Sound Blaster is a family of sound cards and audio peripherals designed by Creative Technology/Creative Labs of Singapore. The first Sound Blaster card was introduced in 1989.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

The Sound Blaster 1.0 (code named "Killer Kard"), CT1320A, was released in 1989. In addition to Game Blaster features, it has 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 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 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.