Sound Blaster 16

In June 1992, Creative Technology launched the Sound Blaster 16, a series of sound cards for PCs using ISA or PCI slots. It took over from the Sound Blaster Pro line and brought CD-quality digital audio to the family. The card kept the OPL-3 FM synthesis support from its predecessor and worked with most software written for earlier Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster Pro models. A new expansion header—the Wave Blaster connector—allowed optional wavetable synthesis through add-on MIDI daughterboards, and a game port enabled hooking up external MIDI sound modules. The SB16’s MPU-401 emulation only handled UART (dumb) mode, but that proved enough for most MIDI software. When a daughterboard like the Wave Blaster, Roland SCB-7, Roland SCB-55, Yamaha DB50XG, or Yamaha DB60XG was installed, it acted as a standard MIDI device accessible to any MPU-401-compatible MIDI program.

The Sound Blaster 16 became enormously popular. Creative’s audio revenue jumped from US$40 million per year to nearly US$1 billion after its release and that of related products. Rich Sorkin served as General Manager of the global business during this period, overseeing product planning, product management, marketing, and OEM sales. Because of its widespread adoption and support, the Sound Blaster 16 is emulated in many virtualization and emulation tools—including DOSBox, QEMU, Bochs, VMware, VirtualBox, and 86Box—with varying levels of accuracy and compatibility.

The ASP or CSP chip added hardware-assisted speech synthesis (via TextAssist software), QSound audio spatialization for digital PCM wave playback, and PCM audio compression and decompression. However, software had to be written to take advantage of these features, and compelling applications never materialized, so the chip was largely ignored by the market. The ASP used an SGS-Thomson ST18932 DSP core with 16K of program RAM and 8K of data RAM.

The Sound Blaster 16 also included the widely used TEA2025 amplifier IC, which Creative configured to deliver roughly 700 milliwatts per channel into standard 4-ohm unpowered multimedia speakers. Later models—often those with ViBRA chips—switched to the TDA1517 amplifier IC. A jumper on the board let users choose between line-level output (bypassing the amplifier) and amplified output. Some revisions released in 1994 and later supported Legacy Plug and Play.