SoundBlaster sold sound cards as well, but then sound cards got integrated into the motherboards and now only <0.01% of people buy sound cards.
It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies.
It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition to DVDs, it killed sound cards (because no more advanced 3D sound rendering that sound blaster could do), CRTs (no more funky resolutions, no more overlay mode, and other fancy CRT features), and initiated the slow death of VGA (that also happened for other reasons but this contributed a lot).
Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card. I know I didn't, especially when working out what you're spending your money on - video cards were far more important. But those, too, have become less important as integrated graphics have improved.
Sure, if you mean a strict majority of people, but what about gamers? There's no reason "most" people need to buy a separate videocard but it is still a huge market. For a time, a good soundcard was with advanced features for 3D sound rendering was looking like it was going to be just as important to PC gaming as good videocards.
Yes, but why were they buying Sound Blaster cards instead of the much cheaper audio cards that were also on the market at the same time, but just didn’t have the same advanced feature set? The SoundBlaster, when it came out, was the “premium, workstation-tier” product of the audio-card world!
Are you suggesting the SoundBlaster’s rise was entirely down to 1. Brand recognition, or 2. even the top-of-market cards still being cheap enough that a strategy of “satisficing with the most expensive thing you can easily afford” would have led people to the SoundBlaster; and not at all to its differentiating feature-set from other audio cards?
Later on, I got a new computer and a much better speakers, and spent some time getting digital output to work. I used my motherboard for that, because at this stage, I wanted soundcard to be just a simple, stupid data sender. No DSP, no "advanced 3D sound rendering" -- the ideal sound card takes data from input (DVD) and sends them to speakers, acting as a dumb data pipe.
Same goes for "fancy CRT features" -- what is that exactly that CRTs can do that flat-screens can not? Other than duck hunt-style controllers, I don't think there is anything.
Overlay mode wasn't a CRT feature, and worked fine with flat panel displays with XP. The introduction of GPU compositing in Vista was what killed it, but it still continued to work in 7 if you turned compositing off. The death of funky resolutions was entirely a result of switching to hardware which has a native resolution, and not anything software side.
DVD drives weren’t even a thing when people stopped buying soundcards. Yeah a small selection wanted 3d sound for a gaming edge, and that was available on low cost cards pretty soon.
Before that they a place, but all features were available through software. The mixer, sampler, channels.
pretty sure these happened at around the same time. Single data point:
my 486-era machine (92):
- bolt on sb16+cdrom as part of 'multimedia upgrade' (MPC II)
my pentium-I era machine (96):
- came with sb16+cdrom (MPC III)
my pentium-II era machine (98):
- came with integrated DVD-ROM + ac97 audio
none of these were particularly 'special' as far as 'what people were buying then'
If so, I’m surprised nobody’s hacked around that by now by just e.g. using the GPU in GPGPU mode as an pseudo-FPGA, dropping audio DSP logic onto it, and generating their “HD 3D” audio using that.