Here is a collection of links to information on the history of the PC sound and PC sound cards.
LGR – Evolution of PC Audio – As Told by Secret of Monkey Island
Evolution of PC Graphics and Sound as told by The Secret of Monkey Island
Before sound cards
Before Soundcards were common place, many of us had to make do with the PC Speaker for sound effects on our IBM PC Compatibles.
PC Speaker Wizardry: The History of Sound Before Soundcards
PCM Playback Via PC Speaker in DOS Games – NintendoComplete
Recording the IBM PC’s internal speaker: MS-DOS gaming at its loudest
Windows Audio Before Soundcards (Sounds Terrible) | Nostalgia Nerd
Some games utilised this limited medium to good effect, but Windows was always still lacking in sound. That is, until Microsoft developed the PC Speaker Audio driver for Windows. This allows Waveform sound to be played through the PC Speaker in Windows, so you could hear the fabulous startup sounds of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
Covox Speech Thing was a small hardware that was plugged to PC parallel port. It allowed to play back sounds at much better quality that PC speaker could ever do.
LGR Oddware – Covox Speech Thing LPT Sound Device
How the Covox and Disney Sound Source Worked.
IBM-PC COVOX Speech Thing Test
Sound cards era
The Original Sound Blaster : A Retrospective
The History of Creative Labs | 8Bit/16bit Sound card collection | JoeteckTips
30 Year old Sound Blaster Sound Cards from Creative Labs
ISA sound cards for DOS gaming (featuring Crystal, ESS and Aztech)
Massive OPL (FM) ISA Sound Card comparison
OPL2/3 Music on a NEW Yamaha FM Chip (YMF825)
The Gravis UltraSound or GUS is a sound card for the IBM PC compatible system platform, made by Canada-based Advanced Gravis Computer Technology Ltd. The Gravis UltraSound was notable at the time of its 1992 launch for providing the IBM PC platform with sample-based music synthesis technology (marketed as “wavetable”), that is the ability to use real-world sound recordings rather than artificial computer-generated waveforms as the basis of a musical instrument. It was very popular in the demoscene during the 1990s.
LGR – Gravis UltraSound: 1992 Sound Card Retrospective
Review and Demonstration of the Gravis Ultrasound
Second Reality by Future Crew (pc demo) (Captured from 486DX2-66 Overdrive, TSENG ET6000, Gravis Ultrasound ACE)
7 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/26/linux-fu-audio-network-pipes/
Sound System Overview
Someone once said, “The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them.” This is true for Linux sound, too. The most common way to access a soundcard is via ALSA, also known as Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. There are other methods, but this is somewhat the lowest common denominator on most modern systems.
However, most modern systems add one or more layers so you can do things like easily redirect sound from a speaker to a headphone, for example. Or ship audio over the network.
The most common layer over ALSA is PulseAudio, and for many years, it was the most common standard. These days, you see many distros moving to PipeWire.
PipeWire is newer and has a lot of features but perhaps the best one is that it is easy to set it up to look like PulseAudio. So software that understands PipeWire can use it. Programs that don’t understand it can pretend it is PulseAudio.
There are other systems, too, and they all interoperate in some way. While OSS is not as common as it once was, JACK is still found in certain applications. Many choices!
One Way
There are many ways you can accomplish what I was after. Since I am running PipeWire, I elected to use qpwgraph, which is a GUI that shows you all the sound devices on the system and lets you drag lines between them.
It is super powerful but also super cranky. As things change, it tends to want to redraw the “graph,” and it often does it in a strange and ugly way. If you name a block to help you remember what it is and then disconnect it, the name usually goes back to the default. But these are small problems, and you can work around them.
In theory, you should be able to just grab the output and “wire” it to the other program’s input. In fact, that works, but there is one small problem. Both PipeWire and PulseAudio will show when a program is making sound, and then, when it stops, the source vanishes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Many years ago I did some testing of the sound quality of some PC sound card
https://www.epanorama.net/documents/soundcardtest/index.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/testing-pc-soundcard-audio-performance
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.lifewire.com/computer-audio-basics-831415
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/optimising-pc-soundcard-audio-performance
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/ok-so-what-can-i-reliably-measure-from-a-pc-soundcard.609480/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2023/01/13/computer-music-tech-history-and-me/
. I did some early PC sound card audio quality testing and published result on my web pages for several sound cards. That lead me later to take part in making one of the first PC sound quality measurement standard “Personal Computer Audio Quality Measurements 1.00″ started by Cirrus Logic in the later 1990′s. I contributed to standard and reviewed the technical material. Quality levels for some of these measurements are suggested in Microsoft’s PC ‘97, PC ’98, PC ‘99, Intel’s AC ‘97, and in the MPC3 specification.