Misplaced Pages

#434565

112-616: CD-ROM Drive via one of: The Sound Blaster 16 is a series of sound cards by Creative Technology , first released in June 1992 for PCs with an ISA or PCI slot. It was the successor to the Sound Blaster Pro series of sound cards and introduced CD-quality digital audio to the Sound Blaster line. For optional wavetable synthesis , the Sound Blaster 16 also added an expansion-header for add-on MIDI- daughterboards , called

224-466: A Wave Blaster connector , and a game port for optional connection with external MIDI sound modules . The Sound Blaster 16 retained the Pro's OPL-3 support for FM synthesis , and was mostly compatible with software written for the older Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster Pro sound cards . The SB16's MPU-401 emulation was limited to UART (dumb) mode only, but it was sufficient for most MIDI software. When

336-462: A parallel bus design. Since 2005, SPI was gradually replaced by Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), which uses a serial design but retains other aspects of the technology. Many other interfaces which do not rely on complete SCSI standards still implement the SCSI command protocol ; others drop physical implementation entirely while retaining the SCSI architectural model . iSCSI , for example, uses TCP/IP as

448-427: A target . The initiator sends a command to the target, which then responds. SCSI commands are sent in a Command Descriptor Block ( CDB ). The CDB consists of a one byte operation code followed by five or more bytes containing command-specific parameters. At the end of the command sequence, the target returns a status code byte, such as 00h for success, 02h for an error (called a Check Condition), or 08h for busy. When

560-586: A "LUN number" or "LUN id". In modern SCSI transport protocols, there is an automated process for the "discovery" of the IDs. The SSA initiator (normally the host computer through the 'host adaptor') "walk the loop" to determine what devices are connected and then assigns each one a 7-bit "hop-count" value. Fibre Channel – Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) initiators use the LIP (Loop Initialization Protocol) to interrogate each device port for its WWN ( World Wide Name ). For iSCSI, because of

672-403: A 21-bit LBA address. The Read(10), Read(12), Read Long, Write(10), Write(12), and Write Long commands all contain a 32-bit LBA address plus various other parameter options. The capacity of a "sequential access" (i.e. tape-type) device is not specified because it depends, amongst other things, on the length of the tape, which is not identified in a machine-readable way. Read and write operations on

784-581: A 9-voice (11 voices in drum mode) FM synthesizer using the Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2 . It provided compatibility with the market leader AdLib sound card, which had gained support in PC games in the preceding year. Creative used the "DSP" acronym to designate the digital audio part of the Sound Blaster. This stood for Digital Sound Processor, rather than the more common digital signal processor , and

896-536: A PCI busmaster interface to access sample-data stored in the host-PC's system memory. A/D- and D/A- converters as well as analogue mixing is done by an AC'97 chip running at 48 kHz sampling rate. All members of the SB Live! family have at least four-channel analog audio outputs and a 15-pin MIDI/Joystick multiport. For game titles, EAX 1.0 (and later 2.0) ( environmental audio extensions , which briefly competed with

1008-482: A PCI busmaster interface. Analogue interfacing is done by a codec chip, which runs at a fixed sampling frequency of 44 (Ensoniq Audio PCI) or 48 kHz (Creative's versions). (ISA soundcards had not resampled but switched between different time bases.) ES137x do not support SoundFonts but a filter-less MIDI engine with wavetable ( sample table) sets of 2, 4, and 8   MB size. When the Sound Blaster Live!

1120-734: A PCIe interface, but lacks the EMU10K DSP. SCSI Small Computer System Interface ( SCSI , / ˈ s k ʌ z i / SKUZ -ee ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices , best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives . SCSI was introduced in the 1980s and has seen widespread use on servers and high-end workstations, with new SCSI standards being published as recently as SAS-4 in 2017. The SCSI standards define commands , protocols, electrical, optical and logical interfaces . The SCSI standard defines command sets for specific peripheral device types;

1232-557: A cost-reduced, software-compatible replacement for the OPL-3 FM support termed CQM synthesis. However, its synthesis was far from being entirely faithful to the OPL-3 chips, producing considerable distortion along with high-pitched 'squeaking' or 'ringing' artifacts in FM-synthesized music and sound effects. Boards utilizing CQM synthesis feature a CT1978 chip, or they may have CQM integrated in

SECTION 10

#1732875844435

1344-509: A daughterboard, such as the Wave Blaster , Roland SCB-7 , Roland SCB-55 , Yamaha DB50XG , Yamaha DB60XG was installed on the Sound Blaster, the Wave Blaster behaved like a standard MIDI device, accessible to any MPU-401 compatible MIDI software. The Sound Blaster 16 was hugely popular. Creative's audio revenue grew from US$ 40 million per year to nearly US$ 1 billion following the launch of

1456-469: A flawed digital sound processor on board that causes various issues with MIDI daughtercards attached to the Wave Blaster header. The problems include stuck notes, incorrect notes, and various other flaws in MIDI playback. The particular Sound Blaster 16 cards that are affected carry DSP versions 4.11, 4.12 and some 4.13. DSP versions 4.16 or later, and older DSP versions such as 4.05 do not suffer from this bug. There

1568-485: A fully decoded MIDI interface with separate Input and Output (along with on mini-DIN converter.) The Gold highlighted many features aimed at music composition; ease-of-use ( plug-and-play for musicians), real-time loopback-recording of the MIDI-synthesizer (with full freedom of Soundfonts, and environmental effects such as reverb, etc.), and bundled MIDI-software. The mainstream model was the Sound Blaster Live! Like

1680-452: A fully-compatible Sound Blaster card that came with a game port, saved a slot, and included the "DSP" for not much more in price, many consumers opted for the Sound Blaster. In-game support for the digital portion of the card did not happen until after the Sound Blaster had gained dominance. When Microsoft announced Multimedia PC (MPC) in November 1990, it suggested to developers that they use

