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142-434: Line in or out via one of: Microphone via one of: A sound card (also known as an audio card ) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs . The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications. Sound functionality can also be integrated into

284-617: A Yamaha OPL4 sound chip. Prior to the Moonsound, there were also sound cards called MSX Music and MSX Audio for the system, which uses OPL2 and OPL3 chipsets. The Apple II computers, which did not have sound capabilities beyond rapidly clicking a speaker until the IIGS , could use plug-in sound cards from a variety of manufacturers . The first, in 1978, was ALF's Apple Music Synthesizer , with 3 voices; two or three cards could be used to create 6 or 9 voices in stereo. Later ALF created

426-411: A single serial RS232 port or Ethernet port. An expansion card can be installed to offer multiple RS232 ports or multiple and higher bandwidth Ethernet ports. In this case, the motherboard provides basic functionality but the expansion card offers additional or enhanced ports. One edge of the expansion card holds the contacts (the edge connector or pin header ) that fit into the slot. They establish

568-441: A 3-channel setup (LCR), as many of these techniques already contain a center microphone or microphone pair. Microphone techniques for LCR should, however, try to obtain greater channel separation to prevent conflicting phantom images between L/C and L/R for example. Specialised techniques have therefore been developed for 3-channel stereo. Surround microphone techniques largely depend on the setup used, therefore being biased towards

710-455: A Decca Tree and two surround microphones. Two additional omnidirectional outriggers can be added to enlarge the perceived size of the orchestra or to better integrate the front and surround channels. The L, R, LS and RS microphones should be placed in a square formation, with L/R and LS/RS angled at 45 degrees and 135 degrees from the center microphone respectively. Spacing between these microphones should be about 1.8 meters. This square formation

852-523: A PCI Bus. Generally speaking, most PCI expansion cards will function on any CPU platform which incorporates PCI bus hardware provided there is a software driver for that type. PCI video cards and any other cards that contain their own BIOS or other ROM are problematic, although video cards conforming to VESA Standards may be used for secondary monitors. DEC Alpha, IBM PowerPC, and NEC MIPS workstations used PCI bus connectors. Both Zorro II and NuBus were plug and play , requiring no hardware configuration by

994-408: A baffle is used for separation between the front left and right channels, which are 30 cm apart. Outrigger omnidirectional microphones, low-pass filtered at 250 Hz, are spaced 3 meters apart in line with the L and R cardioids. These compensate for the bass roll-off of the cardioid microphones and also add expansiveness. A 3-meter spaced microphone pair, situated 2–3 meters behind front array,

1136-651: A card cage which passively distributed signals and power between the cards. Proprietary bus implementations for systems such as the Apple II co-existed with multi-manufacturer standards. IBM introduced what would retroactively be called the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus with the IBM PC in 1981. At that time, the technology was called the PC bus . The IBM XT , introduced in 1983, used

1278-542: A card could support had to resort to mixing multiple channels in software. Even today, the tendency is still to mix multiple sound streams in software, except in products specifically intended for gamers or professional musicians. As of 2024, sound cards are not commonly programmed with the audio loopback systems commonly called stereo mix , wave out mix , mono mix or what u hear , which previously allowed users to digitally record output otherwise only accessible to speakers. Lenovo and other manufacturers fail to implement

1420-587: A clone of the PCjr, duplicated this functionality, with the Tandy 1000 TL/SL/RL models adding digital sound recording and playback capabilities. Many games during the 1980s that supported the PCjr's video standard (described as Tandy-compatible , Tandy graphics , or TGA ) also supported PCjr/Tandy 1000 audio. In the late 1990s, many computer manufacturers began to replace plug-in sound cards with an audio codec chip (a combined audio AD / DA -converter) integrated into

1562-412: A discrete GPU. Most other computer lines, including those from Apple Inc. , Tandy , Commodore , Amiga , and Atari, Inc. , offered their own expansion buses. The Amiga used Zorro II . Apple used a proprietary system with seven 50-pin-slots for Apple II peripheral cards , then later used both variations on Processor Direct Slot and NuBus for its Macintosh series until 1995, when they switched to

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1704-624: A full-frequency range and, as such, there is no need for an LFE in surround music production, because all the frequencies are available in all the main channels. These labels sometimes use the LFE channel to carry a height channel. The label BIS Records generally uses a 5.0 channel mix. Channel notation indicates the number of discrete channels encoded in the audio signal, not necessarily the number of channels reproduced for playback. The number of playback channels can be increased by using matrix decoding . The number of playback channels may also differ from

1846-414: A halls, side reflections are essential. Appropriate microphone techniques should therefore be used, if room impression is important. Although the reproduction of side images are very unstable in the 5.1 surround setup, room impressions can still be accurately presented. Some microphone techniques used for coverage of three front channels, include double-stereo techniques, INA-3 (Ideal Cardioid Arrangement),

1988-400: A high-speed multi-channel data acquisition system would be of no use in a personal computer used for bookkeeping, but might be a key part of a system used for industrial process control. Expansion cards can often be installed or removed in the field, allowing a degree of user customization for particular purposes. Some expansion cards take the form of "daughterboards" that plug into connectors on

2130-399: A live performance may use multichannel techniques in the context of an open-air concert, of a musical theatre performance or for broadcasting ; for a film , specific techniques are adapted to movie theater or to home (e.g. home cinema systems). The narrative space is also a content that can be enhanced through multichannel techniques. This applies mainly to cinema narratives, for example

2272-406: A master of We Were Soldiers which featured a Sonic Whole Overhead Sound soundtrack. This mix included a new ceiling-mounted height channel . Ambisonics is a recording and playback technique using multichannel mixing that can be used live or in the studio and which recreates the soundfield as it existed in the space, in contrast to traditional surround systems, which can only create illusion of

2414-456: A microphone. In either case, the sound card uses an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to digitize this signal. Some cards include a sound chip to support the production of synthesized sounds, usually for real-time generation of music and sound effects using minimal data and CPU time. The card may use direct memory access to transfer the samples to and from main memory , from where a recording and playback software may read and write it to

2556-530: A mixing board specially designed in cooperation with Solid State Logic , based on 5000 series and including six channels. Respectively: A left, B right, C centre, D left rear, E right rear, F bass. The same engineer had already achieved a 3.1 system in 1974, for the International Summit of Francophone States in Dakar , Senegal. Surround sound is created in several ways. The first and simplest method

