Sound Blaster

A very popular family of sound cards from Creative Labs. In the days of DOS, Sound Blaster was the de facto interface for gaming sounds. Monaural Sound Blaster cards were introduced in 1989, and stereo cards followed in 1992 (Sound Blaster Pro). Wavetable MIDI was added with the 16-bit Sound Blaster AWE32 and AWE64 with 32 and 64 voices. In 1998, Sound Blaster Live was the first PCI-based sound card. Over the years, the Sound Blaster line has been greatly enhanced to provide 3D audio and home theater quality sound directly from a PC. See Creative Labs, DirectSound and OpenAL.

High-End Sound Blaster

This Audigy 4 Pro Sound Blaster card cables to a remote-controlled external hub that supports all major surround sound standards, up to seven speakers and a subwoofer. It provides a wealth of analog and digital inputs and outputs for connecting audio and video equipment and even has ports for MIDI synthesizers and musical instruments.

Driving a Sound Blaster

There are several programming interfaces that applications can use to send sounds to the Sound Blaster card: the Windows DirectSound or earlier MMSystem APIs, or the open source OpenAL. (Illustration courtesy of Creative Labs.)

The Early Days

Before Windows had efficient sound interfaces, DOS applications (mostly games) accessed the Sound Blaster directly. (Illustration courtesy of Creative Labs.)

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(hardware)

Sound Blaster - The best known family of sound cards for the IBM PC from Creative Labs.