1792-459: A much broader range of options for RAID subsystems together with the existence of nearline SAS (NL-SAS) drives. Instead of SCSI, modern desktop computers and notebooks typically use SATA interfaces for internal hard disk drives, with NVMe over PCIe gaining popularity as SATA can bottleneck modern solid-state drives . SCSI is available in a variety of interfaces. The first was parallel SCSI (also called SCSI Parallel Interface or SPI), which uses

1904-441: A proprietary memory format which could be (expensively) purchased from Creative. The main improvements were better compatibility with older SB models, and an improved signal-to-noise ratio . The AWE64 came in two versions: A standard version (later rebranded as Value ) with 512   KB of RAM and a Gold version with 4 MB of RAM and a separate S/PDIF output. In 1998, Creative acquired Ensoniq Corporation , manufacturer of

2016-410: A sequential access device begin at the current tape position, not at a specific LBA. The block size on sequential access devices can either be fixed or variable, depending on the specific device. Tape devices such as half-inch 9-track tape , DDS (4 mm tapes physically similar to DAT ), Exabyte , etc., support variable block sizes. On a parallel SCSI bus, a device (e.g. host adapter, disk drive)

2128-502: A single floppy with the basic utilities and game patches to allow Sierra Online 's games using the Sierra Creative Interpreter engine to play music with the card and it also included a later revision of the game Silpheed that added C/MS support. In 2017 hobbyists developed a clone CT1300 PCB. The Sound Blaster 1.0 (code named " Killer Kard "), CT1320A, was released in 1989. In addition to Game Blaster features, it has

2240-734: A system to need more than 1 ATA interface. With the development of the CD-ROM , many computers could not support it since both devices of the one channel were already used. Some Sound Blaster 16 boards (CT2940 for example) provided an additional IDE interface to computers that had no spare ATA-ports for a CDROM, though the additional drive interface typically only supported one device rather than two, it typically only supported CD ROM drives, and it usually could not support additional hard drives. Proprietary CD-ROM standards were also supported by several Sound Blaster 16 cards. Mitsumi (CT2700) and Philips/LMSI (CT1780) for example. Most Sound Blaster 16 cards came with

2352-453: A transport mechanism, which is most often transported over Gigabit Ethernet or faster network links. SCSI interfaces have often been included on computers from various manufacturers for use under Microsoft Windows , classic Mac OS , Unix , Amiga and Linux operating systems, either implemented on the motherboard or by the means of plug-in adaptors. With the advent of SAS and SATA drives, provision for parallel SCSI on motherboards

SECTION 20

#1732875844435

2464-522: A unified standard. In October 1981, the two companies agreed to co-develop SASI and present their standard jointly with ANSI. Until at least February 1982, ANSI developed the specification as "SASI" and "Shugart Associates System Interface". However, the committee documenting the standard would not allow it to be named after a company. Almost a full day was devoted to agreeing to name the standard "Small Computer System Interface", which Boucher intended to be pronounced "sexy", but ENDL's Dal Allan pronounced

2576-421: Is a "virtual" disk—a stripe set or mirror set constructed from portions of real disk drives. The SCSI ID, WWN, etc. in this case identifies the whole subsystem, and a second number, the logical unit number (LUN) identifies a disk device (real or virtual) within the subsystem. It is quite common, though incorrect, to refer to the logical unit itself as a "LUN". Sometimes, redundantly, the actual LUN may be called

2688-427: Is a 5-bit field reported by a SCSI Inquiry Command ; defined SCSI Peripheral Device Types include, in addition to many varieties of storage device, printer, scanner, communications device, and a catch-all "processor" type for devices not otherwise listed. In larger SCSI servers, the disk-drive devices are housed in an intelligent enclosure that supports SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) . The initiator can communicate with

2800-487: Is a protocol that specifies how to transport SCSI commands over a reliable RDMA connection. This protocol can run over any RDMA-capable physical transport, e.g. InfiniBand or Ethernet when using RoCE or iWARP . USB Attached SCSI allows SCSI devices to use the Universal Serial Bus . The Automation/Drive Interface − Transport Protocol (ADT) is used to connect removable media devices, such as tape drives, with

2912-512: Is a simple microcontroller from the Intel MCS-51 family (supplied by Intel and Matra MHS , among others). It can play back 8-bit monaural sampled sound at up to 23 kHz sampling frequency and record 8-bit at up to 12 kHz. The sole DSP-like features of the circuit are ADPCM decompression and a primitive non-MPU-401-compatible MIDI interface. The ADPCM decompression schemes supported are 2 to 1, 3 to 1 and 4 to 1. The CT1320B variety of

3024-416: Is considered to be the "father" of SASI and ultimately SCSI due to his pioneering work first at Shugart Associates and then at Adaptec , which he founded in 1981. A SASI controller provided a bridge between a hard disk drive's low-level interface and a host computer, which needed to read blocks of data. SASI controller boards were typically the size of a hard disk drive and were usually physically mounted to

3136-425: Is considered very inaccurate compared to the original OPL chips. Fortunately it is General MIDI compatible in most games. The following model numbers were assigned to the Sound Blaster 16 PCI: As many Sound Blaster 16s are now around 30 years old, many cards suffer from symptoms related to aging capacitors, ranging from muffled or distorted output to the cards failing to function properly. In addition, with regard to

3248-545: Is essentially an Audigy 2 with updated DAC and op-amps . Audigy 2 ZS uses the Cirrus Logic CS4382 DAC together with the op-amps and can produce an output SNR of 108 dB. There were a few slight printed circuit board modifications and 7.1 audio support was added. Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro (November 2004) was an Audigy 2 ZS with updated DACs and ADCs , the new DAC being the Cirrus Logic CS4398, boosting