2698-589: A passive backplane . The first commercial microcomputer to feature expansion slots was the Micral N , in 1973. The first company to establish a de facto standard was Altair with the Altair 8800 , developed 1974–1975, which later became a multi-manufacturer standard, the S-100 bus . Many of these computers were also passive backplane designs, where all elements of the computer, (processor, memory, and I/O) plugged into

2840-543: A passive adapter can be made to connect XT cards to a PLUS expansion connector. Another feature of PLUS cards is that they are stackable. Another bus that offered stackable expansion modules was the "sidecar" bus used by the IBM PCjr . This may have been electrically comparable to the XT bus; it most certainly had some similarities since both essentially exposed the 8088 CPU's address and data buses, with some buffering and latching,

2982-503: A power stage, though in many cases they can adequately drive headphones. Professional sound cards are sound cards optimized for high-fidelity, low-latency multichannel sound recording and playback. Their drivers usually follow the Audio Stream Input/Output protocol for use with professional sound engineering and music software. Professional sound cards are usually described as audio interfaces , and sometimes have

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3124-572: A software downmix at a fixed sampling rate. Modern low-cost integrated sound cards (i.e., those built into motherboards) such as audio codecs like those meeting the AC'97 standard and even some lower-cost expansion sound cards still work this way. These devices may provide more than two sound output channels (typically 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound ), but they usually have no actual hardware polyphony for either sound effects or MIDI reproduction – these tasks are performed entirely in software. This

3266-704: A sound card called the Creative Music System (C/MS) at about the same time. Although the C/MS had twelve voices to AdLib's nine and was a stereo card while the AdLib was mono, the basic technology behind it was based on the Philips SAA1099 chip which was essentially a square-wave generator. It sounded much like twelve simultaneous PC speakers would have except for each channel having amplitude control, and failed to sell well, even after Creative renamed it

3408-415: A square, ideally placed far away and high up in the hall. Spacing between the microphones should be between 1–3 meters. The microphones nulls (zero pickup point) are set to face the main sound source with positive polarities outward facing, therefore very effectively minimizing the direct sound pickup as well as echoes from the back of the hall The back two microphones are mixed to the surround channels, with

3550-657: A standard PC. Several Japanese computer platforms, including the MSX, X1, X68000, FM Towns and FM-7, have built-in FM synthesis sound from Yamaha by the mid-1980s. By 1989, the FM Towns computer platform featured built-in PCM sample-based sound and supported the CD-ROM format. The custom sound chip on Amiga , named Paula, has four digital sound channels (2 for the left speaker and 2 for

3692-408: A stereo recording to parse out individual sounds to component panorama positions, then positions them, accordingly, into a five-channel field. However, there are more ways to create surround sound out of stereo, for instance with the routines based on QS and SQ for encoding Quad sound, where instruments were divided over 4 speakers in the studio. This way of creating surround with software routines

3834-525: A subwoofer for the Low Frequency Effects (LFE) channel, that is low-pass filtered at 120 Hz. The angles between the speakers have been standardized by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) recommendation 775 and AES (Audio Engineering Society) as follows: 60 degrees between the L and R channels (allows for two-channel stereo compatibility) with the center speaker directly in front of

3976-688: A supporting system board. In personal computing , notable expansion buses and expansion card standards include the S-100 bus from 1974 associated with the CP/M operating system , the 50-pin expansion slots of the original Apple II computer from 1977 (unique to Apple), IBM's Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) introduced with the IBM PC in 1981, Acorn 's tube expansion bus on the BBC Micro also from 1981, IBM's patented and proprietary Micro Channel architecture (MCA) from 1987 that never won favour in

4118-488: A two-dimensional (2-D) sound field with headphones. A third approach, based on Huygens' principle , attempts reconstructing the recorded sound field wave fronts within the listening space; an "audio hologram" form. One form, wave field synthesis (WFS), produces a sound field with an even error field over the entire area. Commercial WFS systems, currently marketed by companies sonic emotion and Iosono , require many loudspeakers and significant computing power. The 4th approach

4260-456: A virtual source, based on level differences between two loudspeakers to the side of a listener, shows great inconsistency across the standardised 5.1 setup, also being largely affected by movement away from the reference position. 5.1 surround is therefore limited in its ability to convey 3D sound, making the surround channels more appropriate for ambience or effects. ) 7.1 channel surround is another setup, most commonly used in large cinemas, that

4402-603: Is Sound Blaster compatibility ... It would have been unfair to have recommended anything else." The magazine that year stated that Wing Commander II was "Probably the game responsible" for making it the standard card. The Sound Blaster line of cards, together with the first inexpensive CD-ROM drives and evolving video technology, ushered in a new era of multimedia computer applications that could play back CD audio, add recorded dialogue to video games , or even reproduce full motion video (albeit at much lower resolutions and quality in early days). The widespread decision to support

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4544-581: Is a PC speaker driven by a timer. Sound cards were made for the C-Bus expansion slots that these computers had, most of which used Yamaha's FM and PSG chips and made by NEC themselves, although aftermarket clones can also be purchased, and Creative did release a C-Bus version of the SoundBlaster line of sound cards for the platform. Devices such as the Covox Speech Thing could be attached to

4686-452: Is a compromise between the ideal image creation of a room and that of practicality and compatibility with two-channel stereo. Because most surround sound mixes are produced for 5.1 surround (6 channels), larger setups require matrixes or processors to feed the additional speakers. The standard surround setup consists of three front speakers LCR (left, center and right), two surround speakers LS and RS (left and right surround respectively) and

4828-402: Is a technique for enriching the fidelity and depth of sound reproduction by using multiple audio channels from speakers that surround the listener ( surround channels ). Its first application was in movie theaters . Prior to surround sound, theater sound systems commonly had three screen channels of sound that played from three loudspeakers (left, center, and right) located in front of

4970-465: Is achieved by using multiple discrete audio channels routed to an array of loudspeakers . Surround sound typically has a listener location ( sweet spot ) where the audio effects work best and presents a fixed or forward perspective of the sound field to the listener at this location. Surround sound formats vary in reproduction and recording methods, along with the number and positioning of additional channels. The most common surround sound specification,

5112-412: Is an expansion card that attaches to a system directly. Daughterboards often have plugs, sockets, pins or other attachments for other boards. Daughterboards often have only internal connections within a computer or other electronic devices, and usually access the motherboard directly rather than through a computer bus . Such boards are used to either improve various memory capacities of a computer, enable

5254-515: Is compatible with 5.1 surround, though it is not stated in the ITU-standards. 7.1 channel surround adds two additional channels, center-left (CL) and center-right (CR) to the 5.1 surround setup, with the speakers situated 15 degrees off centre from the listener. This convention is used to cover an increased angle between the front loudspeakers as a product of a larger screen. Most 2-channel stereophonic microphone techniques are compatible with

