First sound card.

[astroman]

Reminds me on my project for 2021 (aka the Final CountDown):
Asus P2B, with 2 ISA slots for a Yamaha XG60 (to run XG-Gold) and a HardSid Quattro
Plus a single Pulsar One for VDAT to eventually (finally ) succeed to control it by the Alesis BRC....

[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.

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

Well I had a mate do it - he's kind of a Wiz with electronics so did it without any previous experience on music gear or MIDI other than hi-fi maybe. So I sent him the card and a 1 octave MIDI keyboard to test it - project pics follow :

DB50XG #1

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[dante]

I think in this pic you can see an article he used for the design.

DB50GX #2

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[dante]

DB50GX #3

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[dante]

DB50GX #4

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[dante]

DB50GX #5

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[dante]

DB50GX #6

DB50XG #6.jpg (354.4 KiB) Viewed 3855 times

[fra77x2]

This I like. Where you found a pic of my room?

[t_tangent]

Interesting Dante, nice idea. Might have to look into this as a project one of these days. Thanks

Hi John, haha yes, like my kitchen table too which has turned into my worktop

[dante]

The pinouts are here : https://sdiy.info/wiki/Yamaha_DB50XG

After further digging for the source article I found the following :

https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazin ... 9707/33902

I think you have to pay Elektor a couple of euro to get the full article. Not sure if its in English or Dutch though.

Other references :

http://www.compuzik.de/DB50XG.html

And a cool vid :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3DrNlqle1A

[nebelfuerst]

Not really a soundcard, but one of the coolest cards IMHO is this one:
https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboa ... spx?id=386

If you plug in an original SID of C64, you can use this chip on Amiga or PC to get the original sound.
Unfortunately, there is no Midi-interface to a SID. Most "songs" are hardcoded playroutines, just without a gui.

[t_tangent]

Thanks for the links Dante. Will save those and look into it some more. Just got the old pc running again and was nice to have a quick go with XG Gold after so many years, haha. Forgot how nice the XG card sounded Thanks again

[st1]

My first "add-on" sound generator was an Acorn Music 500 digital synthesizer for the BBC Micro (model B).
I acquired it in 1985, I believe.
And IIRC, it had 16-voice wavetable synthesis, ~48KHz sample rate, but no filters.
Still have it somewhere in the outhouse, along with the BBC Micro. Need to go see sometime.

While it definitely was shelves above the beep-on-beep-off of the computer speaker I had so far, it didn't quite get me where I wanted to be (think early to mid-80's samplers on pop records -Art of Noise, Jean Michel Jarre, ABC, Peter Gabriel etc).

In response, my dear home-computer-nerding friends then for a birthday gave me a "go-do kit" consisting of a Zilog Z80, an 8-bit DAC and an 8-bit ADC chip + sockets. Go build & program a Fairlight yourself...
Probably no need to say the project was never finished, and no sound from that contraption was heard.
(In fact, I may still also have the board and those chips in the outhouse somewhere!)

I think the next thing I got was a Soundblaster Pro or something like that for a 80386sx-based PC, but that was 1988 or so.

Nevertheless, I did get somewhat back on my friends 'gift' - just a couple of years later, I was working as an audio engineer and programmer at a local recording studio, where we among other boards had a Farlight series III (16-bit machine). Couldn't get much better than that at the time (late 80's)!
Yay!
Of course, my iPhone these days can do all of that, and more, and I'm doing something completely different

[Ditykman]

Hello all
For me it was this thing :



Yhea good old time

[fra77x2]

ISIS was my first soundcard before I bought a Pulsar 2 around 2000.
For me the most crucial moment was when I bought a "computer music" magazine that offered a cd with numerous "synthesizers" (pre vst) that stressed my Pentium2 or 3 (can't remember) to its limits by just using a filter. It contained Generator (Reaktor), and other stuff. I remember I had started using a tracker and I had a metal band these times and I was able to make a demo of the drums and the bass (I was playing guitar and singing) so the members of the group to listen and take an idea.

Needless to say my Pulsar2 still works like new alongside a Scope SRB (15DSPs) I bought around 2006 so to be able to use the Scope SDK...

My first computer was a PC-XT with 640K memory and a Hercules green graphics card my father bought in 1983. I was 6 years old. I had to run "simcga" so to be able to play games. After some years he also bought a Mac classic so I have used Adobe Illustrator from the illustrator 88' version. When I was studying as a graphics designer I already knew Photoshop and Illustrator and had already worked in publishing houses. I was printing my friends works for the examinations in the school in high quality "thermal printers". Of course I didn't had to attend the computer class in the school.

[Ditykman]

Same story with reaktor
I was in a metal band but with the preset bimachine of reaktor the techno comes to me
hehehehehe