[TheAmazingRace]

Holy cow. Again, kudos for the details. This has been a fantastic digression so far lol.

So I do strongly remember Sound Blaster cards, specifically of the SB16 variety, being jokingly referred to as “Noise Blasters” for quite some time, due to the horrible noise floor they had as well as all the hiss. One of the reasons I loved the AWE64 Gold was because Creative did manage to get that well under control by that point, along with other fixes introduced with DSP 4.16. I still have an AWE64 Gold in my collection, complete with the SPDIF bracket, that I will never sell, due to sentimental reasons.

The YMF724 card you mentioned… did that happen to have coaxial SPDIF perchance? I heard that, unlike the SPDIF implementation found on the AWE series cards from Creative, the YMF724 SPDIF carried all audio over it, even under DOS. Not just 44.1 kHz specific sound, which I believe Creative sourced from the EMU8k. Plus, as an added bonus, if your motherboard offered SBLINK (also known as PC/PCI), you could interface with the PCI sound card interrupts directly in DOS without memory-hogging TSRs.

As for my final sound card I ever owned before abandoning them, mine was the rather unique ESI Juli@ back in the 2011/2012 timeframe. I loved how the audio ports had a zany breakout cable for MIDI and RCA features, as well as the board that could flip around for different style jacks.

One other remark that leads to a question. Linux users back in the day had a penchant for choosing one audio API over the other in Linux, like ALSA, OSS, or PulseAudio. Did you play around much with these in the dog days of Linux?

[ssl-3]

It's been fun so far.

For the YMF724: I really don't remember that part of it, but I'd like to think that if it had SPDIF built out that I really would have paid attention to that detail. The only reason I went through the horrors of using the cheap-at-every-expense CMI8738 Zoltrix card was to get SPDIF to feed an external DAC (and finally live in silence), and if the YMF724 I had included it then my memories would be shaped differently. :)

And I'm usually pretty good with model numbers, but it's possible that this card really didn't have one. Back then, I got a lot of hardware from an amazing shop that sold things in literal white boxes -- stuff that they'd buy in bulk from Taiwan or wherever and stock on the shelves in simple white boxes with a card (in a static bag) inside. No book, no driver disk.

These boxes had a description literally pasted onto them; sometimes black-and-white, and sometimes copied on one of those fancy new color copiers, sometimes with jumper settings if appropriate -- and sometimes without. Some of the parts were name-brand (I bought a Diamond SpeedStar V330 from there with its minty nVidia Riva128 -- that one had a color label), but other times they were approximately as generic as anything could ever be.

Or, I'd pick up stuff even cheaper from the Dayton Hamvention. There were huge quantities of astoundingly-cheap computer parts of questionable origin moving through that show.

But no, no SPDIF on that device that I recall. It may have been on the board as a JST or something, but if it was then I absolutely never used it.

I do remember that bit about the EMU8k's SPDIF output -- my CT3670 had that, too. IIRC it was TTL-level and not galvanically-isolated or protected in any way, on a 2-pin 0.1" header. IIRC, it didn't even have the 75 Ohm terminating resistor that should have been there. I was disappointed by the fact that it only output audio data from the EMU8k, since that part didn't handle PCM audio.

But! There was a software project way back then that abused the EMU8k to do it anyway: Load up the sample RAM with some PCM, and play it. Repeat over and over again with just the right timing (loading samples in advance, and clearing the ones that have been used), give it a device name, and bingo-bango: A person can play a high-latency MP3 over SPDIF on their SoundBlaster AWE-equivalent.

I was never able to make it work, but I sure did admire the hack value. :)

That ESI Juli@ is an a very clever bit of kit and I've not ever seen one before. I'm a bit in awe of the flexibility of it; the flip-card business is brilliant. There's got to be applications where that kind of thing could be used in the resurgent analog synth world.

It's very different, but for some reason it reminds me of the Lexicon Core 2 we used in a studio from 1999 until 2002 or so. This had its (sadly unbalanced) 4 inputs and 8 outputs on an external breakout box, and we gave it another 8 channels in each direction by plugging it into an ADAT machine. That was an odd configuration, and bouncing through the hardware reverb on the card was even odder.

The Core 2 did not work with the then-cutting-edge Athlon box we built for it and that was a real bummer -- we spent a lot of money on that rig, and I spent a ton of time troubleshooting it before giving up. (We then spent a lot more money replacing that board with a slotted Pentium 3.)

ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio: Yeah, all of those. I paid for OSS fairly early on, and that was also always very simple to make work -- and it did work great as long as a person only did one thing at a time. I really enjoyed the flexibility of ALSA -- it let me plug in things like software mixers, so I could hear a "ding" while I was playing an MP3. And I liked the network transparency of PulseAudio ("it's kind of like X, but for sound!") but nobody else really seemed interested in that aspect around that time.

If I had to pick just one as a favorite, it would definitely be OSS: The concept of one sound card with exactly one program that completely owned the hardware until it was done with it allowed for some very precise dealings, just like with MS-DOS. It felt familiar, plain, and robust.

You?

[TheAmazingRace]

So with regards to the YMF724... what you describe about how spartan the offering was to you doesn't surprise me in the least. That specific chip was pretty much offered to OEMs very cheaply by Yamaha, and a ton of Chinese card makers (mostly of the generic variety) snapped them up and implemented the chip however they saw fit. As for Yamaha, they apparently did produce their own branded soundcard based on a later revision of the YMF724 chip called the WaveForce WF-192XG.

There is some guy on Youtube that reviewed his specific generic YMF724-based sound card many many years ago that did have SPDIF on board and he seemed quite fond of it. Though later on, he redacted his initial recommendation due to how hard it is to find a YMF724 card built exactly like his was. So to be honest, it's likely you didn't miss out after all.

Initial review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zueKH6CUVqE

Comment on rescinding his recommendation (w/ timestamp): https://youtu.be/fl3D9trFJ8E?t=1410

Regarding the SPDIF implementation on the Creative AWE-series cards, those SPDIF brackets turned out to be very important due to their proper support for the TTL-level signal, yet back in the day, most users discarded it or lost them in the shuffle, making them exceedingly rare in the long run. If you are out shopping for any AWE32 or AWE64, good luck finding one with the bracket! Frankly, I wish Creative just slapped the coaxial SPDIF port on the card itself rather than on a separate bracket, though I suppose Creative wanted the world to know how they half-assed the implementation anyway. I digress. :)

That ESI Juli@ was the most interesting sound card I ever used, and I've not seen one like it since. I even recall ensuring that it had a dedicated PCI slot for it that did not connect over a PCI-to-PCIe bridge, in case that would introduce latency. Hilariously though, my needs were never particularly stringent. I was just being OCD.

For me? As far as Linux audio subsystems go, I preferred the ease of PulseAudio, even if it was rather buggy in its earlier days. I even played around with JACK many years later, but would go right back to PulseAudio, since it's truly set-it-and-forget-it in the current era... or I guess we default to pipewire now? I kinda stopped paying attention since audio is so seamless now.