Sound Cards with Breakout Boxes

Posted by erikfriend@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 29 comments

Sound Blaster Live!, Hercules Game Theater XP, Echo Gina 24

Ok, the Gina is more of an "audio interface" than a sound card. It supports low-latency ASIO but no gaming APIs. The Sound Blaster and Game Theater offer EAX, but the Game Theater's Crystal CS4630 chip adds A3D. It's basically a fancy Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Neato.

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rosmaniac@reddit

I have an original 20 bit Echo Layla and an mAudio Delta 1010 (needs doubler capacitors like virtually all of them do). I have a Delta 1020LT, but that has pair of octopus cables instead of the rack mounted interface box. I've used all three of these to do low latency multi track audio production.

I have one of those SoundBoaster Live 'drives' that fit in a 5.25 bay.

The best of the bunch though is the ATI AllinWonder with the custom Polycom back panel with multiple audio, composite video, and svideo I/O. The whole PC case is the breakout box.

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Very cool. I have a $10 Layla 24/96 from a yard sale. Crazy what gets thrown away... Tempted to build a Win98 machine just to run Sonar 8 with the Layla and an SBLive for SoundFonts. Retro studio rig!

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nricotorres@reddit

Never heard of Gina!

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Echo Audio made a full line of prosumer sound cards/interfaces. The key features were balanced 1/4" TRS inputs and outputs and low-latency ASIO drivers for use in digital audio workstations. They are lacking in game APIs though. No EAX or A3D type functions.

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siliconsandwich@reddit

wait til you find out about pro tools hd!

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Heh. I know PT is the industry standard, but I've always preferred Cakewalk. The hardware lock-in always irritated me. IIRC, Cakewalk LE was bundled with several Creative Labs products. That's how they won me over. I've used Cakewalk with interfaces by Apogee, Lynx, Mackie, Echo, and Creative Labs. Sometimes, I have to export the multitracks to WAV and send them off to be mixed by others in PT though.

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siliconsandwich@reddit

I was always a DP girl if I could get away with it, but MOTU did something nasty to their summing about 10 years ago and now I just use whatever is in front of me!

But what I meant was: Early pro tools HD systems from ~mid-2000s had awesome internal PCI-X core and processing cards that connected to an array of big external rack mount interfaces, DAC/ADCs and other IO, so it’s like the pro version of what you’re displaying here.

Given their age, people are selling them off cheap these days. There are at least a couple of folks round here building entire “20-years-ago” pro studios in their bedrooms. I even picked up some old bits myself!

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

Totally. That old gear is still good gear. There is a Digi 96 HDX in the local studio in town. I'm using Apogee AD-16x/DA-16x into a Lynx AES16 PCI card. My portable rig is a Mackie Onyx 1640 into firewire. I stubbornly REFUSE to upgrade. If it ain't broke, why fix it?

The hardest part is finding modern motherboards with PCI and laptops with PC-card slots, etc. I love the daisy-chains of lightning to firewire-800 to firewire-400 adapters some people do...

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shinyviper@reddit

Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold was my standard on a PIII 500, such a good card.

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erikfriend@reddit (OP)

I loved that card. The move from FM synthesis to Wavetable synthesis was an exciting time. Suddenly, games were using General MIDI for their soundtracks, with "real" instruments. Tracker/MOD music was at it's peak and the AWE64 could play it back in hardware with smooth sample interpolation. Plus it worked as a multitimbral sampler for music production. Mind-blowing at the time.

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ZarK-eh@reddit

Didn't do EAX or A3D tho...

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refuge9@reddit

It would be surprising if it did, since EAX didn’t come about until 3 years after the AWE64 was released. That’d be like complaining that a 1993 Pentium 66 didn’t come with MMX, even though the MMX instruction set wasn’t released until 1996 with the P55C Pentium w/ MMX 166/200. Heck, the DirectSound3D API that EAX is based on and is required in order to function didn’t even exist until 1996.

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ZarK-eh@reddit

Still doesn't have EAX or A3D. Not sure what you are complaining about. The Awe64 is a pretty decent card especially with full ram expansion! I have run two sound cards to get all the goodness! Lol

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brasticstack@reddit

I had a friend that had the Gina in his home studio. Solid bit of kit, that!

I had a M-Audio Delta 24/96 that I used in several PCs, probably as late as 2006 or so. It had a little breakout cable for MIDI and S/PDIF that I very rarely needed.

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Accurate-Campaign821@reddit

Always wanted an Audigy2 ZS with the front panel. Had it for a bit but had to move...

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Suturb-Seyekcub@reddit

I had the game theater XP. I had to drop it when I moved on from Windows XP because there wasn’t ever a driver released for newer operating systems. It was an impressive bit of kit with a very very thick cable connecting it to the card.

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refuge9@reddit

God, I miss the days of discrete sound cards, especially ones with breakout boxes that can either be internal or externally mounted.

Now the best you can do is a USB DAC, and while they can sound good, there’s just something about old school sound cards that’s coooool

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Niphoria@reddit

Modern PCI-E soundcards do still exist.

A simple search for "Sound Blaster PCI-E" would have told you that.

It's just that now it's no longer mandatory to have a sound card anymore unless you are using an analog Headset... Which many are not since analog Headset can't have RGB lights.

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refuge9@reddit

Yes, but modern PCI-E cards really don’t push any boundaries. Most of the time all they bring to the table is multi channel sound vs basic stereo+mic. In windows Vista, Microsoft changed the way sound drivers worked,removing direct API access to the DEPs on sound cards, causing pretty much all of the advanced post processing features of Discrete sound cards to be instead processed through the CPU, turning all of the add-on sound cards into basic DACs and little more. Outside of some niche features like professional inputs or multichannel outputs, there really isn’t any reason most on-motherboard sound systems can’t do everything 90% of users want.

While sometimes there are reasons you need a add-on soundcard (ie: my Threadripper 3xxx series motherboard audio has been bugged out since day one and never worked), most people will never really have need of one, and in professional settings a USB breakout box tends to work and sound better, since it’s isolated from the rest of the PC and will have less interference from EMI emissions. So, while yes, there are discrete PCI-E sound cards available, they don’t generally bring anything to the table that the onboard sound doesn’t already do.

Whereas back in the late 90s, you had on board memory, hard coded wave table synthesis, and on board instruments. Sound cards were interesting rather than an afterthought.

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