# Singapore’s Sound Card Hero

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Asianometry
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPa6wRECw0
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/26149

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

It used to be that if you wanted to get good audio on your computer, you had to get a sound card. And if you needed a sound card, there was just one choice: Sound Blaster. The company behind this iconic brand, Creative Labs or Technology, actually came from the city of the Merlion: Singapore. Their fortunes rose and fell with that of their most iconic product. In today's video, a look at Singapore's sound card tech hero. ## Beginnings Wong Hoo Sim was born in 1955 to a Hokkien Chinese family in Singapore. He was what was called a Kampong kid. Kampong refers to rural villages of Malaysia and Singapore with homes built on stilts. People there live a slower pace of life surrounded by fruit trees and wild chickens. In his 1999 semi-autobiography "Chaotic Thoughts From The Old Millennium", Sim writes about a time when Singapore's rule of law was not yet so strong. When housewives gambled a few dollars here and there and kids had little to do. His family was poor. As a child, Sim earned a few cents a day by selling eggs on the street. And he passed the time by playing a harmonica that one of his sisters gave him at the age of 11. Later in 1972, he entered Ngee Ann Polytechnic as an Electrical and Electronics student. There, he joined the school's harmonica troupe - arranging music pieces for them to play. He later also taught himself the accordion. He would later say that the experience changed his life, and that the company Creative Technology would not exist had it not been for his time in the troupe. It opened his eyes to the power of creativity. I think this unstructured upbringing was quite obvious. Article profiles of Sim find him talking a fount of quirky ideas: An algorithm for piano software, conspiracy theories about Princess Diana's passing, and so on. An eccentric inventor type. And I don’t know a better place to mention this, but his aforementioned autobiography has a chapter titled "Uses for Saliva". Number 7 is for easing fungi-related body itches. I cannot attest to this. ## Thinking About Starting Something After graduating and completing his mandatory military service, Sim works at various factories and electronics companies - earning money as an assistant electronics engineer. He finally landed a stable job at a small petroleum exploration firm owned by a French expat couple. The firm saw the computerization trend and hired an American to lead a project to build a computerized exploration tool. Sim is hired to work with the American consultant. With his help, the first project is completed on time and Sim then takes over. Sim then leads the design of a second computerized tool entirely on his own. But in the end, he wanted something else. After two years, things got unbearable. On January 1, 1981 - whilst working on an oil rig in the South China Sea - Wong Hoo Sim looks up at the stars and set a goal for himself. That he would make a million dollars within five years. So he quit his job and started a YouTube channel. Just kidding. Nobody starts a channel to get rich. Just look at me. ## Founding Creative Technology After leaving his job, he had to survive on about $200 a month. He would dedicate his time to doing R&D on computers and maybe computer music. Unfortunately his first venture was a tuition cram school which crashed out when his business partner vanished with a load of debts - leaving gangsters to loot the school of its furniture. Then on July 1st, 1981, Sim founded Creative Technology with about $10,000 Singapore Dollars of his own savings. Two of his childhood friends later joined him. Including Kai Wa Ng, who became the chief technology officer. Unlike the boisterous Sim, Ng is quiet and prefers to stay out of the limelight. Together, they rented a small 440-square-foot shop in Singapore's Pearls Centre, a now-demolished mall in Chinatown. It was basically a repair shop that fixed computers and resold secondary parts. It did not make a lot of money, so Sim took teaching jobs, piecemeal work, and one-offs whenever possible. His main goal would be to "create my own things, my own R&D". Their first products were apparently two add-on boards for the Apple II microcomputer: One for memory and another with a Zilog Z80 CPU. Then in 1984