5396-424: Is connected to an amplifier, headphones, or external device using standard interconnects, such as a TRS phone connector . A common external connector is the microphone connector. Input through a microphone connector can be used, for example, by speech recognition or voice over IP applications. Most sound cards have a line in connector for an analog input from a sound source that has higher voltage levels than

5538-515: Is currently common). The Apocalypse Now encoder/decoder was designed by Michael Karagosian, also for Dolby Laboratories . The surround mix was produced by an Oscar-winning crew led by Walter Murch for American Zoetrope . The format was also deployed in 1982 with the stereo surround release of Blade Runner . The 5.1 version of surround sound originated in 1987 at the famous French Cabaret Moulin Rouge . A French engineer, Dominique Bertrand used

5680-458: Is effective for the pickup of audience and ambience. All the above-mentioned microphone arrays take up considerable space, making them quite ineffective for field recordings. In this respect, the double MS (Mid Side) technique is quite advantageous. This array uses back to back cardioid microphones, one facing forward, the other backwards, combined with either one or two figure-eight microphone. Different channels are obtained by sum and difference of

5822-594: Is essentially a compact version of the ISA bus. The CardBus expansion card standard is an evolution of the PC card standard to make it into a compact version of the PCI bus. The original ExpressCard standard acts like it is either a USB 2.0 peripheral or a PCI Express 1.x x1 device. ExpressCard 2.0 adds SuperSpeed USB as another type of interface the card can use. Unfortunately, CardBus and ExpressCard are vulnerable to DMA attack unless

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5964-537: Is intended for generic home, office, and entertainment purposes with an emphasis on playback and casual use, rather than catering to the needs of audio professionals. In general, consumer-grade sound cards impose several restrictions and inconveniences that would be unacceptable to an audio professional. Consumer sound cards are also limited in the effective sampling rates and bit depths they can actually manage and have lower numbers of less flexible input channels. Professional studio recording use typically requires more than

6106-572: Is normally referred to as "upmixing", which was particularly successful on the Sansui QSD-series decoders that had a mode where it mapped the L ↔ R stereo onto an ∩ arc. There are many alternative setups available for a surround sound experience, with a 3-2 (3 front, 2 back speakers and a Low Frequency Effects channel) configuration (more commonly referred to as 5.1 surround) being the standard for most surround sound applications, including cinema, television and consumer applications. This

6248-474: Is responsible for the room impressions. The center channel is placed a meter in front of the L and R channels, producing a strong center image. The surround microphones are usually placed at the critical distance (where the direct and reverberant field is equal), with the full array usually situated several meters above and behind the conductor. The NHK (Japanese broadcasting company) developed an alternative technique also involving five cardioid microphones. Here

6390-454: Is similar to the way inexpensive softmodems perform modem tasks in software rather than in hardware. In the early days of wavetable synthesis , some sound card manufacturers advertised polyphony solely on the MIDI capabilities alone. In this case, typically, the card is only capable of two channels of digital sound and the polyphony specification solely applies to the number of MIDI instruments

6532-421: Is typical for 2-channel stereo, due to phase differences at the two ears of a listener. The centre channel is especially used in films and television, with dialogue primarily feeding the center channel. The function of the center channel can either be of a monophonic nature (as with dialogue) or it can be used in combination with the left and right channels for true three-channel stereo. Motion Pictures tend to use

6674-452: Is used for the surround channels. The centre channel is again placed slightly forward, with the L/R and LS/RS again angled at 45 and 135 degrees respectively. The OCT-Surround (Optimum Cardioid Triangle-Surround) microphone array is an augmented technique of the stereo OCT technique using the same front array with added surround microphones. The front array is designed for minimum crosstalk, with

6816-431: Is using a surround sound recording technique—capturing two distinct stereo images, one for the front and one for the back or by using a dedicated setup, e.g., an augmented Decca tree —or mixing-in surround sound for playback on an audio system using speakers encircling the listener to play audio from different directions. A second approach is processing the audio with psychoacoustic sound localization methods to simulate

6958-494: Is using three mics, one for front, one for side and one for rear, also called Double MS recording . The Ambisonics form, also based on Huygens' principle , gives an exact sound reconstruction at the central point; however, it is less accurate away from the central point. There are many free and commercial software programs available for Ambisonics, which dominates most of the consumer market, especially musicians using electronic and computer music. Moreover, Ambisonics products are

7100-605: The Apple Music II , a 9-voice model. The most widely supported card, however, was the Mockingboard . Sweet Micro Systems sold the Mockingboard in various models. Early Mockingboard models ranged from 3 voices in mono, while some later designs had 6 voices in stereo. Some software supported use of two Mockingboard cards, which allowed 12-voice music and sound. A 12-voice, single-card clone of the Mockingboard called

7242-657: The Decca Tree setup and the OCT (Optimum Cardioid Triangle). Surround techniques are largely based on 3-channel techniques with additional microphones used for the surround channels. A distinguishing factor for the pickup of the front channels in surround is that less reverberation should be picked up, as the surround microphones will be responsible for the pickup of reverberation. Cardioid, hypercardioid, or supercardioid polar patterns will therefore often replace omnidirectional polar patterns for surround recordings. To compensate for

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7384-706: The Game Blaster a year later, and marketed it through RadioShack in the US. The Game Blaster retailed for under $ 100 and was compatible with many popular games, such as Silpheed . A large change in the IBM PC-compatible sound card market happened when Creative Labs introduced the Sound Blaster card. Recommended by Microsoft to developers creating software based on the Multimedia PC standard,

7526-674: The ITU 's 5.1 standard , calls for 6 speakers: Center (C), in front of the listener; Left (L) and Right (R), at angles of 60°; Left Surround (LS) and Right Surround (RS) at angles of 100–120°; and a subwoofer , whose position is not critical. Though cinema and soundtracks represent the major uses of surround techniques, its scope of application is broader than that, as surround sound permits creation of an audio-environment for all sorts of purposes. Multichannel audio techniques may be used to reproduce contents as varied as music, speech, natural or synthetic sounds for cinema, television , broadcasting, or computers. In terms of music content for example,

7668-547: The Iannis Xenakis -designed Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair , also used spatial audio with 425 loudspeakers used to move sound throughout the pavilion. In 1957, working with artist Jordan Belson , Henry Jacobs produced Vortex: Experiments in Sound and Light - a series of concerts featuring new music, including some of Jacobs' own, and that of Karlheinz Stockhausen , and many others - taking place in

