Ensoniq AudioPCI
Encyclopedia
Ensoniq
Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid 1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.- Company history :...
AudioPCI is a PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect
Conventional PCI is a computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer...
-based sound card
Sound card
A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware...
released in 1997. It was Ensoniq's last sound card product before they were acquired by Creative Technology
Creative Technology
Creative Technology Ltd. is a Singapore-based global company headquartered in Jurong East, Singapore. The principal activities of the company and its subsidiaries consist of the design, manufacture and distribution of digitized sound and video boards, computers and related multimedia, and personal...
. The card represented a shift in Ensoniq's market positioning. Whereas the Soundscape line had been made up primarily of low-volume high-end products full of features, the AudioPCI was designed to be a very simple, low-cost product to appeal to system OEM
Original Equipment Manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
s and thus hopefully sell in mass quantities.
Low cost
Ensoniq
Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid 1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.- Company history :...
was struggling financially. Their cards were very popular with PC OEM
Original Equipment Manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
s, but their costs were too high and their musical instrument division was fading in revenue. Pressure from intense competition, especially with the dominant Creative Labs, was forcing audio card makers to try to keep their prices low.
The AudioPCI, released in July 1997, was designed primarily to be cheap. In comparison to the wide variety of chips on and sheer size of the older Soundscape boards, the highly integrated two chip design of the AudioPCI is an obvious shift in design philosophy. The board consists only of a very small software-driven audio chip (one of the following: S5016, ES1370, ES 1371) and a companion digital-to-analog converter
Digital-to-analog converter
In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter is a device that converts a digital code to an analog signal . An analog-to-digital converter performs the reverse operation...
(DAC). In another cost-cutting move, the previously typical ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
chip used for wavetable patch set storage was replaced with the facility to use system RAM as storage for this audio data. This was made possible by the move to the PCI bus
Peripheral Component Interconnect
Conventional PCI is a computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer...
, with its far greater bandwidth and more efficient bus mastering
Bus mastering
In computing, bus mastering is a feature supported by many bus architectures that enables a device connected to the bus to initiate transactions...
interface when compared to the older ISA bus
Industry Standard Architecture
Industry Standard Architecture is a computer bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers introduced with the IBM Personal Computer to support its Intel 8088 microprocessor's 8-bit external data bus and extended to 16 bits for the IBM Personal Computer/AT's Intel 80286 processor...
standard.
Features
AudioPCI, while designed to be cheap, is still quite functional. It offers many of the audio capabilities of the Soundscape ELITE card and surpasses the other Soundscape cards. Notably, AudioPCI supports several digital effects (reverbReverberation
Reverberation is the persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound is removed. A reverberation, or reverb, is created when a sound is produced in an enclosed space causing a large number of echoes to build up and then slowly decay as the sound is absorbed by the walls and air...
, chorus
Chorus effect
In music, a chorus effect occurs when individual sounds with roughly the same timbre and nearly the same pitch converge and are perceived as one...
, and spatial enhancement
3D audio effect
3D audio effects are a group of sound effects that attempt to widen the stereo image produced by two loudspeakers or stereo headphones, or to create the illusion of sound sources placed anywhere in 3 dimensional space, including behind, above or below the listener.There are several types of 3D...
) when used with Microsoft Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
and later versions of Windows.
AudioPCI had some surprises for the market. It was one of the first cards to have Microsoft DirectSound3D 4-speaker playback support. The 4-speaker mode is only activated by software supporting the DirectSound3D quadraphonic
Quadraphonic
Quadraphonic sound – the most widely used early term for what is now called 4.0 surround sound – uses four channels in which speakers are positioned at the four corners of the listening space, reproducing signals that are independent of one another...
mode. An oddity is that the rear channel was connected to the same output jack as line input. The jack switches modes if 4-speaker output became active.
The DOS and Windows drivers support wavetable-synthesis through Ensoniq's ".ecw" patch set format. Several patch set choices are available, varying in size and instrument quality (2, 4, or 8 MB
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
).
The ".ecw" file format (Ensoniq Concert Wavetable) was never made open as had been hoped for by enthusiasts. Consequently, there are very few custom wave sets available, in contrast to the huge availability of home-made releases in E-mu
E-mu Systems
E-mu Systems, Inc. is a synthesizer maker and pioneer in samplers and low-cost digital sampling music workstations.-History:Founded in 1971 by Scott Wedge and Dave Rossum, E-mu began making modular synthesizers...