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

Creative made a splash with one of Singapore's first indigenous personal computers: the Cubic 99. ## Cubic 99 It was the time of the personal computer. News of the IBM PC was sweeping across the United States, thanks to the heft of the IBM giant. But in Asia, the microcomputer that hobbyists really took to was the Apple II. The Apple II was - in the early days - unusually open. There were no anti-tamper screws or seals. You just opened it up and there it all was. It was simple and easy to understand. Moreover, components like its 6502 CPU were well-labeled - and very importantly - can be bought from off the shelf. Tinkerers from Taiwan to South Korea started slapping together their own Apple II clones. Singapore had their own shops selling pirated software and components and clones. Such efforts contributed a great deal towards their future PC industries. In 1984, Apple finally woke up to the threat of these clones and started going after them in court. Sim and Creative believed this opened the door for a Apple-compatible microcomputer with similar performance but a lower price point and the ability to process Chinese characters. The Cubic 99 had 1 disc drive, and sold at two price points: 64K at $1,350 and 192K at $1,895. The computer had two CPUs, a 6502 and Z80A, which let it run software applications from both Apple's operating system as well as the disk operating system CP/M. The Cubic 99's key selling point, however, was its Talking BASIC. It let the computer speak out BASIC commands. The idea being that programmers no longer need to look at the screen so much. They can just listen to it. The computer also had the first voice synthesizer specialized for Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin - one of Singapore's two official languages then. Cubic 99 gained some traction. Introduced in October 1984 at the ProCom Asia Exhibition, it was said to have sold one unit every four minutes at the last day of the exhibit. And total sales ranged about 5,000 units. ## The Cubic CT Flops In early 1986, Creative poured their heart, soul and $500,000 into a follow-up computer called the Cubic CT. The CT was positioned as more of an IBM-compatible for businesses - with better color graphics and an audio board for producing melodies. And to serve the Chinese-speaking Singapore market, Creative built what it called a highly sophisticated but easy to use Chinese system. By extending the BIOS to intercept all I/O signals, it allowed Chinese-speaking people to execute computer commands in Chinese. Despite the extra time and new features, the PC sold poorly in Singapore. In a later interview with the Straits Times, Sim grumbled about the shortcomings of building for his own home market: > We realized then that a company like ours which wants to do a lot of R&D did open a big door for Sim and his 50-person team at Creative Technology to leap through. ## Sound in Computers The first IBM PCs and clones shipped with a simple speaker that can produce a single square wave. Meaning that the PC speaker can flip between two states, ON and OFF. It had no volume control. They called it the beeper or bipper and its initial purpose was to alert the user of errors. The IBM PC team never thought about doing more than that because it wasn't necessary for business users and the GUI was not even all that rich at that time. But clever programmers learned how to programmatically trigger the speaker to combine rapid pulses of different lengths and produce pretty sophisticated music. This hack of making digital tones sound like analog sounds is called "pulse width modulation" or PWM. Even so, nobody’s inviting the IBM PC speaker to Carnegie Hall to back Jascha Heifetz. Programmers were making do with what was available. But the IBM PC featured five to eight internal expansion slots. Third parties can build expansion cards to plug into a slot and add functionality. So it was possible to produce PC sound cards to create richer audio to be played via external speakers. In 1987, IBM marketed the IBM Music Feature Card, compatible with the IBM PC/AT and its

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clones. It was a high-end sound card with a powerful Yamaha synthesizer chip. This chip was used in many arcade machines and was capable of producing MIDI-style music. But at $600, the card cost half as much as a PC itself. IBM targeted it at music professionals like composers, but those guys used computers like the Atari ST and Amiga. Not PCs. The market that did exist on the PC and did care about sounds and music were gamers. But IBM quizzically did not target that segment. Their card could not play recorded digital sound effects or speech all that well. And that in the end was what game developers wanted. They wanted to work with hardware that helped them easily play both their music and sound samples. Thusly, the IBM Music Card failed with barely 10,000 units sold. And generally speaking, it was hard to get gamers to spend one of their precious PC expansion slots on something as seemingly trivial as a sound card. Many preferred to spend their slots on a hard disk drive, a printer, or more memory. ## AdLib The first sound card to break through into the mainstream was the AdLib Music Synthesizer. The company was founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music at Laval University in Quebec City. After seeing a demo of a singing computer program in the 1970s, he sought ways to apply computer technology to teaching music. The company itself was founded in 1981. Its first product was a 8-bit special computer to help train the ear. It did not sell well, so Prevel decided to try a sound expansion card. Released in August 1987, the AdLib Music Synthesizer Card took a different tack than IBM. Correctly pinning IBM's failure on price, the card was low-end - basically just a Yamaha YM3812 synthesizer chip stuck onto a board so it can interface with the PC. At the heart of the AdLib card was a technology called Frequency Modulation or FM Synthesis. This was a technique that let you take simple-to-generate sine waves and modulate their frequencies to create rich sounds without using that much memory or compute resources. Despite costing just $200, the sound card offered a truly massive step up in audio quality - enabling multiple simultaneous channels of synthesized music and sound. ## Sierra The card also came at the right time for video game makers to take advantage. The pioneer in this aspect was the American video game developer Sierra. Founded by Ken and Roberta Williams to produce business software, they broke ground with narrative-driven graphical adventure video games like Mystery House. One of the biggest game developers in America, they were known for aggressively pushing MS-DOS standards rather than waiting for them. In graphics, they were early supporters of EGA, VGA and MCGA to add dozens of colors to their games. And in terms of distribution, they were one of the first adopters of both the 5. 25 inch and 3. 5 inch floppy disk formats. So in 1988, they sought to raise the bar on what a video game can do sound-wise. They struck a deal with several sound card makers including AdLib to support their next big game King's Quest IV. It was the first PC-compatible game to have such sound card support. And Sierra integrated it into the whole experience by hiring film and TV composers like William Goldstein and Jan Hammer to compose music for their games. Gamers who wanted to experience Sierra's full vision had to buy a sound card. With the other Sierra-backed card makers like Roland being more high-end, most turned to AdLib, making theirs the first industry standard sound card. A bevy of sound cards sprouted up to try and take the market from AdLib. But it was a pain for game developers to customize their games for these new cards. AdLib did good enough for them. ## Creative Makes a Sound Card The Cubic CT's market failure in 1987 had taught Sim and his team that marketing a whole computer was too much for a small team to handle. However, the Creative team had done an extensive amount of work on making the CT "multimedia" - though the phrase had not yet been coined. Sim recalled in a later interview that Creative had developed a lot of cool software for the CT. Like the Intelligent Organ, which let you play orchestra-like music by tapping keys

