First sound card.

[dante]

Heres mine - just found this image. Hung of the parallel port of my 8 bit Sorcerer II and pumped out 4 poly sine waves.

UPDATE - this was 1980 -:)

Sorcerer SoundPlug

soundplug1.jpg (130.81 KiB) Viewed 2579 times

What was yours ?

[Spielraum]

Heres mine

YEAR: ?

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*1992 | DAW: 16 ch hd + 14MB sampler Ram + Dsp FX

Atari Falcon030 DAW start 10.1992

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Falcon Digital Interface

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Falcon Analog8

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SoundPool ADAT

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Atari Falcon030 DAW HD-Setup (14MB RAM)

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YEP, in 12.2014 falcon battery change (DS12887A Dallas now on Socket), and funny run...run...run...
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http://atari.soundpool.de/
unbelievable, even the page is still there!
man oh man,
how many hours have i dreamed with matthias in soundpool berlin spandau,
many thanks also to charlie, dave, nolan and ted!!
ROCK ON
\o/

[valis]

The very first soundcard I had was something for my Tandy Color Computer 2 (and subsequent 3), which I rarely used because I lacked the necessary amp to make it sound good (I managed to connect it directly to a very low impedance crap bookshelf speaker but it sounded thin & tinny, and QUIET). This was unfortunate, it was a rather expensive gift for my mother at the time. Thankfully, l found a program that allowed me to "write" audio blips to the external tape deck that was used to store & retreive programs. If memory serves, this was a BASIC program that you could modify which knew what data structures correlated to audio spectra (including some 'drum'-like sounds) and all you had to do was write a new 'score' section with typical BASIC loops (while..do, if then else etc). So you could structure your 'song' as verse/chorus/refrain and just call those loops to iterate a few times (by iterating a counter). Each loop also called subsequent data structures, also in basic. The core of the program was entirely written in PEEK & POKE calls, which were the BASIC equivalent of embedding assembly in a C routine--direct hardware calls.

This influenced my desire to learn CSound in the mid 90's, which is how I became aware of Scope (though my first Pulsar1 card actually came from an employer going bankrupt, oddly enough).

I also managed to find a used MT-32 that Sierra (games) sold to its customers after Kings Quest III or IV (forget which), which also bundled a MPU-401 interface that I continued to use for some time. Turtle Beach soon replaced that setup for gaming, but the midi interface on that was used alongside DOS trackers until about 93, at which point I had a 2 year 'gap' in computer ownership which ended with the purchase of a Supermicro Dual Pentium Pro (200Mhz) computer which ran only NT 3.51 & 4, and thus Cakewalk was my next sequencer. I learned Logic at a friend's record store/music studio a few years later, and have used that since.

[dante]

Yep 'POKE' was how it worked on the Sorcerer, although I worked out how to do it in Z80 Assembler as well.

[valis]

I still have an AWE64 Gold in a box somewhere, as it was probably one of the best sounding (though not clinically, but rather in a colored way) cards that Soundblaster ever produced from their ISA tech. Everything past that was a result of acquisitions, including the aforementioned Turtle Beach.

I also have a few SBLives, because I dearly loved fiddling with the KX drivers and the myriad mods you can do to an SBLive card using that driver & suite of apps.

No machine housing any of this right now, and I have too many computers, but memory lane is a fun place to visit from time to time, so I like to keep some of that around. Thanks for the encouraging a visit to that pathway right now

[dante]

I had a sound blaster that you could add 8MB ram chip to and a neat 8MB GM sound set to use on it. Also had a couple of Turtle Beaches with Voyetra DOP Pro sequencer

[Peter Drake]

Atari 1040ste, not a sound card per se, but did have built in 16 bit? Audio that was quite gritty. I had prior experience with an alphaSyntauri on an Apple II, which was also gritty and aggressive in nature, but I only had it on loan for a while.
I made a lot of nasty noises with Turbosynth on the Atari, which took forever to transfer samples over MIDI to my sampler.

[Mr Arkadin]

Whatever was built into my PC at the time, some SoundBlaster thing. Then jumped straight to Pulsar and PowerSampler. I was buying the Pulsar and mistakenly thought that you needed PowerSampler to run the sampler - I don't think information was as clear back then and I didn't know about Planet Z. Well it gave me 9 DSP so not all bad!

[Bud Weiser]

Microdeal Replay16 sampler came w/ a small AD/DA device for ATARI ST.

Replay16_2.JPG (198.11 KiB) Viewed 2496 times

I stll own it as collectors item.
DD Turbosynth too ...
I loved ATARI and think it´s still a good machine for MIDI.

EDIT:
Digidesign Soundtools for ATARI Mega ST4 was my 1st HDD recording system ...