3360-555: Is identified by a "SCSI ID", which is a number in the range 0–7 on a narrow bus and in the range 0–15 on a wide bus. On earlier models a physical jumper or switch controls the SCSI ID of the initiator ( host adapter ). On modern host adapters (since about 1997), doing I/O to the adapter sets the SCSI ID; for example, the adapter often contains a Option ROM (SCSI BIOS) program that runs when the computer boots up and that program has menus that let

3472-551: Is misleading—see the pictures for size comparison). It offered similar features to the AWE32, but also had a few notable improvements, including support for greater polyphony , although this was a product of 32 extra software-emulated channels (the additional channels could also be obtained on AWE32 hardware by using the AWE64's driver software). The 30-pin SIMM slots from AWE32/SB32 were replaced with

Sound Blaster 16 - Misplaced Pages Continue

3584-517: Is more in line with the Audigy 2 Value series. The Audigy 4 had a shorter life span than its predecessors, due to the short window between it and the next-generation Sound Blaster X-Fi. Sound Blaster Audigy Rx (September 2013) is similar to the Audigy 4 but with a dedicated 600-ohm headphone amplifier and a PCIe 1x interface. Sound Blaster Audigy Fx (September 2013) also features a 600-ohm amplifier and

3696-601: Is no workaround for this flaw and it occurs with all operating systems since it is an issue at the hardware level. The DSP version can be checked by running the "DIAGNOSE" utility in DOS or looking at the DSP chip on the sound card. A version number is printed on the CT1740A chip usually near the CT1745A mixer chip. Computer Gaming World in 1993 stated that "We were not impressed with the quality of

3808-404: Is typically for a CD-ROM drive. Note that a SCSI target device (which can be called a "physical unit") is sometimes divided into smaller "logical units". For example, a high-end disk subsystem may be a single SCSI device but contain dozens of individual disk drives, each of which is a logical unit. Further, a RAID array may be a single SCSI device, but may contain many logical units, each of which

3920-435: Is used which is also of serial nature. SCSI is popular on high-performance workstations, servers, and storage appliances. Almost all RAID subsystems on servers have used some kind of SCSI hard disk drives for decades (initially Parallel SCSI, interim Fibre Channel, recently SAS), though a number of manufacturers offer SATA -based RAID subsystems as a cheaper option. Moreover, SAS offers compatibility with SATA devices, creating

4032-718: The Macintosh Quadra 630 in 1994, and added it to its high-end desktops starting with the Power Macintosh G3 in 1997. Apple dropped on-board SCSI completely in favor of IDE and FireWire with the (Blue & White) Power Mac G3 in 1999, while still offering a PCI SCSI host adapter as an option on up to the Power Macintosh G4 (AGP Graphics) models. Sun switched its lower-end range to Parallel ATA (PATA) with introduction of their Ultra 5 and 10 low end workstations using CMD640 IDE controller and continued this trend with

4144-573: The Sound Blaster 16 for the OEM market. Creative Labs also used this chip for the Sound Blaster 32, Phone Blaster and Phone Blaster 28.8 (VIBRA plus modem, CT3120 and CT3220.) and many other value-edition cards. External Yamaha OPL3 FM music synthesis was retained in earlier boards built around the ViBRA16 or ViBRA16s controllers, whilst the later (and more common) ViBRA16 boards used CQM (Creative Quadratic Modulation) developed by E-mu Systems . This series included

4256-615: The Vibra chip to reduce component count, which meant bass/treble/gain control was limited compared to the AWE32. The loss of onboard RAM is offset by the inclusion of 30-pin SIMM RAM sockets, which allow up to 28 MB RAM to be installed and used by the EMU engine. The AWE32's successor, the Sound Blaster AWE64 (November 1996), was significantly smaller, being a "half-length ISA card" (that term

4368-466: The 3.5 mm jack ports as an SPDIF out, which allowed the connection of an external decoder. Creative also released a Sound Blaster Live! Player 1024 edition, which is identical to the regular Sound Blaster Live! , but with the addition of some extra software. The Sound Blaster PCI 512 (CT4790) is an EMU10K1-based sound card designed to fill a lower cost segment than the Live! Value. It is capable of most of

4480-559: The AWE32 design, the Sound Blaster 32 (SB32) was a value-oriented offering from Creative. Announced on June 6, 1995, the SB32 became the new entry-level card in the AWE32 product-line (previously held by the AWE32 Value .) The SB32 retained the AWE32's EMU8000/EMU8011 MIDI-synthesis engine and built-in instrument ROM, but dropped the onboard RAM , the Wave Blaster header, and the CSP port. The SB32 used

4592-776: The Amiga 3000/3000T systems and it was an add-on to previous Amiga 500/2000 models. Starting with the Amiga 600/1200/4000 systems Commodore switched to the IDE interface. Atari included SCSI as standard in its Atari MEGA STE , Atari TT and Atari Falcon computer models. SCSI has never been popular in the low-priced IBM PC world, owing to the lower cost and adequate performance of ATA hard disk standard. However, SCSI drives and even SCSI RAIDs became common in PC workstations for video or audio production. Recent physical versions of SCSI‍—‌ Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), SCSI-over- Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), and USB Attached SCSI (UAS)‍—‌break from

Sound Blaster 16 - Misplaced Pages Continue

4704-547: The AudioPCI, a card popular with OEMs at the time. It was a full-featured solution with wavetable MIDI ( sample-based synthesizer ), 4-speaker DirectSound3D surround sound, A3D emulation, and DOS legacy support via a terminate-and-stay-resident program . It was cheap due to lack of hardware acceleration. It is full-duplex but at least in MS Windows cannot play back several sources at once. Creative released many cards using