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

on the keyboard. They packaged it with a PC expansion card to create the "Creative Music System" and marketed it in Singapore as a music product. The advert copy read: > The Creative Music System is a new musical tool blessed with awesome power and ease of use never seen before - enabling the laymen to create and play his own Professional Quality Music in a matter of hours that would otherwise take years or perhaps impossible. Bombastic. Released in 1987, the package product sold for about $288 Singapore dollars and did quite well in Asia - a major ego boost for the small company. In 1988, Sim decided that it was time to go to the United States. Partner Kai Wai Ng recalled at the time: > He told everybody he would not come back unless he made $1 million by selling 20,000 of our music soundcards This was not easy especially for a company from a distant Asian country most Americans had never heard of. Sim recalls in a 1994 interview: > We brainstormed the product development and tried to imagine what the Americans would like. As to how to sell it, I hadn't a single clue. Creative took the Creative Music System bundle and chopped off some of the software but kept the hardware mostly the same. A few were made available to American consumers via Tandy/Radio Shack and mail order under the "Game Blaster" name. The product sold quite well - better than anything else Creative had offered before. But AdLib's sound cards remained dominant in the market and Sim recognized that improvements were necessary. ## Killer Kard In June 1989, Creative debuted their Killer Kard - their followup sound card. Killer Kard... this choice of name makes me wonder what Singaporeans think of Americans. Creative must have realized pretty quickly that the name did not convey the right connotations and renamed it the "Sound Blaster". The first Sound Blaster was an 8-bit sound card with a sampling rate half that of a Compact Disc - 22 kilohertz, as limited by PC speed and component costs. So the sound by itself wasn't all that amazing. But when your frame of reference is the standard PC speaker, it is a massive jump. The sound card was also compatible with AdLib's audio standard as Creative used the same Yamaha synthesizer chips as AdLib. It was also dual-compatible with their own Game Blaster audio standard. Most importantly, Sound Blaster had two things over AdLib. First, the AdLib card can play a video game's music but it cannot play its sampled sound effects - zaps, bangs, booms, etc. Sound Blaster can and in doing so, add further immersion to the gaming experience. Second, the Sound Blaster card added an in-built Game Port. Recall earlier I mentioned that PCs had a limited number of expansion slots and that gamers thought hard about using one of them on a sound card. The Sound Blaster game port was a 15-pin game port in the back that let users connect a joystick to their computer. Usually, those wanting to use such a stick had to buy a $50 game port adaptor or multiple I/O card and jam that puppy into an expansion slot. The Sound Blaster adding this game port feature not only freed up the expansion slot, but also served as a $50 shadow discount on the card. Asked later why they added the Game Port, Sim recalled: > It was very simple to do, and we had the space on the backplate to include a gameport. ## Rise of the Sound Blaster made its big debut at the Comdex Show in Las Vegas in November 1989. It was a huge hit. Sim recalled the King of Pop himself Michael Jackson stopping by for a whole thirty minutes despite the urgings of his handlers. I can't confirm that, but I did find news reports saying that he was there and looked at something PC and music related. Speaking to Singaporean media in 1989, Sim claimed that they sold about $100,000 of cards at Comdex. He said: > At Comdex, people lined up in 20-person queues in front of three cashiers in our tiny 300 square foot booth - we sold one Sound Blaster every four minutes. The momentum did not stop. Six months later, sales increased to about 10,000 cards a month. Company sales in 1989 reportedly doubled to $30 million Singapore dollars.

