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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having 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).

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The vast majority of people didn't buy Sound Blaster cards for their advanced 3D sound rendering, though. They bought them to play sound at a level more advanced than a PC speaker, which is what most had at the time.

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.

> Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card.

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.

Also because built-in cards had shitty Realtek chips. I remember fetching a Sound Blaster on my third PC just so that I could use custom drivers to bypass the Realtek chip and use a proper card with advanced DSP support.

> They bought them to play sound at a level more advanced than a PC speaker, which is what most had at the time.

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?

I think a ton of people bought them because they weren't that much more expensive and compatibility was such a headache in those days, it was worth it for the peace of mind alone.

Microsoft made dramatic changes to how sound drivers worked that caused problems for SoundBlaster's advanced features, but the explanation at the time was that SoundBlaster's garbage drivers were responsible for a sizeable portion of Windows' BSODs, and redesigning the driver model was a critical part of making the OS stable. I've never seen a reason to doubt that narrative.

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.

I don't think this is the case. I remember seeing something about 3D sound in the card settings, thinking "that's not going to work with my 2.1 speaker system, must be just a useless gimmiky DSP" -- and never using it again. Most of my friends had the same experience.

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.

The 3D sound rendering with Thief back in the day was amazing. Positional audio. Then that tech seemed to just disappear for a decade.

I think it's safe to say CRTs were killed by their incredible bulk compared to LCD displays.

Back in the early 2000s, our company phased out the huge 21" Sun boat anchor monitors for another smaller unit also with a 21" screen. They were put on the loading dock and we were told they were up for grabs. A colleague and I took several and the following weekend we took them to his private land where we proceeded to ascertain which handgun and rifle calibers were best at destroying them up close and at a distance. Up close .45 ACP was the winner. At a distance .308 was the winner. We also learned that a 6.5x55 Swedish will completely pass through one and lodge itself into a tree so deep we could not retrieve the projectile. Contrary to popular belief, monitors (at least these) did not explode when struck. Interestingly enough, the 6.5x55 will also handily pass through a HDD with no worries. All standard FMJ rounds.

Wow you are messing up timelines and your projecting your experience/reason/hobbies on the market.

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.

> DVD drives weren’t even a thing when people stopped buying soundcards.

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'

Do you have a link to a source for this information? I personally stopped buying sound cards because they are now integrated on motherboards.

Say you could run an experiment where in one universe motherboards were developed with integrated audio and Microsoft never cooperated with Hollywood and then in a second universe motherboards never included audio but Microsoft did cooperate with Hollywood. Clearly sound card makers have a big future in only one of those.

So... modern audio drivers, used by a 3D game, can’t generate the same kind of environmental 8.1-channel signal that you’d find on a Blu-Ray?

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.

Where can I read more about this?

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