's SoundFont
SoundFont
SoundFont is a brand name that collectively refers to a file format and associated technology designed to bridge the gap between recorded and synthesized audio, especially for the purposes of computer music composition...
format. It was particularly unfortunate because the AudioPCI used system RAM for patch set storage which in itself offers tremendous potential for new patch sets over the traditional ROM storage previously used. It is also disappointing considering the incredible popularity and longevity of the Ensoniq ES1370 chipset and its descendants, some of which were still in use six years after the original AudioPCI board, and the fact that DOS drivers for the far newer Sound Blaster Audigy
Sound Blaster Audigy
Sound Blaster Audigy is a product line of sound cards from Creative Technology. The flagship model of the Audigy family used the EMU10K2 audio DSP, an improved version of the SB-Live's EMU10K1, while the value/SE editions were built with a less-expensive audio controller...
still use ".ecw" wave sets. These newer cards are unable to use SoundFonts in DOS, limiting them to the three official .ecw wavesets from the late '90s and one incomplete unofficial waveset.
DOS compatibility
The AudioPCI boasted excellent DOSDOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
support for a PCI sound card. The competing Monster Sound from Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia is a company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackStar, a PC add-on card which emulated Apple II computers...
was limited to running DOS games in Windows 9x
Windows 9x
Windows 9x is a generic term referring to a series of Microsoft Windows computer operating systems produced since 1995, which were based on the original and later modified Windows 95 kernel...
-based DOS command windows, meaning DOS compatibility was frequently only reliable through an additional ISA sound card. Creative was struggling with the challenge of legacy support as well, and had created the SB-Link, an interconnect between the card and their special port design included on many of the first PCI motherboards, in order to achieve DOS compatibility for their Sound Blaster AWE64
Sound Blaster AWE64
Sound Blaster Advanced Wave Effects 64 is an ISA sound card from Creative Technology. It is an add-on board for PCs. The card was launched in November 1996.-Overview:...
-variant PCI sound cards. However, Ensoniq's DOS driver successfully simulated having a real Sound Blaster
Sound Blaster
The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level , and the evolution in PC design led to onboard...
-compatible ISA sound card in the computer. Compatibility was achieved through the clever use of the PC's NMI
Non-Maskable interrupt
A non-maskable interrupt is a computer processor interrupt that cannot be ignored by standard interrupt masking techniques in the system. It is typically used to signal attention for non-recoverable hardware errors...
and a TSR
Terminate and Stay Resident
Terminate and Stay Resident is a computer system call in DOS computer operating systems that returns control to the system as if the program has quit, but keeps the program in memory...
program that together virtualized
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
the Sound Blaster hardware. This was a tremendous step forward for the time. However, the DOS driver required a memory manager such as EMM386
EMM386
The name EMM386 was used for the expanded memory managers of both Microsoft's MS-DOS and Digital Research's DR-DOS, which created expanded memory using extended memory on Intel 80386 CPUs. There also is an EMM386.EXE available in FreeDOS....
to be loaded, potentially reducing compatibility with games. This is not a requirement exclusive to AudioPCI, however, as a number of ISA sound cards used it as well, including the Creative AWE ISA series.
The AudioPCI DOS driver included Ensoniq Soundscape 16-bit digital audio and wavetable support, along with support for Sound Blaster Pro, AdLib Gold
AdLib
Ad Lib, Inc. was a manufacturer of sound cards and other computer equipment founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval...
, General MIDI
General MIDI
General MIDI or GM is a standardized specification for music synthesizers that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee and first published in 1991...
, and MT-32
Roland MT-32
The Roland MT-32 Multi-Timbre Sound Module is a MIDI synthesizer module first released in 1987 by Roland Corporation. Along with its compatible modules, it established an early de-facto standard in computer music and was the first product in Roland's ミュージくん line of Desktop Music System packages...
. However, without actual hardware for FM synthesis
Frequency modulation synthesis
A 220 Hz carrier tone modulated by a 440 Hz modulating tone with various choices of modulation index, β. The time domain signals are illustrated above, and the corresponding spectra are shown below ....
, FM music was simulated using the Ensoniq wavetable, resulting in FM soundtracks sounding inauthentic. DOS MIDI utilizes the same .ecw patch set files as Windows MIDI.
Creative acquisition
Part of the deal when Ensoniq was purchased by Creative Labs was to integrate the AudioPCI DOS driver into the upcoming Sound Blaster Live!Sound Blaster Live!
Sound Blaster Live! is a sound card from Creative Technology. It is a PCI add-on board for PCs.-Overview:Sound Blaster Live! saw the introduction of the EMU10K1 processor, a 2.44 million transistor audio DSP, rated at 1000 MIPS...