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Saying that the market for sound cards could be as large as $40 million, Sim sought to make Sound Blaster the audio hardware standard for the PC. He raised money from local VCs and struck deals with Asian computer-makers to bundle the chipset and software. Sim also began wooing game developers - providing them with free Sound Blaster Developer Kits and free consultancy for fixing any compatibility problems. They were one of the first to do this, and it helped accelerate adoption. Creative also kept shipping new product - quickly following up the breakthrough Sound Blaster 1. 0 with a deluxe "Pro" model with an extra Yamaha FM chip for stereo sound and a higher sampling rate. ## The Fall of AdLib And what happened to AdLib, Creative's Canadian rival? When the Sound Blaster emerged, the company already had its next product - the AdLib Gold or Gold1000 - designed and ready to go. The Gold1000 would use Yamaha's newest chip and match the Sound Blaster Pro feature-wise and more. Debuting at the Spring 1991 Comdex, AdLib planned to back the launch with a big ad campaign. But it all depended on Yamaha shipping them the new FM Synthesizer chip on time. And that did not happen, for whatever reason. There is one named intimation from Rich Heimlich - one of the authors of the Sound Blaster: Official Book - that Creative leaned on Yamaha to ship AdLib a chip that would not pass testing. And that Yamaha played ball because Creative was then their biggest customer. Others have gone on to repeat the claim. I was not able to find any primary sources to corroborate it. It is a pretty big accusation, considering that AdLib could have put Yamaha on blast had it actually happened. In the end, Creative gets a pretty similar Yamaha chip and uses it to launch the Sound Blaster 16 in 1992. This third-generation sound card included support for CD-quality 16-bit audio. The Sound Blaster 16 turns out to be a monster hit - even making inroads into the business market. It goes on to become one of the best-selling sound cards in history - selling over a billion dollars. In August 1992, Creative IPOs on the American NASDAQ market - the first Singaporean company to do so. The stock soared, valuing the company at over a billion dollars. Sim becomes one of Singapore's richest men. AdLib finally releases the Gold but by then it was too late. Drained by its expensive ad run, AdLib files for bankruptcy in May 1992. The Quebec government buys the assets, and sells them to a German company. ## Empire of Sound As Sim had hoped, the card becomes the standard for sound in the PC market. Consumers looking for a sound card for their Windows 3. 1 and early Windows 95 PCs automatically bought Sound Blaster sound cards. Developers producing content automatically targeted Sound Blaster hardware. At one point, Sound Blaster seemed to have received the blessings of the gate-keeper Microsoft itself. In the 1990s, Creative and Microsoft joined a panel that produced the Multimedia Personal Computer or MPC standard. The goal was to try to impose some order on the current mess of consumer multi-media solutions. There were tiers of MPCs, but they generally were all PCs with a sound card, CD-ROM, and Microsoft Windows. Now millions of PCs automatically included Creative sound cards. By 1994, company sales surged to $650 million. Yet in the back of their minds, Sim and others knew that the company cannot rely on a single product. It had to diversify. But to what? This led to some pain. In late 1994, Creative started making CD-ROM drives, but did so just as the cost of drives crashed. Profits fell from $97 million on $650 million of revenues in 1994 to just $26. 5 million on $1. 2 billion of revenue in 1995. The stock crashed. Sim promised better performance, and held out yet another diversification into graphics cards - releasing the 3D Blaster card in 1995. Creative marketed it as one of the first 3D game cards, while also highlighting its complementary audio functionality. But the 3D Blaster arrived at a time when other graphics cards like 3dfx held the high ground. The card never reached the same heights as Sound Blaster, and turned losses for the company. Creative nevertheless kept it in the market until the early 2000s.

