CuteFloor | Sound Blaster 16 ⭐ Creative Labs / Creative Technology @CuteFloor | Uploaded March 2021 | Updated October 2024, 6 days ago.
The Sound Blaster 16 is an ISA (and later PCI) sound card first introduced by Creative Technology in June 1992. It is the successor to the Sound Blaster Pro and features 44.1 kHz stereo sound, a Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesis chip, an MPU-401 compatible UART, and a connector to the Wave Blaster daughterboard, which allows wavetable synthesis. Some Sound Blaster 16 cards provided an additional IDE connector for use with one CD-ROM drive, for computers that didn't have a spare IDE connector for it. There were also cards that had a socket for an additional signal processing chip to support PCM compression/decompression in hardware. However, this was somewhat short-lived and dropped in later revisions.
Like its predecessors, the original Sound Blaster and the Sound Blaster Pro cards, the Sound Blaster 16 quickly became a de-facto standard and widely supported by games in the DOS era. It was even so popular that Creative decided to produce PCI versions of the Sound Blaster 16. However, these are actually based on Ensoniq AudioPCI – technically unrelated to the ISA cards. The Sound Blaster 16 PCI cards don't have an OPL FM synthesis chip, instead they use the Ensoniq sample-synthesis engine to simulate it, which is considered very inaccurate.
In this video, you can see the MMPLAY demo that was shipped with the Sound Blaster 16 drivers in 1993.
Did you own a Sound Blaster 16 card? What are your experiences? Leave a comment! :)
The Sound Blaster 16 is an ISA (and later PCI) sound card first introduced by Creative Technology in June 1992. It is the successor to the Sound Blaster Pro and features 44.1 kHz stereo sound, a Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesis chip, an MPU-401 compatible UART, and a connector to the Wave Blaster daughterboard, which allows wavetable synthesis. Some Sound Blaster 16 cards provided an additional IDE connector for use with one CD-ROM drive, for computers that didn't have a spare IDE connector for it. There were also cards that had a socket for an additional signal processing chip to support PCM compression/decompression in hardware. However, this was somewhat short-lived and dropped in later revisions.
Like its predecessors, the original Sound Blaster and the Sound Blaster Pro cards, the Sound Blaster 16 quickly became a de-facto standard and widely supported by games in the DOS era. It was even so popular that Creative decided to produce PCI versions of the Sound Blaster 16. However, these are actually based on Ensoniq AudioPCI – technically unrelated to the ISA cards. The Sound Blaster 16 PCI cards don't have an OPL FM synthesis chip, instead they use the Ensoniq sample-synthesis engine to simulate it, which is considered very inaccurate.
In this video, you can see the MMPLAY demo that was shipped with the Sound Blaster 16 drivers in 1993.
Did you own a Sound Blaster 16 card? What are your experiences? Leave a comment! :)