7810-706: The Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis included expansion buses in some form; In the case of at least the Genesis, the expansion bus was proprietary. In fact, the cartridge slots of many cartridge-based consoles (not counting the Atari 2600 ) would qualify as expansion buses, as they exposed both read and write capabilities of the system's internal bus. However, the expansion modules attached to these interfaces, though functionally

7952-729: The Phasor was made by Applied Engineering. The ZX Spectrum that initially only had a beeper had some sound cards made for it. Examples include TurboSound Other examples are the Fuller Box, and Zon X-81. The Commodore 64, while having an integrated SID (Sound Interface Device) chip, also had sound cards made for it. For example, the Sound Expander, which added on an OPL FM synthesizer. The PC-98 series of computers, like their IBM PC cousins, also do not have integrated sound contrary to popular belief, and their default configuration

8094-605: The ZX Spectrum , MSX , Mac , and Apple IIGS . Workstations from Sun , Silicon Graphics and NeXT do as well. In some cases, most notably in those of the Macintosh, IIGS, Amiga, C64, SGI Indigo, X68000, MSX, Falcon, Archimedes, FM-7 and FM Towns, they provide very advanced capabilities (as of the time of manufacture), in others they are only minimal capabilities. Some of these platforms have also had sound cards designed for their bus architectures that cannot be used in

8236-475: The clone market, the vastly improved Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) that displaced ISA in 1992, and PCI Express from 2003 which abstracts the interconnect into high-speed communication "lanes" and relegates all other functions into software protocol. Vacuum-tube based computers had modular construction, but individual functions for peripheral devices filled a cabinet, not just a printed circuit board. Processor, memory and I/O cards became feasible with

8378-456: The form factor of the motherboard and case , around one to seven expansion cards can be added to a computer system. 19 or more expansion cards can be installed in backplane systems. When many expansion cards are added to a system, total power consumption and heat dissipation become limiting factors. Some expansion cards take up more than one slot space. For example, many graphics cards on the market as of 2010 are dual slot graphics cards, using

8520-437: The hard disk for storage, editing, or further processing. An important sound card characteristic is polyphony , which refers to its ability to process and output multiple independent voices or sounds simultaneously. These distinct channels are seen as the number of audio outputs, which may correspond to a speaker configuration such as 2.0 (stereo), 2.1 (stereo and sub woofer), 5.1 (surround), or other configurations. Sometimes,

8662-908: The mezzanine of a theatre . Wavetable cards ( sample-based synthesis cards) are often mounted on sound cards in this manner. Some mezzanine card interface standards include the 400 pin FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC); the 172 pin High-Speed Mezzanine Card (HSMC); the PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC); XMC mezzanines; the Advanced Mezzanine Card ; IndustryPacks (VITA 4), the GreenSpring Computers Mezzanine modules ; etc. Examples of daughterboard-style expansion cards include: Surround sound Surround sound

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8804-440: The motherboard , using components similar to those found on plug-in cards. The integrated sound system is often still referred to as a sound card . Sound processing hardware is also present on modern video cards with HDMI to output sound along with the video using that connector; previously they used a S/PDIF connection to the motherboard or sound card. Typical uses of sound cards or sound card functionality include providing

8946-440: The motherboard . Many of these used Intel 's AC'97 specification. Others used inexpensive ACR slot accessory cards. From around 2001, many motherboards incorporated full-featured sound cards, usually in the form of a custom chipset, providing something akin to full Sound Blaster compatibility and relatively high-quality sound. However, these features were dropped when AC'97 was superseded by Intel's HD Audio standard, which

9088-600: The 1950s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen experimented with and produced ground-breaking electronic compositions such as Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte , the latter using fully discrete and rotating quadraphonic sounds generated with industrial electronic equipment in Herbert Eimert 's studio at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). Edgar Varese 's Poème électronique , created for

9230-493: The 32-bit extended version of ISA championed by Compaq , was used on some PC motherboards until 1997, when Microsoft declared it a "legacy" subsystem in the PC 97 industry white-paper. Proprietary local buses (q.v. Compaq) and then the VESA Local Bus Standard, were late 1980s expansion buses that were tied but not exclusive to the 80386 and 80486 CPU bus. The PC/104 bus is an embedded bus that copies

9372-431: The 5.1 surround setup, as this is the standard. Surround recording techniques can be differentiated into those that use single arrays of microphones placed in close proximity, and those treating front and rear channels with separate arrays. Close arrays present more accurate phantom images, whereas separate treatment of rear channels is usually used for ambience. For accurate depiction of an acoustic environment, such as

9514-516: The CPU. Later, the integrated audio ( AC'97 and later HD Audio ) prefer the use of a software MIDI synthesizer, for example, Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth in Microsoft Windows . With some exceptions, for years, sound cards, most notably the Sound Blaster series and their compatibles, had only one or two channels of digital sound. Early games and MOD -players needing more channels than

9656-529: The Disney studio's animated film Fantasia . Walt Disney was inspired by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov 's operatic piece Flight of the Bumblebee to have a bumblebee featured in his musical Fantasia and also sound as if it was flying in all parts of the theatre. The initial multichannel audio application was called ' Fantasound ', comprising three audio channels and speakers. The sound was diffused throughout

9798-575: The Host PCI Bus via PCI to PCI Bridge. Cardbus is being supplanted by ExpressCard format. Intel introduced the AGP bus in 1997 as a dedicated video acceleration solution. AGP devices are logically attached to the PCI bus over a PCI-to-PCI bridge. Though termed a bus, AGP usually supports only a single card at a time ( Legacy BIOS support issues). From 2005 PCI Express has been replacing both PCI and AGP. This standard, approved in 2004, implements

9940-587: The IBM PC platform were not designed for gaming or multimedia applications, but rather on specific audio applications, such as music composition with the AdLib Personal Music System , IBM Music Feature Card , and Creative Music System , or on speech synthesis like Digispeech DS201 , Covox Speech Thing , and Street Electronics Echo . In 1988, a panel of computer-game CEOs stated at the Consumer Electronics Show that

10082-511: The ISA bus had to have in-depth knowledge of the hardware they were adding to properly connect the devices, since memory addresses, I/O port addresses, and DMA channels had to be configured by switches or jumpers on the card to match the settings in driver software. IBM's MCA bus, developed for the PS/2 in 1987, was a competitor to ISA, also their design, but fell out of favor due to the ISA's industry-wide acceptance and IBM's licensing of MCA. EISA,