4816-548: The C/MS board in particular, the Philips chips had white pieces of paper with a fictitious "CMS-301" inscription on them. Real Creative parts usually had consistent CT number references. Surprisingly, the board also contained a large 40-pin DIP integrated circuit bearing a "CT 1302A CTPL 8708" (Creative Technology Programmable Logic) serigraphed inscription and looking exactly like the DSP of

4928-566: The Creative digital audio section (audio codec , optional CSP/ASP chip socket, Yamaha OPL3), and the E-mu MIDI synthesizer section. The synthesizer section consisted of the EMU8000 sampler and effects processor, an EMU8011 1 MB sample ROM, and 512 KB of sample RAM (expandable to 28 MB). To fit the new hardware, the AWE32 was a full-length ISA card , measuring 14 in (360 mm). A derivative of

5040-738: The Creative/Tandy Multimedia Sound Adapter, 849–3030. This Sound Blaster Pro derived card was factory installed in Tandy Multimedia PCs. It combined the CT1330 with Tandy joystick and MIDI ports (not MPU-401 compatible). The revised version, the Sound Blaster Pro 2, CT1600, replaced the YM3812s with a more advanced Yamaha YMF262 ( OPL3 ). Otherwise it is functionally identical to the original Sound Blaster Pro. Shortly after

5152-456: The EMU10K1 in the original Live!), and all audio had to be resampled to 48 kHz in order to be accepted by the DSP (for recording or rendering to output.) Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (September 2002) featured an updated EMU10K2 processor, sometimes referred to as EMU10K2.5, with an improved DMA engine capable of 24-bit precision. Up to 192 kHz was supported for stereo playback/record, while 6.1

5264-415: The EMU10K1 processor that shipped with the Sound Blaster Live! . The Audigy could process up to four EAX environments simultaneously with its upgraded on-chip DSP and native EAX 3.0 ADVANCED HD support, and supported up to 5.1-channel output. The Audigy was controversially advertised as a 24-bit sound card. The EMU10K2's audio transport (DMA engine) was fixed at 16-bit sample precision at 48 kHz (like

5376-459: The Gold, the Live featured multi-speaker analog output (up to four channels), and identical music/sound generation capabilities (without the bundled MIDI software and interfacing-equipment.) Later versions of the Live!, usually called Live! 5.1 , offered 5.1-channel support which adds a center channel speaker and LFE subwoofer output, most useful for movie watching. The Live! 5.1 could also use one of

5488-472: The ISA bus. While at first glance it appears to be a 16-bit ISA card, it does not have 'fingers' for data transfer on the higher "AT" portion of the bus connector. It uses the 16-bit extension to the ISA bus to provide the user with an additional choice for an IRQ (10) and DMA (0)m channel only found on the 16-bit portion of the edge connector. A short lived joint developed project between Creative and Tandy resulted in

5600-401: The Live! Value's features aside from being limited to 512 MIDI voice polyphony (a software-based limitation), lacking digital I/O , removal of expansion headers , and only stereo or quadraphonic output support. The card's circuit layout is somewhat simpler than that of the Live! series. The Sound Blaster Audigy (August 2001) featured the Audigy processor (EMU10K2), an improved version of

5712-514: The Microsoft MPC standard. . The Sound Blaster Pro supported faster digital input and output sampling rates (up to 22.05 kHz stereo or 44.1 kHz mono), added a " mixer " to provide a crude master volume control (independent of the volume of sound sources feeding the mixer), and a crude high pass or low pass filter. The Sound Blaster Pro used a pair of YM3812 chips to provide stereo music-synthesis (one for each channel). The Sound Blaster Pro

SECTION 50

#1732875844435

5824-474: The Panasonic / Matsushita interface, which resembles IDE with the 40PIN connector. The Sound Blaster with the SCSI controller (SB 16 SCSI-2, CT1770, CT1779) was designed for use with "High End" SCSI based CD-ROM drives. The controller did not have the on-board firmware (Boot BIOS) to start an OS (operating system) from a SCSI hard drive. Normally that meant that SCSI device ID-0 and ID-1 were not used. As well, if

5936-532: The SB/Live family was the SB Live! Gold . Featuring gold tracings on all major analog traces and external sockets, an EMI -suppressing printed circuit board substrate and lacquer , the Gold came standard with a daughterboard that implemented a separate 4-channel alternative mini-DIN digital output to Creative-branded internal- DAC speaker sets, a S/P-DIF digital audio Input and Output with separate software mappings, and

6048-554: The SCSI standards also include an extensive set of command definitions. The SCSI command architecture was originally defined for parallel SCSI buses but has been carried forward with minimal change for use with iSCSI and serial SCSI. Other technologies which use the SCSI command set include the ATA Packet Interface , USB Mass Storage class and FireWire SBP-2 . In SCSI terminology, communication takes place between an initiator and

6160-507: The Sound Blaster 1.0 typically has C/MS chips installed in sockets rather than soldered on the PCB, though units do exist with the C/MS chips soldered on. Some sources note that the original Sound Blaster 1.0 was produced under the CT1310 number. This however is a topic of ongoing debate. Creative refers to CT1310 for the Sound Blaster 1.0 on its website. In less than a year, the Sound Blaster became

6272-471: The Sound Blaster 1.5, CT1320C, dropped the C/MS chips, which were no longer popular with game developers. Instead, the board had two empty sockets, which could be user upgraded by purchasing the C/MS chips directly from Creative or Phillips SAA-1099s from another source. Otherwise the card functions identically to the Sound Blaster 1.0. The CT1320U variety has the same layout as the CT1320C. The final revision of

