note, I don't think any studio in the nineties made as memorable tunes and sounds as Westwood did. There was always something enchanting about them. Dune 2, the Kyrandia games, they all had excellent music that really played into the strengths of what was available back then.
Of course I'm talking with pink tinted nostalgia goggles, but still... good memories :)
How quickly we forget the chip tunes of the PC Speaker, I used it in a computer lab one day to play a nearly undetectable high freq wave using logo. The PC Speaker was a pretty flexible little speaker
What a nightmare it was to have sound AND your CD drive drivers to load and leave enough memory for some of those nasty old DOS games.
Felt like being a hacker.
(I might have realized I'm the old guy in the picture)
Creative de-facto monopolized the industry often by unethical means (suing Aureal into bankruptcy, etc.), not letting much room for competitors, which in turn lead to diminishing quality on the part of Creative.
Microsoft didn't put hardware acceleration support into XAudio, which superseeded DirectSound.
Game publishers realized the vast majority of gamers didn't care about sound quality, so they could spent those resources on making the games look a little bit more realistic.
At least it was a real name. Nowadays it seems like every new company's name is just a random jumble of letters solely because that .com was available.
The motherboard had nothing but the case usually had a speaker just to make a "beep" sound. I had to play Wolfenstein with that shit because my dad didn't have a sound blaster until he also got a CD-ROM drive to play Doom since he could only find a copy on CD and not floppy disk.
And even now, a SoundBlaster32 is better than the in-built audio stuff motherboards do have. Though it's not worth getting one just for games.
what was really cool were the few games that would give realistic* music and speech from the internal motherboard speaker. No daughterboards or external speakers required. This was 386 era, I think.
* realistic as much as could be from that tiny internal speaker and 8 bits of data.
To this day I use a Creative Labs emu 0404 sound card weekly and just purchased a replacement when the present one started having issues every now and then. One of the great underrated pieces of hardware IMO.
Hi/Lo Z in, digital IO, optical IO, analog IO, USB, 24/192, preamps and one hell of a solid clock and it can be used as a stand alone mixer without a PC.
I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn't bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn't matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.
(I'm going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I'm contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there's still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? ...Oh they're still around!? Good.)
Dr. Sbaitso was the speech systhesis DOS program that was included with most Soundblaster cards. You could tell Dr. Sbaitso about all of your problems.
What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.
Wait. When did onboard sound get good enough that you don't need a soundcard? My computer is "only" 12ish years, and it has a soundcard. The reason used to be that internal ones sounded like shit.
I still use my external soundblaster to connect to my 5.1 amp. I have HDMI to my TV and then toslink to my amp, but it was inconvenient having to have the TV on for listening music.
Got a second hand ISA interface SoundBlaster 64 at a computer fair in San Diego when I was visiting there for the best summer of my life in 1998. If I remember correctly it was $4.
You should still buy sound cards as they are significantly better, at least the ones in the 100€ range. Just because there are premium mainboards with acceptable sound doesn't mean it is great.
My fairly modern computer, originally released in 2014 (yes, that's modern compared to a lot of the computers I own), has no sound card.
I picked up a Yamaha AG06, which has a USB connection and creates both audio inputs and audio outputs to/from my PC. I can quickly plug in my phone or a Bluetooth receiver (which my phone connects to), and get other audio into my headphones with very little trouble. I prefer it this way, and if my next PC has onboard audio, I'll probably disable it in favor of the AG06.
My best friend gave me his sound blaster after upgrading to the Pro. Later I upgraded to a Gravis Ultrasound. Offloading sound processing to the sound card (1MB) improved gaming performance significantly.
I still like Xonar cards, like the Xonar DG (though it isn't compatible with my new PC). I always liked their interface more than the competitors, and it puts out excellent volume on my Logitech headset that is otherwise way too quiet for me. Never been a big fan of the simulated 3D environments on any of these cards, though. The only game it ever sounded decent in was No Man's Sky, but even that still had a distant tinny sound to it.
I think most people just use external amplifiers these days, but I'm still using a third-party sound card.