10224-524: The ISA bus. Intel launched their PCI bus chipsets along with the P5 -based Pentium CPUs in 1993. The PCI bus was introduced in 1991 as a replacement for ISA. The standard (now at version 3.0) is found on PC motherboards to this day. The PCI standard supports bus bridging: as many as ten daisy-chained PCI buses have been tested. CardBus , using the PCMCIA connector, is a PCI format that attaches peripherals to

10366-621: The ITU Rec. 775. Dimensions between the front three microphone as well as the polar patterns of the microphones can be changed for different pickup angles and ambient response. This technique therefore allows for great flexibility. A well established microphone array is the Fukada Tree, which is a modified variant of the Decca Tree stereo technique. The array consists of five spaced cardioid microphones, three front microphones resembling

10508-531: The ITU-R BS. 775-1, with 5.1 surround. The 3-1 channel setup (consisting of one monophonic surround channel) is such a case, where both LS and RS are fed by the monophonic signal at an attenuated level of -3 dB. The function of the center channel is to anchor the signal so that any central panned images do not shift when a listener is moving or is sitting away from the sweet spot. The center channel also prevents any timbral modifications from occurring, which

10650-416: The L, R and LS, RS channels. The disadvantage of this approach is that direct sound pickup is quite significant. Many recordings do not require pickup of side reflections. For Live Pop music concerts a more appropriate array for the pickup of ambience is the cardioid trapezium. All four cardioid microphones are backward facing and angled at 60 degrees from one another, therefore similar to a semi-circle. This

10792-406: The LFE channel is not the subwoofer channel ; there may be no subwoofer and, if there is, it may be handling a good deal more than effects. Some record labels such as Telarc and Chesky have argued that LFE channels are not needed in a modern digital multichannel entertainment system. They argue that, given loudspeakers that have low frequency response to 30 Hz, all available channels have

10934-421: The LFE channel. Also, if there is no subwoofer speaker present then the bass management system can direct the LFE channel to one or more of the main speakers. Because the low-frequency effects (LFE) channel requires only a fraction of the bandwidth of the other audio channels, it is referred to as the .1 channel; for example 5.1 or 7.1 . The LFE channel is a source of some confusion in surround sound. It

11076-573: The MT-32 were made to be less expensive. By 1992, one sound card vendor advertised that its product was "Sound Blaster, AdLib, Disney Sound Source and Covox Speech Thing Compatible!" Responding to readers complaining about an article on sound cards that unfavorably mentioned the Gravis Ultrasound , Computer Gaming World stated in January 1994 that, "The de facto standard in the gaming world

11218-529: The Midway T-Unit hardware. The T-Unit hardware already has an onboard YM2151 OPL chip coupled with an OKI 6295 DAC, but said game uses an added-on DCS card instead. The card is also used in the arcade version of Midway and Aerosmith 's Revolution X for complex looping music and speech playback. MSX computers, while equipped with built-in sound capabilities, also relied on sound cards to produce better-quality audio. The card, known as Moonsound , uses

11360-671: The Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Sound designers commonly regard this as the origin of the (now standard) concept of "surround sound." The program was popular, and Jacobs and Belson were invited to reproduce it at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels. There are also many other composers that created ground-breaking surround sound works in the same time period. In 1978, a concept devised by Max Bell for Dolby Laboratories called "split surround"

11502-499: The PC speaker like RealSound . The resulting audio, while functional, suffered from the heavily distorted output and low volume, and usually required all other processing to be stopped while sounds were played. Other home computers of the 1980s like the Commodore 64 included hardware support for digital sound playback or music synthesis, leaving the IBM PC at a disadvantage when it came to multimedia applications. Early sound cards for

11644-623: The PC's limited sound capability prevented it from becoming the leading home computer, that it needed a $ 49–79 sound card with better capability than current products, and that once such hardware was widely installed, their companies would support it. Sierra On-Line , which had pioneered supporting EGA and VGA video, and 3-1/2" disks, promised that year to support the AdLib, IBM Music Feature, and Roland MT-32 sound cards in its games. A 1989 Computer Gaming World survey found that 18 of 25 game companies planned to support AdLib, six Roland and Covox, and seven Creative Music System/Game Blaster. One of

11786-702: The Sound Blaster brought digital audio playback to the PC. Many game companies also supported the MT-32, but supported the Adlib card as an alternative because of the latter's higher market base. The adoption of the MT-32 led the way for the creation of the MPU-401 , Roland Sound Canvas and General MIDI standards as the most common means of playing in-game music until the mid-1990s. Early ISA bus sound cards were half-duplex , meaning they couldn't record and play digitized sound simultaneously. Later, ISA cards like

11928-414: The Sound Blaster cloned the AdLib and added a sound coprocessor for recording and playback of digital audio. The card also included a game port for adding a joystick , and the capability to interface to MIDI equipment using the game port and a special cable. With AdLib compatibility and more features at nearly the same price, most buyers chose the Sound Blaster. It eventually outsold the AdLib and dominated

12070-563: The Sound Blaster design in multimedia and entertainment titles meant that future sound cards such as Media Vision 's Pro Audio Spectrum and the Gravis Ultrasound had to be Sound Blaster compatible if they were to sell well. Until the early 2000s, when the AC'97 audio standard became more widespread and eventually usurped the SoundBlaster as a standard due to its low cost and integration into many motherboards, Sound Blaster compatibility

12212-474: The SoundBlaster AWE series and Plug-and-play Soundblaster clones supported simultaneous recording and playback, but at the expense of using up two IRQ and DMA channels instead of one. Conventional PCI bus cards generally do not have these limitations and are mostly full-duplex. Sound cards have evolved in terms of digital audio sampling rate (starting from 8-bit 11025 Hz , to 32-bit, 192 kHz that

12354-582: The addition of interrupts and DMA provided by Intel add-on chips, and a few system fault detection lines (Power Good, Memory Check, I/O Channel Check). Again, PCjr sidecars are not technically expansion cards, but expansion modules, with the only difference being that the sidecar is an expansion card enclosed in a plastic box (with holes exposing the connectors). Laptops are generally unable to accept most expansion cards intended for desktop computers. Consequently, several compact expansion standards were developed. The original PC Card expansion card standard

12496-440: The audience. Surround sound adds one or more channels from loudspeakers to the side or behind the listener that are able to create the sensation of sound coming from any horizontal direction (at ground level) around the listener. The technique enhances the perception of sound spatialization by exploiting sound localization : a listener's ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance. This

12638-438: The audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition, editing video or audio, presentation, education and entertainment (games) and video projection. Sound cards are also used for computer-based communication such as voice over IP and teleconferencing . Sound cards use a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), which converts recorded or generated digital signal data into an analog format. The output signal