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## No U-Turns In the 1990s, Creative was seen as Singapore's technology hero - a phenomenon that the country had to replicate. And Wong Hoo Sim was the island nation's own Bill Gates. In 1993, Sim was awarded the Businessman of the Year Award, receiving plaudits from the great Lee Kuan Yew himself. Government officials hailed the company for surviving in a fiercely competitive environment. Sim becomes somewhat of a role model and business guru in his native country - speaking often on the topic of how Singapore can create more people like him. In this aspect, he is perhaps most well known for the concept of No U-Turn Syndrome, or NUTS. He writes in his book: > In the US, when there is no sign on the road, it means that you can make a U-turn. When the authority do not want people to make U-turns, they will put up signs to tell you not to make U-turns. > In Singapore, it is the reverse. When there is no sign on the road, you are not allowed to make U-turns. When the authority allow you to make U-turns, then they will put up signs to give you that right. Sim wrote that this rules-based society helped Singapore for a long time, but now holds it back in the business world because you cannot innovate if you first have to get approval from the authorities. Even as Creative struggled through the financial setbacks from its diversification drive into CD-ROMs and graphics cards in 1995 and 1996, Sim hailed the values of having a strong spirit and being positive. But even as he preached his ways of thinking, the hardware integration that Creative built its business upon started to come across serious problems. ## Holding Back Let us go back to the core idea: Why did PCs in the 1990s need sound cards in the first place? The reason was because the PC CPUs of the era did not have the beef. In other words, they lacked power to handle the heavy audio processing to provide a music track plus several sound effects. By providing a hardware-accelerated solution, Creative established a valuable proprietary industry standard. Games talked right to the sound card, which then communicated right with the CPU and hardware. The sound card handled all audio functions, whether that meant conversion between analog and digital, processing, what have you. But the standard that Creative built and monetized also locked developers into a thing from the ancient DOS era. Over time, people determined that it was holding back the entire ecosystem. For example, in the late 1990s, the PC industry moved from the old ISA bus to the PCI bus. ISA had been a true bottleneck as a single stereo-CD stream at 1. 4 megabits per second consumed 40% of its 2-6 megabits per second carrying capacity. But Sound Blaster cards used and assumed ISA. OEMs feared breaking things and sought backwards compatibility, perhaps to a fault. Creative eventually released PCI cards in 1998, but it worked weirdly - forcing some developers to emulate ISA behavior using software. Moreover, the Sound Blaster sound card going direct to the hardware caused driver instability and audio glitches that Intel and Microsoft got blamed for. Many Creative drivers were fingered as being "nightmares", with people sticking to particular versions. There is more. Sound Blaster began with games. Its sound paradigm was built around games. But Microsoft envisioned Windows 95 applications doing voice chat and telephony. Such applications needed full-duplex sound, conflicting with Sound Blaster's turf. In the end, Microsoft and Intel decided that audio was too important to be left to a third party fiefdom. And thanks to Moore's Law, by the late 1990s Intel’s chips had gotten fast enough that Intel felt that they can handle at least some of this digital signal processing. Thus in late 1996, Intel brought out Audio Codec '97 or AC'97. A landmark in PC audio systems and the beginning of the end for the sound card. ## AC’97 AC'97's core concept was to split all PC audio functions into two chips: One digital and the other analog. Analog codecs convert all analog signals into digital ones and vice versa. So basically audio coming directly in and out of the line jacks. It takes the form of a small, 48-pin mixed signal chip - often made by analog specialists like the Taiwanese firm RealTek or Analog Devices. Since these chips were vulnerable to