6384-565: The Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects: In 1998, Creative Technology acquired Ensoniq and subsequently released the Sound Blaster 16 PCI. The Sound Blaster 16 PCI was based on Ensoniq AudioPCI technology and is therefore unrelated to the ISA Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster 16 VIBRA and Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects. It has no dedicated hardware for Adlib/OPL support, instead using the Ensoniq sample-synthesis engine to simulate it, though this simulation

6496-492: The Sound Blaster 16 and related products. Rich Sorkin was General Manager of the global business during this time, responsible for product planning, product management, marketing and OEM sales. Due to its popularity and wide support, the Sound Blaster 16 is emulated in a variety of virtualization and/or emulation programs, such as DOSBox , QEMU , Bochs , VMware and VirtualBox , with varying degrees of faithfulness and compatibility. The ASP or CSP chip added some new features to

6608-505: The Sound Blaster Pro. The kit bundled the sound card, a Matsushita CD-ROM drive (model 531 for single-speed, or 562/3 for the later double-speed (2x) drives), and several CD-ROMs of multimedia software titles. As CD-ROM technology was new, the kit included CD-ROM software, representing a very good value to customers. One such kit, named "OmniCD", included the 2x Matsushita drive along with an ISA controller card and software, including Software Toolworks Encyclopedia and Aldus PhotoStyler SE. It

6720-448: The Sound Blaster as it was the only sound card that came close to complying with the MPC standard. The press speculated that Microsoft based the MPC standard on the Sound Blaster's specifications. By 1993 Computer Gaming World wondered "why would a gamer" buy a competing AdLib card that was not Sound Blaster-compatible. Creative advertised the Sound Blaster 16 ("the 16-bit sound standard") with

6832-453: The Sound Blaster line, such as hardware-assisted speech synthesis (through the TextAssist software), QSound audio spatialization technology for digital ( PCM ) wave playback, and PCM audio compression and decompression. Software needed to be written to leverage its unique abilities, yet the offered capabilities lacked compelling applications. As a result, this chip was generally ignored by

SECTION 60

#1732875844435

6944-589: The TEA2025/TDA1517 amplifier to reduce costs. The Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects was released in 1997 as a cheaper and simpler redesign of the Sound Blaster 16. It came with Creative WaveSynth also bundled on Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold , a physical modeling software synthesizer developed by Seer Systems (led by Dave Smith ), based on Sondius WaveGuide technology (developed at Stanford's CCRMA ). The WavEffects line also supports CQM synthesis for Adlib/OPL compatibility. The following model numbers were assigned to

7056-537: The ViBRA16 (CT2501), ViBRA16s (CT2502, CT2504), ViBRA16c (CT2505) PnP and ViBRA16XV (CT2511) chips. The primary advantage of the ViBRA16 was the inclusion of a 14.4 kbit/s telephony Modem; it also functioned as a telephone. Released in March 1994, the Sound Blaster AWE32 (Advanced WavEffects) introduced an all new MIDI synthesizer section based on the EMU8000. The AWE32 consisted of two distinct audio sections;

7168-549: The Wave Blaster connector while others came equipped with the connector. Several different revisions of the VIBRA chipset exist: The following model numbers were assigned to the Sound Blaster VIBRA 16: Note: various PCBs with the same model number were shipped with a different configuration regarding CD-ROM interfaces and sockets. Even among the same models variations exist; for example, some OEM-specific cards were made without

7280-517: The also then-widely used TDA1517 amplifier IC. By setting an onboard jumper, the user could select between line-level output (bypassing the on-board amplifier) and amplified-output. Some of Sound Blaster 16 revisions (released in 1994 and later) support Legacy Plug and Play . Early Intel PCs built after the IBM PC/AT typically only included support for one ATA interface (which controlled up to two ATA devices.) As computer needs grew it became common for

7392-534: The auto-init DMA and new MIDI capabilities of the Sound Blaster 2.0 but not the expanded sampling rates. The upgrade was necessary for full compatibility with the Windows 3.0 Multimedia Extensions upgrade. Sound Blaster MCV, CT5320, was a version created for IBM PS/2 Model 50 and higher and their ISA-incompatible Micro Channel architecture . The MCV Sound Blaster has some issues outputting audio while running on PS/2s with CPUs running faster than 16 MHz. However,

7504-439: The card itself, it failed for a number of DOS games that either were not fully compatible with this CPU mode or needed so much free conventional memory that they could not be loaded with the driver occupying part of this memory. In Microsoft Windows , there was no problem, as Creative's Windows driver software could handle both ISA and PCI cards correctly. The Sound Blaster ViBRA16 was an inexpensive single-chip implementation of

7616-496: The case of ViBRA16C/X-based boards. The following model numbers were assigned to the Sound Blaster 16: Note: various PCBs with the same model number were shipped with a different configuration regarding CD-ROM interfaces, sockets and presence/absence of the ASP/CSP chip. The following models were typically equipped with an ASP/CSP socket: CT1740, CT1750, CT1770, CT1790, CT2230, CT2740, CT2950, CT2290. The Sound Blaster Easy 16 (CT2750)

7728-525: The computer did have a SCSI hard drive with the required SCSI controller then the settings for the SCSI controller on the SB card had to be selected so that the SB SCSI-2 interface did not conflict with the main SCSI controller. Most Sound Blaster 16 cards feature connectors for CD-audio input. This was a necessity since most operating systems and CD-ROM drives of the time did not support streaming CD-audio digitally over

7840-526: The controllers of the libraries (automation devices) in which they are installed. The ADI standard specifies the use of RS-422 for the physical connections. The second-generation ADT-2 standard defines iADT, use of the ADT protocol over IP (Internet Protocol) connections, such as over Ethernet . The Automation/Drive Interface − Commands standards (ADC, ADC-2, and ADC-3) define SCSI commands for these installations. In addition to many different hardware implementations,