12780-430: The basic functionality of an electronic device, such as when a certain model has features added to it and is released as a new or separate model. Rather than redesigning the first model completely, a daughterboard may be added to a special connector on the main board. These usually fit on top of and parallel to the board, separated by spacers or standoffs , and are sometimes called mezzanine cards due to being stacked like

12922-401: The board for limited changes or customization. Since reliable multi-pin connectors are relatively costly, some mass-market systems such as home computers had no expansion slots and instead used a card-edge connector at the edge of the main board, putting the costly matching socket into the cost of the peripheral device. In the case of expansion of on-board capability, a motherboard may provide

13064-399: The center channel for monophonic purposes with stereo being reserved purely for the left and right channels. Surround microphones techniques have however been developed that fully use the potential of three-channel stereo. In 5.1 surround, phantom images between the front speakers are quite accurate, with images towards the back and especially to the sides being unstable. The localisation of

13206-442: The cinema, controlled by an engineer using some 54 loudspeakers. The surround sound was achieved using the sum and the difference of the phase of the sound. However, this experimental use of surround sound was excluded from the film in later showings. In 1952, "surround sound" successfully reappeared with the film "This is Cinerama", using discrete seven-channel sound, and the race to develop other surround sound methods took off. In

13348-530: The companies Sierra partnered with were Roland and AdLib, opting to produce in-game music for King's Quest 4 that supported the MT-32 and AdLib Music Synthesizer. The MT-32 had superior output quality, due in part to its method of sound synthesis as well as built-in reverb. Since it was the most sophisticated synthesizer they supported, Sierra chose to use most of the MT-32's custom features and unconventional instrument patches, producing background sound effects (e.g., chirping birds, clopping horse hooves, etc.) before

13490-452: The computer to connect to certain kinds of networks that it previously could not connect to, or to allow for users to customize their computers for various purposes such as gaming. Daughterboards are sometimes used in computers in order to allow for expansion cards to fit parallel to the motherboard, usually to maintain a small form factor . This form are also called riser cards , or risers. Daughterboards are also sometimes used to expand

13632-550: The content would typically be synthetic noise produced by the computer device in interaction with its user. Significant work has also been done using surround sound for enhanced situation awareness in military and public safety application. Commercial surround sound media include videocassettes , DVDs , and SDTV broadcasts encoded as analog matrixed Dolby Surround compressed Dolby Digital and DTS , and lossless audio such as DTS HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD on HDTV Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD , which are identical to

13774-434: The conventional 5.1 arrangement, for a total of four surround channels and three front channels, to create a more 360° sound field. Most surround sound recordings are created by film production companies or video game producers; however some consumer camcorders have such capability either built-in or available separately. Surround sound technologies can also be used in music to enable new methods of artistic expression. After

13916-451: The development of integrated circuits . Expansion cards make processor systems adaptable to the needs of the user by making it possible to connect various types of devices, including I/O, additional memory, and optional features (such as a floating point unit ) to the central processor. Minicomputers, starting with the PDP-8 , were made of multiple cards communicating through, and powered by,

14058-468: The electrical contact between the electronics on the card and on the motherboard. Peripheral expansion cards generally have connectors for external cables. In the PC-compatible personal computer, these connectors were located in the support bracket at the back of the cabinet. Industrial backplane systems had connectors mounted on the top edge of the card, opposite to the backplane pins. Depending on

14200-420: The failure of quadraphonic audio in the 1970s, multichannel music has slowly been reintroduced since 1999 with the help of SACD and DVD-Audio formats. Some AV receivers , stereophonic systems, and computer sound cards contain integral digital signal processors or digital audio processors to simulate surround sound from a stereophonic source (see fake stereo ). In 1967, the rock group Pink Floyd performed

14342-472: The feature in hardware, while other manufacturers disable the driver from supporting it. In some cases, loopback can be reinstated with driver updates. Alternatively, software such as virtual audio cable applications can be purchased to enable the functionality. According to Microsoft, the functionality was hidden by default in Windows Vista to reduce user confusion, but is still available, as long as

14484-510: The figure-eight and cardioid patterns. When using only one figure-eight microphone, the double MS technique is extremely compact and therefore also perfectly compatible with monophonic playback. This technique also allows for postproduction changes of the pickup angle. Surround replay systems may make use of bass management , the fundamental principle of which is that bass content in the incoming signal, irrespective of channel, should be directed only to loudspeakers capable of handling it, whether

14626-513: The first manufacturers of sound cards for the IBM PC was AdLib, which produced a card based on the Yamaha YM3812 sound chip, also known as the OPL2. The AdLib had two modes: A 9-voice mode where each voice could be fully programmed, and a less frequently used percussion mode with 3 regular voices producing 5 independent percussion-only voices for a total of 11. Creative Labs also marketed

14768-482: The first-ever surround sound concert at "Games for May", a lavish affair at London ’s Queen Elizabeth Hall where the band debuted its custom-made quadraphonic speaker system. The control device they had made, the Azimuth Co-ordinator , is now displayed at London's Victoria and Albert Museum , as part of their Theatre Collections gallery. The first documented use of surround sound was in 1940, for

14910-658: The form of external rack-mountable units using USB , FireWire , or an optical interface, to offer sufficient data rates. The emphasis in these products is, in general, on multiple input and output connectors, direct hardware support for multiple input and output sound channels, as well as higher sampling rates and fidelity as compared to the usual consumer sound card. On the other hand, certain features of consumer sound cards such as support for 3D audio , hardware acceleration in video games , or real-time ambiance effects are secondary, nonexistent or even undesirable in professional audio interfaces. The typical consumer-grade sound card

15052-410: The front array. If echoes are notable, the front array can be delayed appropriately. Alternatively, backward facing cardioid microphones can be placed closer to the front array for a similar reverberation pickup. The INA-5 (Ideal Cardioid Arrangement) is a surround microphone array that uses five cardioid microphones resembling the angles of the standardised surround loudspeaker configuration defined by

15194-401: The front left and right microphones having supercardioid polar patterns and angled at 90 degrees relative to the center microphone. It is important that high quality small diaphragm microphones are used for the L and R channels to reduce off-axis coloration. Equalization can also be used to flatten the response of the supercardioid microphones to signals coming in at up to about 30 degrees from

15336-426: The front of the array. The center channel is placed slightly forward. The surround microphones are backwards facing cardioid microphones, that are placed 40 cm back from the L and R microphones. The L, R, LS and RS microphones pick up early reflections from both the sides and the back of an acoustic venue, therefore giving significant room impressions. Spacing between the L and R microphones can be varied to obtain