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electrical signal interference, Intel had them placed in a "quiet place" on the motherboard. The other half is the digital controller, in the motherboard chipset. It does a bunch of stuff, but in essence the controller co-opts the sound card by handling complicated digital audio processing. So stuff like sound tasks, music synthesis, surround sound for movies, and telephony. AC'97 did a few other things to mess with the sound card market that may or may not have been deliberate. One thing was it hardcoded the sampling rate to 48 kilohertz, which conflicted with Sound Blaster's 44 kilohertz - making it sound worse. At the start, AC'97 was not perfect. It handled just one stream at a time. Channels had limited flexibility. Commenters recall there being issues with crosstalk and drivers. And PC OEMs did not really adopt it en masse until mid-1999. But its impact on the sound card industry was significant. AC'97 commoditized CD-quality audio, making it a standard feature as widespread as the color monitor. Subsequent sound cards - the Live! in 1998 and the Audigy in 2001 - still rung up good sales. However, it was clear that ordinary consumers no longer needed a basic sound card, causing the lower end of the market to collapse. ## EAX As I mentioned, Creative had feared this day. But what to do? What the great companies did to find another hit product or transition phase to ride. For instance, Qualcomm initially rose on the back of modems and wireless standards. But when CDMA began to fade, they transitioned to making mobile processors - which remains one of their core businesses today. And Nvidia. When it became clear that Intel and Microsoft were coming for them, Nvidia generalized their fixed graphics pipeline to create the proprietary GPU compute language that we now call CUDA. Creative sought to do something kind of similar to Nvidia's CUDA. In 1998, they extended a Windows sound API called DirectSound3D to create what they called Environmental Audio Extensions or EAX. The idea with EAX was to add value to the gaming experience and move beyond the sound card by owning certain sound effects like reverb, occlusion, and environmental effects. As described by Creative's audio marketing manager Micah Stroud: > EAX is a tool for designing convincing interactive entertainment applications without imposing unnecessary effort on the game developer and the CPU > The programming interface in EAX allows the game developer to directly concentrate on the perceived acoustical effects of reflections and reverberation Developers can use EAX to develop these special sound environments without worrying so much about the API itself. Such advanced effects would be processed on sound card hardware, rather than on the CPU. EAX competed with another API called A3D, made by the audio company Aureal Semiconductor. When EAX released, Aureal's VP of audio snarled: > EAX is a very small and simple reverb extension API for DirectSound3D, and it only works on Creative hardware... In comparison, A3D is a very complete, stand-alone API that runs seamlessly on any Windows audio subsystem, taking full advantage of all standard 2D and 3D audio capabilities There was no shortage of bad blood between the two. In 1998, Creative sued Aureal for patent infringement and false advertising. Aureal countersued and eventually won in 1999 but went bankrupt from all the legal costs. Which let Creative eventually acquire them. EAX was used in a variety of popular games like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Splinter Cell. So it was quite popular. But the question of whether EAX would be enough to save the company remained outstanding. ## Mass Diversifications During this era, Creative also spent a great deal of resources diversifying into various new hardware segments, plus Internet. The most famous of such diversifications were the Nomad and Zen Audio Players. They were not the first to market with these so-called MP3 players. That honor goes to the Rio, made by an US-based firm called Diamond, as well as the MPMAN, made by a Korean firm. Both came out in 1998. Creative acquired two companies - Opti Systems in 1997 and Silicon Engineering in 1998 - that allowed them to release its first portable MP3 player: the Nomad, in April 1999.