7952-486: The digital audio" of the Sound Blaster 16 or 16 ASP, reporting "pops and extra noise" and incomplete Sound Blaster compatibility. The magazine instead recommended the "almost foolproof" Sound Blaster Pro or the original Sound Blaster. Sound Blaster Sound Blaster sound cards were the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible platform until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95 and

8064-452: The drive's chassis. SASI, which was used in mini- and early microcomputers, defined the interface as using a 50-pin flat ribbon connector which was adopted as the SCSI-1 connector. SASI is a fully compliant subset of SCSI-1 so that many, if not all, of the then-existing SASI controllers were SCSI-1 compatible. In around 1980, NCR Corporation had been developing a competing interface standard by

8176-534: The faster serial SCSI (SAS) host adapters. The "small" reference in "small computer system interface" is historical; since the mid-1990s, SCSI has been available on even the largest of computer systems. Since its standardization in 1986, SCSI has been commonly used in the Amiga , Atari , Apple Macintosh and Sun Microsystems computer lines and PC server systems. Apple started using the less-expensive parallel ATA (PATA, also known as IDE ) for its low-end machines with

8288-439: The headphone amplifier design on most boards, Creative did not fully adhere the datasheets' recommendations on component values, potentially impacting the amplified output's sound quality. Some users have found that replacing the capacitors with fresh ones of the recommended values noticeably improved both amplified and line-level audio quality, in addition to restoring proper operation. A large number of Sound Blaster 16 cards have

8400-603: The integration of commoditized audio electronics in PCs. Windows 95 standardized the programming interface at the application level and thereby eliminated the importance of backward compatibility with Sound Blaster cards. By 1995, Sound Blaster cards had sold over 15 million units worldwide and accounted for seven out of ten sound card sales. To date, Sound Blaster has sold over 400 million units, and their current product lineup includes USB -powered DACs as well as other audio adapters. The history of Creative sound cards started with

8512-579: The joystick interface is still inoperable on PS/2s it was designed for due to the slow-speed Schottky chips that have been installed. None of these timing issues affect the Yamaha YM3812. Some of the MCV Sound Blasters were released with faster Schottkys which eradicated some of the problems. Model CT1330, announced in May 1991, was the first significant redesign of the card's core features, and complied with

8624-429: The jumpers are typically located; the switch emulates the necessary jumpers. While there is no standard that makes this work, drive designers typically set up their jumper headers in a consistent format that matches the way that these switches implement. Setting the bootable (or first) hard disk to SCSI ID 0 is an accepted IT community recommendation. SCSI ID 2 is usually set aside for the floppy disk drive while SCSI ID 3

8736-471: The later Blade 100 and 150 entry level systems and did not switch to contemporary SATA interface even with the introduction of the Blade 1500 in 2003 while the higher end Blade 2500 released at the same time used Ultra320 Parallel SCSI-3. Sun moved to SATA and SAS interfaces with their last UltraSPARC-III based workstations in 2006 with the entry level Ultra 25 and mid-range Ultra 45. Commodore included SCSI on

8848-434: The later Sound Blaster. Software, including Creative's own, use this chip to automatically detect the card (by trying certain register reads and writes). 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. Whereas the C/MS package came with five floppy disks full of utilities and song files, Creative supplied only

8960-500: The launch of the Sound Blaster 16 and related products. Rich Sorkin was General Manager of the global business during this time, responsible for product planning, product management, marketing and OEM sales. Moving the card off the ISA bus, which was already approaching obsolescence, meant that no line for host-controlled ISA DMA was available, because the PCI slot offers no such line. Instead, the card used PCI bus mastering to transfer data from

9072-486: The main interface. The CD-audio input could also be daisy-chained from another sound generating device, such as an MPEG decoder or TV tuner card. Sound Blaster 16 cards sold separately feature a CT1747, a chip which has the discrete Yamaha YMF262 OPL-3 FM synthesizer integrated. Some post-1995 cards (notably the CT2910) feature the fully compatible YMF289 FM synthesis chip instead. Starting in late 1995, Creative utilized

9184-513: The main memory to the D/A converters. Since existing DOS programs expected to be able to initiate host-controlled ISA DMA for producing sound, backward compatibility with the older Sound Blaster cards for DOS programs required a software driver work-around; since this work-around necessarily depended on the virtual 8086 mode of the PC's CPU in order to catch and reroute accesses from the ISA DMA controller to

9296-434: The market. The ASP was a SGS-Thomson ST18932 DSP core with 16K of program RAM and 8K of data RAM. The Sound Blaster 16 also featured the then widely used TEA2025 amplifier IC ( integrated circuit ) which, in the configuration Creative had chosen, would allow approximately 700 milliwatts per channel when used with a standard pair of unpowered, 4-Ohm multi-media speakers. Later models (typically ones with ViBRA chips) used

9408-638: The most commonly used being: Each device on the SCSI bus is assigned a unique SCSI identification number or ID. Devices may encompass multiple logical units, which are addressed by logical unit number (LUN). Simple devices have just one LUN, more complex devices may have multiple LUNs. A "direct access" (i.e. disk type) storage device consists of a number of logical blocks, addressed by Logical Block Address ( LBA ). A typical LBA equates to 512 bytes of storage. The usage of LBAs has evolved over time and so four different command variants are provided for reading and writing data. The Read(6) and Write(6) commands contain

9520-508: The name of BYSE. In the summer of 1981, NCR abandoned their in-house efforts in favor of pursuing SASI and improving on its design for their own computer systems. Fearing that their extension of the SASI standard would induce market confusion, however, NCR briefly cancelled their contract with Shugart. NCR's proposed improvements to the design of SCSI piqued the interest of Optimem, a subsidiary of Shugart, who requested that NCR and Shugart collaborate on

