The reproduction of sound on the PC has an interesting history to say the least, from the beeps of the loudspeaker of the first computers to the complex sound hardware that we have in today’s computers, join us on this little trip where we explain the evolution of the sound cards for PC.
Audio is one of the essential experiences when it comes to enjoying multimedia content, be it video games, movies or the simple act of listening to our favorite song. But on the PC it has not always been like that and there is a history of how audio evolved on this platform.
The first IBM PC, and its little speaker
When IBM launched their IBM 5150 they were very clear about one thing, it was not going to be used to generate music, so they added a simple speaker to reproduce sounds, which was fully controlled by the CPU at all times. That is, the CPU had to completely stop everything it had to do if it wanted to reproduce something beyond a simple beep or a succession of them.
Although many used the loudspeaker in static scenes where there was no action, its quality and lack of sound channels would have meant that if the PC could do so, it would pale with embarrassment. Which was normal, IBM did not design its standard to be used in homes and in the same way that graphics were behind in home systems, the same happened with sound.
Music from a computer, but not from the PC
While the PC was focused on the business market and not for homes, other computers completely designed for the home market began to include support chips that were responsible for generating the sound, which are known as PSG or programmable sound generators.
In general they worked as follows; they were capable of generating three different square waves, of which he controlled the frequency and duration of each wave to give a specific note. In addition, they were unable to imitate any sound in reality and sounded like a band of musicians playing the same instrument, but due to the type of wave reproduced, the notes were not produced with such precision, giving a texture to the sound that today we recognize as 8 bits. .
However, IBM launched a version of its first IBM PC for the domestic market that they called PC jr, its particularity apart from an advanced version of CGA capable of displaying 16 colors on the screen was the addition of a PSG chip capable of generating 3 channels square wave and a noise channel.
The counterpart of this? IBM, in its mentality of seeing the PC as a computer for the business and corporate market, did not make the sound of the PC Jr standard, although the TANDY range of computers ended up using it and IBM itself in later models for the home market such as the IBM PS /1.
Creative’s Game Blaster
The Creative Music System, shortened to CMS and later renamed Game Blaster. Which was a card for 8-bit ISA interfaces, so it could also be used with the original IBM PC. Creative’s card was a vitaminized PSG that instead of using 3 channels for square waves had a total of 9, but it had no support for other types of sound waves.
But no game took advantage of this card and in specifications it was inferior to the Adlib Music Synthetizer that had been released that year, but Creative signed an agreement with Radio Shack that resold it as the Game Blaster, which catapulted its standardization in games but to the level of the Adlib. Its main strength? The fact of having a stereo output, so you could assign one series of channels to the left speaker and another series of channels to the right speaker.
But FM synthesis had already dazzled a large number of audiophiles, things would never be the same again and the sound in the PC world would change forever.
FM synthesis and the evolution of sound cards
FM synthesis was invented by John Chowning. But what is FM synthesis? Like the PSG they also use waves, but this time it does not reproduce approximations to the sine wave but rather said type of wave, but if we stay here what we get is a PSG for this type of waves. The concept of FM goes much further and makes use of other waves called operators, which modify the main wave or waves to achieve sounds that are not possible with a PSG.
The way in which the different operators are combined is called “algorithms” and each of these algorithms represents a different type of instrument. Thanks to this, not only were electronic keyboards capable of reproducing other types of instruments born, but also the addition of complex soundtracks was made possible.
To understand the success of FM synthesis we have to go back a little more in time, to 1983, when Yamaha launched its DX7 musical keyboard, which was a huge success for being the first to work through FM synthesis. , which allowed to reproduce any instrument.
Yamaha saw the enormous potential in FM synthesis, not only for the music production market but also for video games, the first processor capable of FM synthesis that they designed was the YM2151 that was used in the arcade Marble Madness, but on PC it would take a while to appear, at least four years through the Adlib Music Synthetizer first and the first Sound Blaster later.
The first sound cards for PC
While the Game Blaster was a want and can’t, the Adlib Music Synthesizer marked a before and after, based on the Yamaha YM3812 FM synthesis chip, it offered 9 simultaneous voices with FM quality and the ability to display an instrument on each channel. Different, which put the PC above the rest of the audio platforms on the market in the late 80s, only the Commodore Amiga with the powerful Paula chip based on PCM audio kept pace.
But the card that marked the before and after as far as PC sound hardware is concerned was Creative’s Sound Blaster, it used the same YM3812 from the Adlib but added additional hardware for audio recording and playback in PCM format, a Joystick port that was also a MIDI interface. The popularity of the Sound Blaster was such that it became the standard for sound cards in the PC for more than a decade, each and every game became compatible with the Sound Blaster and its variants.
Sound cards with PCM playback and the CD-ROM era
Today we are used to having our songs in audio files, we can do it because storage memory is extremely cheap, but in the 80’s both RAM and storage were extremely expensive and this made the audio not work. It was stored in data but even the FM synthesis was not another thing about how the sound was to be generated, but, audio files were not used.
Although the FM synthesis could reproduce any instrument, it had the problem that things like the human voice that is still a type of noise were still reproduced with noise generators with very unconvincing results. That was not a problem, until the arrival of the CD-ROM made it clear that the storage problem was non-existent, which marked the move to the use of PCM sound.
In the case of audio reproduction through PCM chips, it is not told to change the frequency, but to convert the values it is reading from a data file into analog signals in real time. This allows the reproduction of all kinds of sounds, the most important of which is the human voice, allowing the future reproduction of movies, the implementation of actors in video games and many other possibilities that today we see as normal.
With the passage of time, more and more sound cards appeared that expanded the number of channels or voices that they could display, the arrival years later of the PCI ports greatly improved the sound quality of the samples that went from being 16 bits at 32 bits,
Over time, Moore’s Law took effect, allowing smaller and smaller versions of these sound cards to be made, to the point that over time they ended up being integrated into the motherboard’s chipset and years later with the emergence of the SoCs within these as one more accelerator, the term sound card is only for the professional market and for gamers with very high demands in this field.
Today even the cheapest PC has a built-in sound card, which plays the audio of games and movies, but it has become such a tiny piece that it takes up a small part of the chipset or processor.
