Sound hardware has been built into PC motherboards for so long now it’s difficult to remember the days when a sound card was an expensive add-on peripheral. By the mid to late 1990s they were affordable and ubiquitous enough to be everywhere, but three decades later some of them are starting to fail. [Necroware] takes us through the repair of a couple of Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16s, which were the card to have back then.
The video below is a relaxed look at typical problems afflicting second-hand cards with uncertain pasts. There’s a broken PCB trace on the first one, which receives a neat repair. The second one has a lot more wrong with it though, and reveals some surprises. We would have found the dead 74 series chips, but we’re not so sure we’d have immediately suspected a resistor network as the culprit.
Watching these cards become sought-after in the 2020s is a little painful for those of us who were there at the time, because it’s certain we won’t be the only ones who cleared out a pile of old ISA cards back in the 2000s. If you find one today and don’t have an ISA slot, worry not, because you can still interface it via your LPC bus.
Anyone who cares about good audio will have a internal or external 96/192kHz 24 bit sound card.
They are night vs day better than built in(motherboard) SC’s
And if you are a ham who does “digi modes”- you will decode signals better.
Good to see these old cards coming back to life, I had many of them(gray beard).
Couldn’t agree more…got a Soundblaster Z in my main rig.
I threw out a 1MB gravis ultrasound in the early 2000s. Especially gutted as I’m normally a hoarder – I don’t know what came over me :(
I am still running a Soundblaster X-fi card in my PC. Did the opamp and capacitor mod on it. Much better sound. https://www.overclock.net/threads/incredible-x-fi-mod-will-void-your-warranty-56k-warning.185072/
About sound cards being expensive: Yes and no, I think. It depends.
Good 48KHz 16-Bit stereo sound cards with wavetable were quite pricey.
This were the type of sound cards you could use for real audio editing in the studio.
Such as AWE 64 Gold (ISA), Turtle Beach sound cards, Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000 or an EWS 64XL (PCI, but supported by MOD4WIN)..
Or an SB16 with a DB50XG MIDI daughterboard (waveblaster header).
The Roland MT-32 and SC-55 MIDI modules (expanders) were sought after, too.
A basic AdLib compatible or Sound Blaster Clone (8-Bit, mono, 22 KHz) was dirt cheap by early 90s, though.
There had been highly integrated chipsets such as ESS ES488, ES688 etc.
And many SB clones using discrete 8051 microcontrollers, too.
So it really depends.. Everyone had the opportunity to join the party somehow.
By early 90s, poor users could have afforded at least a Turbo XT with a basic VGA card (256KB) and a monochrome VGA monitor.
Along with a plain AdLib or CMS music card. Or a no-name Sound Blaster.
Some AdLib cards also had a Covox Speech Thing compatible DAC as an extra.
It was a basic resistor ladder, essentially.
An TurboXT with a NEC V20 at ~10 MHz was on eye level with a basic PC/AT,
an extra 8087 for productivity software had become cheap.
Hello, my old friend…