9632-571: The new acronym as "scuzzy" and that stuck. The NCR facility in Wichita, Kansas developed the industry's first SCSI controller chip, the NCR 5385, released in 1983. According to its developers, the chip worked the first time it was tested. A number of companies, such as Adaptec and Optimem, were early supporters of SCSI. By late 1990 at least 45 manufactures offered 251 models of parallel SCSI host adapters Today, such host adapters have largely been displaced by

9744-426: The now defunct A3D 2.0 ) added hardware-accelerated acoustic effects. The EMU10K1 provided high-quality 64-voice sample-based synthesizer (marketed as "Wavetable"), with self-produced or third-party customized patches or "Soundfonts", and the ability to resample the audio output as input and apply a range of real-time DSP effects to any set of audio subchannels present in the device. The first model and flagship of

9856-459: The opening music of Space Quest III with the card as "extraordinary", praising the quality compared to the Roland MT-32 and Ad Lib versions. Compute! approved of the card's DMA and Creative's dissemination of technical information, and concluded that while the more-expensive MT-32 was superior, Sound Blaster's audio quality was better than that of Ad Lib or Game Blaster. Released in 1990,

9968-414: The operator choose the SCSI ID of the host adapter. Alternatively, the host adapter may come with software that must be installed on the host computer to configure the SCSI ID. The traditional SCSI ID for a host adapter is 7, as that ID has the highest priority during bus arbitration (even on a 16 bit bus). The SCSI ID of a device in a drive enclosure that has a back plane is set either by jumpers or by

10080-533: The original AudioPCI chip, Ensoniq ES1370 , and several boards using revised versions of this chip ( ES1371 and ES1373 ), and some with Creative-labeled AudioPCI chips. Boards using AudioPCI tech are usually easily identifiable by the board design and the chip size because they all look quite similar. Such boards include Sound Blaster PCI64 (April 1998), PCI128 (July 1998), Creative Ensoniq AudioPCI , Vibra PCI and Sound Blaster 16 PCI . An ES137x chip contains three stereo sample rate converters, some buffers and

10192-519: The original Sound Blaster, the Sound Blaster 2.0 was released in October 1991, CT1350, added support for " auto-init " DMA , which assisted in producing a continuous loop of double-buffered sound output. Similar to version 1.0 and 1.5, it used a 1-channel 8-bit DAC. However, the maximum sampling rate was increased to 44 kHz for playback, and 15 kHz for record. The DSP's MIDI UART was upgraded to full-duplex and offered time stamping features, but

10304-413: The output SNR to 113 dB. Other than a breakout box , it has no distinguishable difference from the Audigy 2 ZS. The DSP is identical to the Audigy 2 ZS's but Creative put an "Audigy 4" sticker to cover the chip, making it appear as if it is a new chip. The Audigy 4 Pro is not to be confused with the Audigy 4 (Value) which contains lower quality DACs and does not have golden plated jacks. The Audigy 4 (Value)

10416-470: The parallel cable, and an asynchronous mode. The asynchronous mode is a classic request/acknowledge protocol, which allows systems with a slow bus or simple systems to also use SCSI devices. Faster synchronous modes are used more frequently. Internal parallel SCSI cables are usually ribbons , with two or more 50–, 68–, or 80–pin connectors attached. External cables are typically shielded (but may not be), with 50– or 68–pin connectors at each end, depending upon

10528-515: The presence of "unknown" as one of these types means that in theory it can be used as an interface to almost any device, but the standard is highly pragmatic and addressed toward commercial requirements. The initial Parallel SCSI was most commonly used for hard disk drives and tape drives , but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives , although not all controllers can handle all devices. The ancestral SCSI standard, X3.131-1986, generally referred to as SCSI-1,

10640-718: The release of the Creative Music System ("C/MS") CT-1300 board in August 1987. It contained two Philips SAA1099 integrated circuits, which, together, provided 12 channels of square-wave "bee-in-a-box" stereo sound, four channels of which can be used for noise. These ICs 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 stickers fully covering their tops to hide their identities. On

10752-502: The release of the Sound Blaster Pro 2 version, Creative discontinued the original Sound Blaster Pro. The Sound Blaster Pro 2 was also sold with the following on-board CD-ROM controllers: Packaged Sound Blaster cards were initially marketed and sold into the retail-channel. Creative's domination of the PC audio card business soon had them selling the Sound Blaster Pro 2 OEM , CT1680, to customers for integration into pre-assembled PCs. Creative also sold Multimedia Upgrade Kits containing

10864-589: The shift to serial interfaces is the clock skew issue of high-speed parallel interfaces, which makes the faster variants of parallel SCSI susceptible to problems caused by cabling and termination. The non-physical iSCSI preserves the basic SCSI paradigm , especially the command set, almost unchanged, through embedding of SCSI-3 over TCP/IP . Therefore, iSCSI uses logical connections instead of physical links and can run on top of any network supporting IP. The actual physical links are realized on lower network layers , independently from iSCSI. Predominantly, Ethernet

10976-405: The slogan "Get Real", emphasizing its "real 100% Sound Blaster compatibility" and rhetorically asking "why those other manufacturers spend so much time comparing themselves to Sound Blaster". Compute! in 1989 stated that with Sound Blaster, "IBM-compatible computers have taken the lead in sound and music for personal computers". Naming it a Compute! Choice, the magazine described the quality of

11088-409: The slot in the enclosure the device is installed into, depending on the model of the enclosure. In the latter case, each slot on the enclosure's back plane delivers control signals to the drive to select a unique SCSI ID. A SCSI enclosure without a back plane often has a switch for each drive to choose the drive's SCSI ID. The enclosure is packaged with connectors that must be plugged into the drive where

