memes

I still like Xonar cards, like the Xonar DG (though it isn't compatible with my new PC). I always liked their interface more than the competitors, and it puts out excellent volume on my Logitech headset that is otherwise way too quiet for me. Never been a big fan of the simulated 3D environments on any of these cards, though. The only game it ever sounded decent in was No Man's Sky, but even that still had a distant tinny sound to it.

I think most people just use external amplifiers these days, but I'm still using a third-party sound card.

When I was a kid we had 9 planets.

What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.

My best friend gave me his sound blaster after upgrading to the Pro. Later I upgraded to a Gravis Ultrasound. Offloading sound processing to the sound card (1MB) improved gaming performance significantly.

Wait. When did onboard sound get good enough that you don't need a soundcard? My computer is "only" 12ish years, and it has a soundcard. The reason used to be that internal ones sounded like shit.

And then three things happened at once

1. Creative de-facto monopolized the industry often by unethical means (suing Aureal into bankruptcy, etc.), not letting much room for competitors, which in turn lead to diminishing quality on the part of Creative.
2. Microsoft didn't put hardware acceleration support into XAudio, which superseeded DirectSound.
3. Game publishers realized the vast majority of gamers didn't care about sound quality, so they could spent those resources on making the games look a little bit more realistic.

I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Soundblaster. They have that stupid card a Transformer name and none of us ever questioned it.

I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn't bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn't matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

(I'm going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I'm contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there's still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? ...Oh they're still around!? Good.)