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DD SD II_1.JPG (179.07 KiB) Viewed 2460 times

... and Emagic Audiowerk-8 w/ Logic Gold 4.8 for Mac was the next

Otherwise I worked w/ tape until I bought the Steinberg/Nuendo 9652 and 8 I/O ADDA,- both devices identical w/ (the non-DSP) RME Hammerfall 9652 and ADI 8-Pro convwerter,- in summer 2002 and followed by my 1st real DAW build,- PC ASUS P4T-E, 1GB Rambus RAM, WD 80GB IDE drives and running Cubase SX3.
That was a 4HU 19"- rackmount PC already.

B.t.w.,- my 1st sequencer was this ...

mini-SC 64 Seq 3.JPG (55.24 KiB) Viewed 2496 times

I still have it and it´s like new.
Worked pretty well together w/ EMU Drumulator.
But actually unusable because I sold the Commodore SX64 long time ago.




Bud

[dawman]

Whatever was built into my PC at the time, some SoundBlaster thing. Then jumped straight to Pulsar and PowerSampler. I was buying the Pulsar and mistakenly thought that you needed PowerSampler to run the sampler - I don't think information was as clear back then and I didn't know about Planet Z. Well it gave me 9 DSP so not all bad!

Ladie s & Gentlemen, ...Mr.A.
Ankyu.
Glad you’re still around.

I had the old EgoSys WaMiRack too Bud.
GSIF didn’t work on my Lynx card.
Then came Pulsars and the key tech from ALennox.
He got me going.

Never seen or heard from him since.
Always wanted to thank his snobby ass.

[dante]

I guess we're all over 40 years old then

[Bud Weiser]

I guess we're all over 40 years old then

Yeah,- and we like old gear and even we´re using the modern variants too.

I just aquired 5 (five !) CW Pulsar 2 cards w/ 3 "Plus" cable-whips and 2 new STDM cables at a bargain.
Seems I can expand my former "single PCI card" SCOPE system and have backup cards.
These cards came w/SCOPE v4.5 as also 2 Cutmaster keys which are possibly obsolete.

I already own SCOPE 5.1 and 7.0 for PCI (and XITE).

But when S|C comes w/ some x-mas special, I´d split the cards in 2 sets and buy another SCOPE 7 for PCI.

I really appreciate I can use my old P4 machines w/ PCI and WinXP and Win 7 32Bit still.



Bud

[dante]

Just found here (re ISA Sound Card days) ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_T ... n_products

Turtle Beach had hold of the EMU Proteus chip to put in their sound cards, then Creative bought EM-U in 1994 so the supply of those chips stopped. This was the same year Yamaha came out with DB50XG which then became the Sound Blaster daughter board of choice.

But Turtle Beach were the first with the concept of a synth daughterboard for ISA sound cards, predating Creative or Yamaha by a couple of years.

I still have my Rack Mounted DB50XG.

[Xite Knight v2.0]

SW1000XG was my gateway drug to DSP

[dante]

Yep I had the SW1000XG one too . It was PCI and could join up to the Yamaha DSP Factory for more fun. It was the last 'soundcard' I had before getting the Creamware Pulsar - in fact I used to feed the SW1000XG output into the Pulsar for a while. But eventually gave the SW100XG away to a friend who couldn't get it going as new windows versions came out.

[valis]

Just found here (re ISA Sound Card days) ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_T ... n_products

Turtle Beach had hold of the EMU Proteus chip to put in their sound cards, then Creative bought EM-U in 1994 so the supply of those chips stopped. This was the same year Yamaha came out with DB50XG which then became the Sound Blaster daughter board of choice.

But Turtle Beach were the first with the concept of a synth daughterboard for ISA sound cards, predating Creative or Yamaha by a couple of years.

I still have my Rack Mounted DB50XG.

Turtle Beach, thank you I had forgotten things in this much detail. I was in high school at the time and already had gearlust thanks to these products.

[Xite Knight v2.0]

Yep I had the SW1000XG one too . It was PCI and could join up to the Yamaha DSP Factory for more fun.

Yeah, that DSP Factory was on my wish list for a while

It was the last 'soundcard' I had before getting the Creamware Pulsar

Same here, except that I was temporarily on a Soundscape Mixtreme + SS8IO-2 - very nice sound/converters in that combo

[t_tangent]

Still have my pc with Turtle Beach card and DG50XG daughterboard, sitting in the storage.cupboard now, but will have to try it out again sometime.
Then bought a Pulsar 1 before selling that and getting the Pro cards

[dante]

@ t_tangent - Do you still have computer that an run Turtle Beach - is that ISA or PCI ? I future proofed my DB50XG by having it rack mounted so it works just like a synth module. With XG-Gold still working on Win10 x64 the combo works a treat.

[t_tangent]

@ t_tangent - Do you still have computer that an run Turtle Beach - is that ISA or PCI ? I future proofed my DB50XG by having it rack mounted so it works just like a synth module. With XG-Gold still working on Win10 x64 the combo works a treat.

Hi Dante,

Yes, ISA slot on an old Gigabyte mobo I think. Will have a look over the next few days.

Great idea to rack mount the DB50XG. Would be interested to know how you did that.

Cheers, and HNY