. Creative added Sound Blaster 16
Sound Blaster 16
The Sound Blaster 16 is a series of sound cards by Creative Technology. They are add-on boards for PCs with an ISA or PCI slot.-Sound Blaster 16:Sound Blaster 16 , the successor to the Sound Blaster Pro, introduced 16-bit digital audio sampling to the Sound Blaster line...
emulation to the driver and removed the Ensoniq SoundScape support. AudioPCI itself was re-branded as several Creative Labs sound cards, including the Sound Blaster
Sound Blaster
The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level , and the evolution in PC design led to onboard...
PCI 64, PCI 128, Vibra PCI, and others. The Ensoniq ES1370 audio chip was revised into AC'97-compliant variants, the ES1371 and ES1373, and used for several more years on card and as integrated motherboard audio.
Creative Labs Malvern (which was the former Ensoniq company that had been acquired) later released the Ectiva 1938 (EV1938). This single chip PCI audio controller was based on the ES1371/ES1373 and was register compatible with these previous chips. The main difference between the EV1938 and previous chips was the inclusion of a built-in AC'97 codec (hence producing a cheaper, single chip audio solution). The EV1938 was also used for both integrated audio on laptops/motherboards and on cards, such as the "Sound Blaster AudioPCI 64V" (CT4730).
ES1370
Ensoniq
Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid 1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.- Company history :...
. One of the more important innovations found within was the move from ISA
Industry Standard Architecture
Industry Standard Architecture is a computer bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers introduced with the IBM Personal Computer to support its Intel 8088 microprocessor's 8-bit external data bus and extended to 16 bits for the IBM Personal Computer/AT's Intel 80286 processor...
to the PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect
Conventional PCI is a computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer...
bus. It was one of the first PCI sound card solutions to offer full MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
legacy compatibility without special hardware extensions to the standard PCI slot. When paired with a capable codec
Codec
A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...
, such as the AK4531 (pre-AC'97), the ES1370 supported the then-latest in 3D audio positioning through 4-speaker surround sound. The chip was also a PCI bus master device that was designed to provide high-speed access to system RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
and resources, for wavetable data and effect processing. Depending on the drivers, it may also be called the Sound Blaster 64/128 in the device manager.
ES1370 was one of the first audio chips to support the Microsoft DirectSound3D audio API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
. When programs took full advantage of the API's capabilities, the ES1370 was capable of both global spatial and localized 3D sound effects, in both 2 and 4-speaker mode. The chip was capable of spatializing all audio automatically, but still required DirectSound3D usage for specific localization of sounds.
The ES1370 is also emulated as a piece of virtual hardware in Qemu
QEMU
QEMU is a processor emulator that relies on dynamic binary translation to achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU architectures....
and VMware
VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
.
- ENSONIQ SoundScape wavetable synthesis
- 2 and 4 MB downloadable sound sets (2 MB = GMGeneral MIDIGeneral MIDI or GM is a standardized specification for music synthesizers that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee and first published in 1991...
, 4 MB & 8 MB = GM+GS+10 drum kits) - 32 simultaneous MIDI voices
- Uses system RAM for sound storage (memory locked or dynamic OS control)
- Multi-algorithm reverb and chorus
- Multiple level spatial 3D sound
- Microsoft DirectSound3D compatible (4 speaker 3D sound with AK4531 codec)
- 16-bit Record & Playback at up to 48 kHz
- Support for hardware sound rendering
- Support for EAXEnvironmental audio extensionsThe environmental audio extensions are a number of digital signal processing presets for audio, present in Creative Technology's later Sound Blaster sound cards and the Creative NOMAD/Creative ZEN product lines...
1.0, OpenALOpenALOpenAL is a cross-platform audio API. It is designed for efficient rendering of multichannel three dimensional positional audio. Its API style and conventions deliberately resemble those of OpenGL.- History :... - Low system overhead, PCI bus master
- 100% DOS legacy compatible
- Unlimited digital audio streams
- I²SI²SI2S, also known as Inter-IC Sound, Integrated Interchip Sound, or IIS, is an electrical serial bus interface standard used for connecting digital audio devices together. It is most commonly used to carry PCM information between the CD transport and the DAC in a CD player...
input - OPL-FM and MPU-401 emulation
- Only a single, shared IRQInterrupt requestThe computing phrase "interrupt request" is used to refer to either the act of interrupting the bus lines used to signal an interrupt, or the interrupt input lines on a Programmable Interrupt Controller...
required - No ISAIndustry Standard ArchitectureIndustry Standard Architecture is a computer bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers introduced with the IBM Personal Computer to support its Intel 8088 microprocessor's 8-bit external data bus and extended to 16 bits for the IBM Personal Computer/AT's Intel 80286 processor...
signals required - No distributed DMADirect memory accessDirect memory access is a feature of modern computers that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory independently of the central processing unit ....
signals required - Drivers: DOSDOSDOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
, Windows 3.1xWindows 3.1xWindows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during March 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0...