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It held about 64 megabytes of storage space and included an FM radio as well as a program to manage songs. In addition to the music players, Creative released a variety of other products. Some did okay, others were weird. Back in 1997, they acquired Cambridge SoundWorks - an American-based manufacturer of audio equipment. They kept on selling their SoundWorks speakers and even expanded the lineup throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2000 they released the "BlasterKey", a low-cost and "internet-centric" MIDI-keyboard. The idea was to allow people to make and play Internet music. It never got bigger than a niche product. That same year, they released a line of VIDEO BLASTER PC cameras. They sold okay, though I would not call them a success. Perhaps the most frustrating diversifications were the company's plunge into Internet e-commerce as the Dotcom bubble blew up. Sim envisioned a whole ecosystem of entertainment-centric internet businesses operating under a Creative internet holding company. This includes a website to sell low margin entertainment products. Another website called Hifi to sell advanced home entertainment equipment. And millions of dollars invested in various "synergistic" internet businesses. So many of these diversifications did not pan out and their failures in the wake of the dotcom bust inflicted a lot of pain. In August 2001, after posting a big $130 million loss for the fiscal year, Sim again promised that Creative would move towards "making the money the hard, square way" with its core sound businesses. Though that does not explain why a year later they bought 3Dlabs - a producer of graphics accelerator chips - and announced they would return to the "ultra high-end" graphics card arena. This one faded out too. ## The iPod The Creative music players sold well for a little bit. For instance, the 6GB Creative NOMAD Jukebox made a splash thanks to the sheer amount of storage space when it was released in 2000. But these were eventually eclipsed by Apple's iPods. Sim has famously before said that Steve Jobs and Apple had approached Creative at a booth - saying that he liked their products and wanted to do some kind of deal. Such a deal of course never happened and the iPod went on to dominate the marketplace. The reasons for which are pretty well covered in other publications. First, the first iPod broke ground in user interfaces and aesthetics. Most famously, the touch click-wheel. The Nomad wasn't super ugly, but it seemed like Creative focused more on storage space and codecs than aesthetics - leaving it a bit large and blocky-looking. Second, Apple had and controlled iTunes. It managed the whole process of transferring MP3 music over from the desktop to the device. The FireWire connection made a sync relatively fast. The Nomad on the other hand connected directly to the computer via USB. Worked fine for power users who are really particular about their music and how it is set up, but too much of a hassle for the ordinary user. Third was also iTunes-related: the Music Store. Apple built up relationships with the music labels that let them sell songs at 99 cents a pop. Sim and Creative subtly rooted for MP3 piracy. Creative did not help themselves. Their marketing messages emphasized specs over user experience and benefit. Their lineup got rather convoluted, lacking cohesion in both feel and look. And Creative's court battles probably also distracted them. They received a patent in 2005 for organizing and selecting music within hierarchical user interfaces on portable music players. Sim told the press that Creative would "aggressively pursue" infringers. Thus in May 2005, they sued Apple for patent violation, seeking to halt shipments of their iPod and iPod Nano. Apple promptly countersued, but it seems like this was a pretty air-tight patent. In August, Apple settled for $100 million - a small portion of their $1. 5 billion in iPod revenues. Steve Jobs murmured in a press release, "Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent. " I love early 2000s Jobs. Ten years later, Creative tried to go back to that well again - hitting up seven smartphone makers for cash using the same ZEN patent. Before that progressed too far however, Google intervened and had the patent invalidated in court. ## The End of the Sound Card In 2004, Intel took the next step in the audio codec space with their successor to the original AC'97 standard: Intel HD Audio, or Azalia.

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Prior to it, sound cards still offered certain benefits and clearer sound than AC'97 enabled motherboards. Like the fixed 48 kilohertz sample rate or the poor multi-stream support or device audio jack detection. Intel HD Audio fixed all these and more. It allowed motherboards to support more channels and at far higher sample rates of up to 192 kilohertz. It basically dealt the death blow to the discrete sound card. A few years later, Microsoft dealt their own killing blow to Creative's hopes for their own value-add software platform. In 2007, Microsoft dropped support for the DirectSound3D API that EAX had been based on - eliminating direct DSP hardware access. Video games quickly dropped hardware-based support for audio. EAX did bring some value to developers but it did not have the same impact as CUDA. Reality is that audio doesn't have the same ceiling as high performance compute. Once audio got good enough for most, that was that. Creative also made the mistake of building EAX on top of a platform that someone else controlled. I would also be remiss not to mention the impact of the major platform transitions going on during this time: Notebook PCs and the video game console. Notebooks were small, fully integrated products that simply did not have the space or expansion slots for sound cards. Creative did make notebook sound cards, but nobody bought them. Everyone just used the internal motherboard audio. And the rise of video game consoles like Playstation and Xbox tore video game developers away from the PC. AAA game developers targeted the console's audio APIs - dropping Creative's proprietary standards. Both of these transitions made it impossible for the sound card to find a future - leaving it stuck in the PC past. The rest of the tech world just left it behind. ## Conclusion Unlike other firms with big booms and bust, Creative did not collapse or go bankrupt. The company continued working on sound cards, and settled into the audiophile and gaming niche markets. Since its launch in 1989, the Sound Blaster brand had sold about 400 million units. Sim never liked how digital motherboard audio sounded - arguing that signal interference from onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth ruined audio signal quality. He argued that if gamers can shell out for a top of the line graphics card, they should also consider doing the same for a top discrete sound card too. In 2023, Wong Hoo Sim unexpectedly passed away at the age of 67. His death came as a bit of a shock, as he wasn't that old and he seemed to be in good health. Rest in peace. Many people remain nostalgic about these sound cards - swearing that Sound Blaster or Aureal delivered the best audio they ever experienced in their life. For me, the rise and fall of the sound card is a fascinating tale about integration and the power of digital compute.