15478-544: The front two channels being mixed in combination with the front array into L and R. Another ambient technique is the IRT (Institut für Rundfunktechnik) cross. Here, four cardioid microphones, 90 degrees relative to one another, are placed in square formation, separated by 21–25 cm. The front two microphones should be positioned 45 degrees off axis from the sound source. This technique therefore resembles back to back near-coincident stereo pairs. The microphones outputs are fed to

15620-414: The laptop has an IOMMU that is configured to thwart these attacks. One notable exception to the above is the inclusion of a single internal slot for a special reduced size version of the desktop standard. The most well known examples are Mini-PCI or Mini PCIe . Such slots were usually intended for a specific purpose such as offering "built-in" wireless networking or upgrading the system at production with

15762-466: The latest solutions support). Along the way, some cards started offering wavetable synthesis , which provides superior MIDI synthesis quality relative to the earlier Yamaha OPL based solutions, which uses FM-synthesis . Some higher-end cards (such as Sound Blaster AWE32 , Sound Blaster AWE64 and Sound Blaster Live! ) introduced their own RAM and processor for user-definable sound samples and MIDI instruments as well as to offload audio processing from

15904-538: The latter are the main system loudspeakers or one or more special low-frequency speakers called subwoofers . There is a notation difference before and after the bass management system. Before the bass management system there is a Low Frequency Effects (LFE) channel. After the bass management system there is a subwoofer signal. A common misunderstanding is the belief that the LFE channel is the "subwoofer channel". The bass management system may direct bass to one or more subwoofers (if present) from any channel, not just from

16046-435: The listener. The Surround channels are placed 100–120 degrees from the center channel, with the subwoofer's positioning not being critical due to the low directional factor of frequencies below 120 Hz. The ITU standard also allows for additional surround speakers, that need to be distributed evenly between 60 and 150 degrees. Surround mixes of more or fewer channels are acceptable, if they are compatible, as described by

16188-526: The logical PCI protocol over a serial communication interface. PC/104(-Plus) or Mini PCI are often added for expansion on small form factor boards such as Mini-ITX . For their 1000 EX and 1000 HX models, Tandy Computer designed the PLUS expansion interface, an adaptation of the XT-bus supporting cards of a smaller form factor. Because it is electrically compatible with the XT bus (a.k.a. 8-bit ISA or XT-ISA),

16330-412: The lost low-end of directional (pressure gradient) microphones, additional omnidirectional (pressure microphones), exhibiting an extended low-end response, can be added. The microphone's output is usually low-pass filtered. A simple surround microphone configuration involves the use of a front array in combination with two backward-facing omnidirectional room microphones placed about 10–15 meters away from

16472-402: The majority IBM PC users, the internal PC speaker was the only way for early PC software to produce sound and music. The speaker hardware was typically limited to square waves . The resulting sound was generally described as "beeps and boops" which resulted in the common nickname beeper . Several companies, most notably Access Software , developed techniques for digital sound reproduction over

16614-467: The market. Roland also made sound cards in the late 1980s such as the MT-32 and LAPC-I . Roland cards sold for hundreds of dollars. Many games, such as Silpheed and Police Quest II, had music written for their cards. The cards were often poor at sound effects such as laughs, but for music were by far the best sound cards available until the mid-nineties. Some Roland cards, such as the SCC, and later versions of

16756-429: The number of full-range channels in front of the listener, separated by a slash from the number of full-range channels beside or behind the listener, with a decimal point marking the number of limited-range LFE channels. E.g. 3 front channels + 2 side channels + an LFE channel = 3/2.1 The notation can be expanded to include Matrix Decoders . Dolby Digital EX, for example, has a sixth full-range channel incorporated into

16898-441: The number of speakers used to reproduce them if one or more channels drives a group of speakers. Notation represents the number of channels, not the number of speakers. The first digit in "5.1" is the number of full range channels. The ".1" reflects the limited frequency range of the LFE channel. For example, two stereo speakers with no LFE channel = 2.0 5 full-range channels + 1 LFE channel = 5.1 An alternative notation shows

17040-404: The original movie theater implementation, the LFE was a separate channel fed to one or more subwoofers. Home replay systems, however, may not have a separate subwoofer, so modern home surround decoders and systems often include a bass management system that allows bass on any channel (main or LFE) to be fed only to the loudspeakers that can handle low-frequency signals. The salient point here is that

17182-424: The parallel port of an IBM PC and fed 6- or 8-bit PCM sample data to produce audio. Also, many types of professional sound cards take the form of an external FireWire or USB unit, usually for convenience and improved fidelity. Expansion card Expansion cards allow the capabilities and interfaces of a computer system to be extended or supplemented in a way appropriate to the tasks it will perform. For example,

17324-413: The required stereo width. Specialized microphone arrays have been developed for recording purely the ambience of a space. These arrays are used in combination with suitable front arrays, or can be added to above mentioned surround techniques. The Hamasaki square (also proposed by NHK) is a well established microphone array used for the pickup of hall ambience. Four figure-eight microphones are arranged in

17466-404: The right) with 8-bit resolution for each channel and a 6-bit volume control per channel. Sound playback on Amiga was done by reading directly from the chip RAM without using the main CPU. Most arcade video games have integrated sound chips. In the 1980s it was common to have a separate microprocessor for handling communication with the sound chip. The earliest known sound card used by computers

17608-547: The same as expansion cards, are not technically expansion cards, due to their physical form. The primary purpose of an expansion card is to provide or expand on features not offered by the motherboard. For example, the original IBM PC did not have on-board graphics or hard drive capability. In that case, a graphics card and an ST-506 hard disk controller card provided graphics capability and hard drive interface respectively. Some single-board computers made no provision for expansion cards, and may only have provided IC sockets on

17750-506: The same bus (with slight exception). The 8-bit PC and XT bus was extended with the introduction of the IBM AT in 1984. This used a second connector for extending the address and data bus over the XT, but was backward compatible; 8-bit cards were still usable in the AT 16-bit slots. Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) became the designation for the IBM AT bus after other types were developed. Users of

17892-582: The second slot as a place to put an active heat sink with a fan. Some cards are "low-profile" cards, meaning that they are shorter than standard cards and will fit in a lower height computer chassis such as HTPC and SFF . (There is a "low profile PCI card" standard that specifies a much smaller bracket and board area). The group of expansion cards that are used for external connectivity, such as network , SAN or modem cards, are commonly referred to as input/output cards (or I/O cards). A daughterboard , daughtercard , mezzanine board or piggyback board

