The History of PC Audio

Where the article stops is AC'97 in 1997, which was replaced 7 years later by Intel HD Audio in 2004, still in active use and new production today, two decades later. There was a lot of changes in the early years but it seems that PC audio has (hopefully) stabilised now.

No mention of the Zefiro ZA2 sound card, which was the first generally available full-duplex SPDIF and AES/EBU digital soundcard for PC's:

http://www.dancetech.com/item.cfm?threadid=259

This card was standard fare for audiophiles for a few years in the 90's, given its designers attention to quality.

I remember that my first soundcard was Miro that I thought would be a forgotten historical artifact but vogons even has a wiki for it https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Miro_Sound_PCM12. Such a strange device with multiple compatibility modes.

Another milestone was audio mixing / virtual devices, allowing multiple apps to play sound at the same time. This gradually came in around the Windows 98 / XP transition with WDM rather than VxD drivers.

Honorable mention should go to Creative's EAX, a cool diversion that probably reached its apex in Thief and Thief 2, with environmental and 3D located sounds.

Where is my PAS-16 which was neither SB nor GUS? Actually I guess it must have had some blaster compat mode since while I remember some games having special pas16 support, I don't remember many not working wothout it.

fekkn wierdball cd interface... glad I replaced the system before the drive died or before I wanted a simple upgrade for speed and new disc types.

I feel fortunate I grabbed a bunch of PCs a school discarded... which included multiple "Sound Blaster Pro 2" cards.

They are very useful now, some 20 years later, for retro fun.

I still remember foldly my first sound card, roughly around '93. It was a LPT connected chip that did 22kHz (I believe mono) audio to 3.5mm. Was directly supported by ModEdit. I remember downloading the schematics as an ASCII file. Went to a local electronics shop and bought all the listed items. and handed it over to my cousin who was good with electronics at the time. He soldered the thing together, without a case... And I used it for about 2 years, without it ever breaking. Those were the days!