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Sound Blaster 16
The Sound Blaster 16 is a series of sound cards by Creative Technology, first released in June 1992 [citation needed] 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 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 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 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, VirtualBox and 86Box, with varying degrees of faithfulness and compatibility.
The ASP or CSP chip added some new features to 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 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 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 a system to need more than one 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 CD-ROM, 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.
Hub AI
Sound Blaster 16 AI simulator
(@Sound Blaster 16_simulator)
Sound Blaster 16
The Sound Blaster 16 is a series of sound cards by Creative Technology, first released in June 1992 [citation needed] 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 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 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 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, VirtualBox and 86Box, with varying degrees of faithfulness and compatibility.
The ASP or CSP chip added some new features to 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 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 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 a system to need more than one 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 CD-ROM, 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.