, Win'95Windows 95Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
, WinNTWindows NTWindows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
, (WinNT (AlphaDEC AlphaAlpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors...
), SunSun MicrosystemsSun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
SolarisSolaris Operating SystemSolaris is a Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It superseded their earlier SunOS in 1993. Oracle Solaris, as it is now known, has been owned by Oracle Corporation since Oracle's acquisition of Sun in January 2010....
(SPARCengine Ultra AX), LinuxLinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, and BeOSBeOSBeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing...
available)
ES1371 and ES1373
- Wavetable sound sets: 2, 4, and 8 MBMegabyteThe megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
sets- 128 General MIDI wavetable instruments, 61 drum programs, 128 MT-32 instruments, Roland GS Sound set in 4 & 8 MB sets
- Synthesizer: Up to 32 simultaneous voice polyphonyPolyphonyIn music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....
, 16 MIDI channels- Digital effects: reverb, chorus, and spatial enhancement
- Digital audio
- 16-bit record & playback at up to 48 kHz (mono/stereo). A/DAnalog-to-digital converterAn analog-to-digital converter is a device that converts a continuous quantity to a discrete time digital representation. An ADC may also provide an isolated measurement...
D/ADigital-to-analog converterIn electronics, a digital-to-analog converter is a device that converts a digital code to an analog signal . An analog-to-digital converter performs the reverse operation...
codec - Lowest Noise: >Signal-to-noise ratioSignal-to-noise ratioSignal-to-noise ratio is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise...
90 dbr typical. Frequency responseFrequency responseFrequency response is the quantitative measure of the output spectrum of a system or device in response to a stimulus, and is used to characterize the dynamics of the system. It is a measure of magnitude and phase of the output as a function of frequency, in comparison to the input...
: 20Hz - 22kHz - Full duplexDuplex (telecommunications)A duplex communication system is a system composed of two connected parties or devices that can communicate with one another in both directions. The term multiplexing is used when describing communication between more than two parties or devices....
operation (simultaneous record/playback) - S/PDIFS/PDIFS/PDIF is a digital audio interconnect used in consumer audio equipment over relatively short distances. The signal is transmitted over either a coaxial cable with RCA connectors or a fiber optic cable with TOSLINK connectors. S/PDIF interconnects components in home theaters and other digital high...
and I²SI²SI2S, also known as Inter-IC Sound, Integrated Interchip Sound, or IIS, is an electrical serial bus interface standard used for connecting digital audio devices together. It is most commonly used to carry PCM information between the CD transport and the DAC in a CD player...
output — ES1373 only.
- 16-bit record & playback at up to 48 kHz (mono/stereo). A/D
- Supported standards. 100% DOS legacy game compatible:
- ENSONIQ Soundscape, Microsoft Direct Audio (DirectX), AdLib, OpenAL, Sound Blaster Pro (2.0), General MIDI, MT-32, FM (software emulation), MPCMultimedia PCThe Multimedia PC, or MPC, was a recommended configuration for a PC with a CD-ROM drive. The standard was set and named by the "Multimedia PC Marketing Council", which was a working group of the Software Publishers Association . The MPMC comprised companies including Microsoft, Creative Labs,...
1,2,3
- ENSONIQ Soundscape, Microsoft Direct Audio (DirectX), AdLib, OpenAL, Sound Blaster Pro (2.0), General MIDI, MT-32, FM (software emulation), MPC
- Drivers: DOS,Windows (3.1, 9x, NT 4.x, 2000, XP), FreeBSDFreeBSDFreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
The CT5880 chip is a relabeled ES1371, may be found on some cheap cards i.e. SB Creative VIBRA 128 PCI.
EV1938
Creative EV1938 (AudioPCI 64V) is virtually identical to ES1371/ES1373 and is a later (cost reduced) product.- Built-in AC'97 codec
- 2-channels only
External links
- AudioPCI DOS drivers, on MAMEWorld http://easymamecab.mameworld.net/html/snddosdr.htm
- AudioPCI drivers for older operating systems are available not from the Creative Technology website http://support.creative.com/Products/ProductDetails.aspx?prodID=420, but from the E-mu SystemsE-mu SystemsE-mu Systems, Inc. is a synthesizer maker and pioneer in samplers and low-cost digital sampling music workstations.-History:Founded in 1971 by Scott Wedge and Dave Rossum, E-mu began making modular synthesizers...
web site http://www.emu.com/support/. Slightly newer versions are available on gateway.com, http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/search.asp?param=ensoniq&st=kw. AudioPCI drivers are built into Windows 2000 and Windows XP. (May 9, 2007)
- Ensoniq AudioPCI S5016 User Manual (Retrieved 2009/03/09)