11200-785: The specific SCSI bus width supported. The 80–pin Single Connector Attachment (SCA) is typically used for hot-pluggable devices Fibre Channel can be used to transport SCSI information units, as defined by the Fibre Channel Protocol for SCSI (FCP). These connections are hot-pluggable and are usually implemented with optical fiber. Serial attached SCSI (SAS) uses a modified Serial ATA data and power cable. iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) usually uses Ethernet connectors and cables as its physical transport, but can run over any physical transport capable of transporting IP . The SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP)

11312-518: The target returns a Check Condition in response to a command, the initiator usually then issues a SCSI Request Sense command in order to obtain a key code qualifier ( KCQ ) from the target. The Check Condition and Request Sense sequence involves a special SCSI protocol called a Contingent Allegiance Condition. There are four categories of SCSI commands: N (non-data), W (writing data from initiator to target), R (reading data), and B (bidirectional). There are about 60 different SCSI commands in total, with

11424-423: The top-selling expansion card for the PC. It achieved this by providing an AdLib-compatible product, with additional features, for the same, and often lower, price. The inclusion of a game port was important to its early success. PCs of this era did not include a game port. Game port cards were costly (around US$ 50) and used one of the few expansion slots PCs had at the time. Given the choice between an AdLib card or

11536-456: The traditional parallel SCSI bus and perform data transfer via serial communications using point-to-point links. Although much of the SCSI documentation talks about the parallel interface, all modern development efforts use serial interfaces. Serial interfaces have a number of advantages over parallel SCSI, including higher data rates, simplified cabling, longer reach, improved fault isolation and full-duplex capability. The primary reason for

11648-898: The unlimited scope of the (IP) network, the process is quite complicated. These discovery processes occur at power-on/initialization time and also if the bus topology changes later, for example if an extra device is added. SCSI has the CTL (Channel, Target or Physical Unit Number, Logical Unit Number) identification mechanism per host bus adapter , or the HCTL (HBA, Channel, PUN, LUN) identification mechanism, one host adapter may have more than one channels. While all SCSI controllers can work with read/write storage devices, i.e. disk and tape, some will not work with some other device types; older controllers are likely to be more limited, sometimes by their driver software, and more Device Types were added as SCSI evolved. Even CD-ROMs are not handled by all controllers. Device Type

11760-462: Was capped at 96 kHz. In addition, Audigy 2 supported up to 6.1 (later 7.1 ) speakers and had improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over the Audigy (106 vs. 100 decibels ( A )). It also featured built-in Dolby Digital EX 6.1 and 7.1 decoding for improved DVD play-back. The Audigy 2 line were the first sound cards to receive THX certification. Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (September 2003)

11872-484: Was compliant with the MPC Level 2 standard. The Sound Blaster Pro 2 MCV, CT5330, was a version created for IBM PS/2 model 50 and higher and their MicroChannel bus. The next model, the Sound Blaster 16, announced in June 1992, introduced: Eventually this design proved so popular that Creative made a PCI version of this card. Creative's audio revenue grew from $ 40 million per year to nearly $ 1 billion following

11984-546: Was discontinued. Initially, the SCSI Parallel Interface (SPI) was the only interface using the SCSI protocol. Its standardization started as a single-ended 8-bit bus in 1986, transferring up to 5 MB/s, and evolved into a low-voltage differential 16-bit bus capable of up to 320 MB/s. The last SPI-5 standard from 2003 also defined a 640 MB/s speed which failed to be realized. Parallel SCSI specifications include several synchronous transfer modes for

12096-455: Was fully backward compatible with the original Sound Blaster line, and by extension, the AdLib sound card. The Sound Blaster Pro was the first Creative sound card to have a built-in CD-ROM interface. Most Sound Blaster Pro cards featured a proprietary interface for a Panasonic ( Matsushita MKE ) drive. The Sound Blaster Pro cards are basically 8-bit ISA cards, they use only the lower 8 data bits of

12208-569: Was introduced in August 1998, the use of a programmable digital signal processor in PC-audio was not unprecedented, as IBM had already done that with cheap Mwave sound- and modem-cards and Turtle Beach with their professional Hurricane soundcards. The Live! was built around Creative's new EMU10K1 chip, which contained 2.44 million transistors and was advertised of processing a flashy 1,000 MIPS . The EMU10K1 (and its successors) did not use on-card RAM/ROM storage for instrument samples, instead it used

12320-541: Was not yet compatible with the MPU-401 interface used by professional MIDI equipment. The Sound Blaster 2.0's PCB -layout used more highly integrated components, both shrinking the board's size and reducing manufacturing cost. Owners of previous revision Sound Blaster boards could upgrade their board by purchasing the V2.00 DSP chip from Creative Labs, and swapping the older DSP V1.0x with the newer replacement. The upgraded board gained

12432-720: Was published by the X3T9 technical committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986. SCSI-2 was published in August 1990 as X3.T9.2/86-109, with further revisions in 1994 and subsequent adoption of a multitude of interfaces. Further refinements have resulted in improvements in performance and support for ever-increasing data storage capacity. SCSI is derived from the Shugart Associates System Interface (SASI), developed beginning 1979 and publicly disclosed in 1981. Larry Boucher

12544-434: Was sold with the ASP/CSP chip and a parallel CD-ROM port and 1 audio out. The Sound Blaster VIBRA 16 was released as a cost-reduced, more integrated Sound Blaster 16 chipset targeting OEMs and the entry-level to mid-range markets. Some variants support Plug and Play for Microsoft Windows operating systems . It lacked separate bass, treble and gain control (except CT2502 chip), and an ASP/CSP socket. Some models even lacked

#434565