18034-639: The sound card is capable of producing at once. Modern sound cards may provide more flexible audio accelerator capabilities which can be used in support of higher levels of polyphony or other purposes such as hardware acceleration of 3D sound, positional audio and real-time DSP effects. Connectors on the sound cards are color-coded as per the PC System Design Guide . They may also have symbols of arrows, holes and soundwaves that are associated with each jack position. Sound cards for IBM PC–compatible computers were very uncommon until 1988. For

18176-445: The soundfield if the listener is located in a very narrow sweetspot between speakers. Any number of speakers in any physical arrangement can be used to recreate a sound field. With 6 or more speakers arranged around a listener, a 3-dimensional ("periphonic", or full-sphere) sound field can be presented. Ambisonics was invented by Michael Gerzon . Binaural recording is a method of recording sound that uses two microphones, arranged with

18318-495: The speech of the characters of a film, but may also be applied to plays performed in a theatre, to a conference, or to integrate voice-based comments in an archeological site or monument. For example, an exhibition may be enhanced with topical ambient sound of water, birds, train or machine noise. Topical natural sounds may also be used in educational applications. Other fields of application include video game consoles, personal computers and other platforms. In such applications,

18460-469: The standard in surround sound hardware sold by Meridian Audio . In its simplest form, Ambisonics consumes few resources, however this is not true for recent developments, such as Near Field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics. Some years ago it was shown that, in the limit, WFS and Ambisonics converge. Finally, surround sound can also be achieved by mastering level, from stereophonic sources as with Penteo , which uses digital signal processing analysis of

18602-513: The studio master. Other commercial formats include the competing DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and Super Audio CD (SACD) formats, and MP3 Surround . Cinema 5.1 surround formats include Dolby Digital and DTS . Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) is an 8 channel cinema configuration which features 5 independent audio channels across the front with two independent surround channels, and a Low-frequency effects channel. Traditional 7.1 surround speaker configuration introduces two additional rear speakers to

18744-826: The terms voice and channel are used interchangeably to indicate the degree of polyphony, not the output speaker configuration. For example, much older sound chips could accommodate three voices, but only one output audio channel (i.e., a single mono output), requiring all voices to be mixed together. Later cards, such as the AdLib sound card, had a 9-voice polyphony combined in 1 mono output channel. Early PC sound cards had multiple FM synthesis voices (typically 9 or 16) which were used for MIDI music. The full capabilities of advanced cards are often not fully used; only one (mono) or two ( stereo ) voice(s) and channel(s) are usually dedicated to playback of digital sound samples, and playing back more than one digital sound sample usually requires

18886-548: The two channels that consumer sound cards provide, and more accessible connectors, unlike the variable mixture of internal—and sometimes virtual—and external connectors found in consumer-grade sound cards. In 1984, the first IBM PCjr had a rudimentary 3-voice sound synthesis chip (the SN76489 ) which was capable of generating three square-wave tones with variable amplitude , and a pseudo- white noise channel that could generate primitive percussion sounds. The Tandy 1000, initially

19028-521: The two rear channels with a matrix . This is expressed: 3 front channels + 2 rear channels + 3 channels reproduced in the rear in total + 1 LFE channel = 3/2:3.1 The term stereo , although popularised in reference to two channel audio, historically also referred to surround sound, as it strictly means "solid" (three-dimensional) sound. However this is no longer common usage and "stereo sound" almost exclusively means two channels, left and right. In accordance with ANSI/CEA-863-A In 2002, Dolby premiered

19170-580: The underlying sound card drivers and hardware support it. Ultimately, the user can use the analog loophole and connect the line out directly to the line in on the sound card. However, in laptops, manufacturers have gradually moved from providing 3 separate jacks with TRS connectors – usually for line in, line out/headphone out and microphone – into just a single combo jack with TRRS connector that combines inputs and outputs. The number of physical sound channels has also increased. The first sound card solutions were mono. Stereo sound

19312-400: The user. Other computer buses were used for industrial control, instruments, and scientific systems. One specific example is HP-IB (or Hewlett Packard Interface Bus) which was ultimately standardized as IEEE-488 (aka GPIB). Some well-known historical standards include VMEbus , STD Bus , SBus (specific to Sun's SPARCStations), and numerous others. Many other video game consoles such as

19454-461: Was a standard that many other sound cards supported to maintain compatibility with many games and applications released. When game company Sierra On-Line opted to support add-on music hardware in addition to built-in hardware such as the PC speaker and built-in sound capabilities of the IBM PCjr and Tandy 1000 , what could be done with sound and music on the IBM PC changed dramatically. Two of

19596-413: Was introduced in the early 1980s, and quadraphonic sound came in 1989. This was shortly followed by 5.1 channel audio. The latest sound cards support up to 8 audio channels for the 7.1 speaker setup. A few early sound cards had sufficient power to drive unpowered speakers directly – for example, two watts per channel. With the popularity of amplified speakers, sound cards no longer have

19738-440: Was originally developed to carry extremely low sub-bass cinematic sound effects (e.g., the loud rumble of thunder or explosions) on their own channel. This allowed theaters to control the volume of these effects to suit the particular cinema's acoustic environment and sound reproduction system. Independent control of the sub-bass effects also reduced the problem of intermodulation distortion in analog movie sound reproduction. In

19880-548: Was released in 2004, again specified the use of a codec chip, and slowly gained acceptance. As of 2011, most motherboards have returned to using a codec chip, albeit an HD Audio compatible one, and the requirement for Sound Blaster compatibility relegated to history. Many home computers have their own motherboard-integrated sound devices: Commodore 64 , Amiga , PC-88 , FM-7 , FM Towns , Sharp X1 , X68000 , BBC Micro , Electron , Archimedes , Atari 8-bit computers , Atari ST , Atari Falcon , Amstrad CPC , later revisions of

20022-490: Was tested with the movie Superman . This led to the 70mm stereo surround release of Apocalypse Now , which became one of the first formal releases in cinemas with three channels in the front and two in the rear. There were typically five speakers behind the screens of 70mm-capable cinemas, but only the Left, Center and Right were used full-frequency, while Center-Left and Center-Right were only used for bass-frequencies (as it

20164-648: Was the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind , a music device for PLATO terminals , and is widely hailed as the precursor to sound cards and MIDI. It was invented in 1972. Certain early arcade machines made use of sound cards to achieve playback of complex audio waveforms and digital music, despite being already equipped with onboard audio. An example of a sound card used in arcade machines is the Digital Compression System card, used in games from Midway . For example, Mortal Kombat II on

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