The Sound
Blaster story
Ben Hardwidge talks to CreativeTechnologyfounderandCEO,SimWongHoo,
about the developmentoftheiconicSoundBlasterbrand
N
ow celebrating its 30th
birthday, the Sound
Blaster made a
massive impact when it was
launched back in 1989. It seems
bizarre now, but at that time,
gaming was still considered tobe
a frivolous novelty for the PC,
which was primarily a business
machine. While the Atari ST and
Commodore Amiga had half-
decent sound capabilities, most
PCs came equipped with only a
mono PC speaker, which simplyblurtedourchirpsandbeeps
like an excitable 1970s telephone.PCaudiowasterrible.
If you wanted proper musicinyourgamesthenyou
needed a MIDI card. Rather thanplayingbacka music
recording like current games, MIDI music is a bit like a Word
document. In a Word document, the fonts are stored
somewhere else, and the Word file just stores the formatting,
meaning you can store a huge number of words and pages in
a very small file size. In the same way, with MIDI, you have the
sounds stored on a synthesiser card, and a game’s music file
just tells it which sounds to play when.
This started with basic FM synthesisers such as
Yamaha’s OPL2, which modulated frequencies to simulate
instruments, and then later went up to ‘wavetables’ of
sampled instruments to create much more realistic
sounding music.
In the days before we had very powerful CPUs and masses
of storage space, this meant complicated musical scores
could be performed in games using tiny files, withoutneeding masses of processing power, or a massive hard drive
to store a recording. AdLib was one of the first companies to
market a MIDI music expansion card for the PC, making a
massive difference to games, but the Sound Blaster went
one step further by combining MIDI music with basic
sampling capabilities.
The result was an audio system that could give you decent
music in games, as well as sampled speech and sound
effects. It changed the PC’s sound forever and sold by the
bucketload. It was the final part of the equation needed to
transform the PC into a proper gaming machine. Thirty years
after the original Sound Blaster card was launched, we
caught up with founder and CEO of Creative Technology, Sim
Wong Hoo, to talk about the history of the iconic Sound
Blaster brand.RETRO TECH / ANALYSIS
The first Sound Blaste
launched in 1989,com g y
audio playbacker,codenamed‘KillerCard’was
mbining MIDIsynthesis with 23KHz