You just unlocked a memory for me. One of my dad’s friends had a super cool keyboard, I think it was a Casio. It had midi, and a bunch of built in instruments. Then he had another friend, who was a huge geek, who figured out how to extract the midi instruments from the keyboard, so we could use them to replace the cheaper sounding midi instruments in windows.
Obviously it didn’t sound as good as the keyboard, because it still was dragged behind by inferior hardware on the PC. Not to mention the fact that some of the instruments just didn’t play, and that Windows liked to crash and revert all instruments back to the default if it didn’t like an instrument we tried to feed it, but I still remember it as something really badass.
At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, […] the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful
And the a Atari ST and Amiga 500 was released in the late 1980s.
Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.
Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.
(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).
Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.
(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).
Most of Creative’s AWE32 cards do use a real Yamaha OPL3 chip for FM synthesis, which can produce two-or-four operator voices. The latter of those can approach the quality of the voices in their DX7-family line of musical instruments. Even the older OPL2 chip that is limited to two-operator voices can sound great when programmed well (not that I’d call it realistic-sounding).
The other synth chip on the AWE32 is the Ensoniq EMU8000. That one does sample-based synthesis as you describe above.
Just wanted to note that Creative misappropriated the term wavetable synthesis when they marketed this and other sample-based synthesis cards of theirs, and the misnomer spread widely to the products of other companies and persists to this day.
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You just unlocked a memory for me. One of my dad’s friends had a super cool keyboard, I think it was a Casio. It had midi, and a bunch of built in instruments. Then he had another friend, who was a huge geek, who figured out how to extract the midi instruments from the keyboard, so we could use them to replace the cheaper sounding midi instruments in windows.
Obviously it didn’t sound as good as the keyboard, because it still was dragged behind by inferior hardware on the PC. Not to mention the fact that some of the instruments just didn’t play, and that Windows liked to crash and revert all instruments back to the default if it didn’t like an instrument we tried to feed it, but I still remember it as something really badass.
And the a Atari ST and Amiga 500 was released in the late 1980s.
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Thanks for the anecdote. I love reading this kind of context-giving stories on how different our expectations on consumer-grade electronics were.
Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.
(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).
Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.
(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).
That was a super interesting read - thanks for the writeup!
Most of Creative’s AWE32 cards do use a real Yamaha OPL3 chip for FM synthesis, which can produce two-or-four operator voices. The latter of those can approach the quality of the voices in their DX7-family line of musical instruments. Even the older OPL2 chip that is limited to two-operator voices can sound great when programmed well (not that I’d call it realistic-sounding).
The other synth chip on the AWE32 is the Ensoniq EMU8000. That one does sample-based synthesis as you describe above.
Just wanted to note that Creative misappropriated the term wavetable synthesis when they marketed this and other sample-based synthesis cards of theirs, and the misnomer spread widely to the products of other companies and persists to this day.