Creative Labs infestation

Posted by erikfriend@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 22 comments

SB 2.0 w/CMS, SB Pro 2.0, SB16, SB16 PNP, Wave Blaster, AWE64 Gold, Live!, Audigy 2, SB 128, SB Vibra 128

The SB16+Wave Blaster, AWE64 Gold, and SBLive came from my own computers over the years. The rest are new additions thanks to nostalgic hoarding affliction syndrome and random e-waste donations. The earlier cards have amplifiers on-board and can drive speakers directly. Love the physical volume knobs too.

Unfortunately, this means I have to build at least 4 machines for the favorite cards to live in. Daaaang....

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bobj33@reddit

I was looking for my AWE 32 but I don't see it. It was a massive ISA card with two 30-pin SIMM slots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32

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geko29@reddit

I actually populated the slots on mine with some old RAM from a 486. Even though I didn't do anything with MIDI, so it really served no purpose.

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bobj33@reddit

My roommate had an old 386 and gave me the 30-pin SIMMs from that. I let him borrow my sound card for a while because he loved doing MIDI stuff in Cakewalk. With the extra memory he could load WAV samples of himself playing guitar and use those in Cakewalk.

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Hey-buuuddy@reddit

Sound blaster seemed like they had the market cornered in the early to mid 90s. Most 486 and eve the first Pentiums didn’t come with sound, big ass sound blaster card solves that- sold separately.

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Going from a PC Speaker to FM synthesis was mind blowing back in 1990.

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DualPerformance@reddit

hey, do you owned any set of creative speakers in the 90s? I have the Creative CS120 and as a kid I removed all cables from the circuit board, need help to figure where the cables need to be soldered

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Never used those speakers, but could probably point you in the right direction if I saw a pic of the board. I'd be surprised if the solder pads weren't destroyed by ripping the wires off though. Not a death sentence thankfully, just more work to solder. I'm guessing there are wires from the cone itself, each knob and switch, power jack, and link to second speaker?

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DualPerformance@reddit

Not sure if those links works here, those are high res images https://i.imgur.com/cwSlsuK.jpeg

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

I also see markings C19, C20, and C22. Those would have capacitors, probably the little flat orange/brown type. They are missing. Last are CZ1 and CZ2. Those are either for some 3 and 6 wire ribbon cables OR CZ1 might be a transistor, but usually transistors would be marked Q1, so unlikely.

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DualPerformance@reddit

I don't recall removing any capacitors. Could this board have been used in another Creative model? I think it might work. I'm going to power it and test the connections one by one. The stereo input seems to be the easiest to locate; it's on the green side behind the volume control. I could connect the input signal and see if I get any power at the RCA connector. Thanks for the help. (Sorry for the bad English.)

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

I see markings for SP+ (near headphone jack) and SP- (near yellow spring-button). Those probably go to the speaker.

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DualPerformance@reddit

The board have an RCA output to left speaker, on off swicht, a 9v imput all in the rear, and in the front have knobs for volumen, treble and bass, a power led, and earphone jack, those are pics of the enclosure 1) https://i.imgur.com/SqBclXt.jpeg 2) https://i.imgur.com/3WGOmkK.jpeg

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KingDaveRa@reddit

Did you get into my box of sound cards?! I've got an oddly similar collection of Creative cards.

Thing is, I've come to realise how they're nothing special, despite always wanting one back in the day. My 486 machine has an Aztech card because it's just a bit more interesting.

The AWE and Live were the most interesting cards creative made, in my experience. But the rest are firmly in the Just Works bracket. Sometimes, though, that's all you need.

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Definitely. Back in the 386/486 era, we just needed FM synthesis and basic WAVE. By the Pentium era, I wanted General MIDI and the AWE fit the bill. I used Cubic Player to listen to MOD/tracker music. That player supported AWE32/64 in addition to Gravis Ultrasound. Thought it was pretty cool to hear those songs mixed in hardware. Later, I used the Live! as a SoundFont synth in the Cakewalk DAW. Cakewalk used to support Creative SoundFont hardware out-of-the-box. Now, computers are so fast that audio accelerators aren't needed. Oh well. It was fun!

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garth54@reddit

I do remember learning the hard way as a kid that SB Pro 2 40 pin connector, which was for the CD-ROM drive, wasn't IDE...

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WingedGundark@reddit

CT1600 is probably the best Creative card ever, at least for ISA. It isn't something that can be considered high quality by any means s, but by Creative's standards it was improvement over the earlier and the mess that SB16 was.

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Seems that way. I had the 8-bit Sound Blaster for years. Later upgraded to the Pro. Kept it less than a day. At the time, I didn't understand it's software mixer, so the FM music was too quiet compared to the digital sound. My mistake. I ended up returning it and getting the SB16 CD-ROM kit (Thanks Dad!) Recently I picked up a CT1600 which lives in a 486DX2-66 machine today. It really is great. It just WORKS!

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No_Illustrator5035@reddit

On the sound blaster 16, what's the empty socket for? I always wanted one, but didn't get into them until the pci era. That's a very impressive collection!

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Creative used to sell an addon signal processor chip called ASP or CSP. It wasn't a commercial success but it could perform hardware audio compression/decompression. There's a short list of compatible software. maybe a game or two. It's basically unobtanium. Maybe someone will reverse engineer the thing someday.

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