Ensoniq AudioPCI

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Ensoniq AudioPCI

The Ensoniq AudioPCI is a PCI-based sound card released in 1997. It was Ensoniq's last sound card product before their buyout by Creative Technology. 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 very simple, low-cost product to appeal to system OEMs and thus hopefully sell in mass quantities.

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[edit] Low cost

Ensoniq AudioPCI
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Ensoniq AudioPCI

Towards the end of the 1990s, Ensoniq was struggling financially. Their cards were very popular with PC OEMs, 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 to be cheap first, functional second. In comparison to the wide variety of chips on and sheer size of the older Soundscape boards, the highly integrated 2-chip design of the AudioPCI is an obvious shift in design philosophy. The board consists only of a very small software-driven audio chip (the Ensoniq ES1370) and a companion digital-to-analog converter (DAC). In another cost-cutting move, the previously typical ROM 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, with its far greater bandwidth and more efficient CPU/RAM interface when compared to the older ISA bus standard.

[edit] New and old 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 MIDI digital effects (reverb, chorus, and spatial enhancement) when used with Microsoft Windows 95 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 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.

[edit] Superior DOS compatibility

DOS support with AudioPCI was as good as any PCI card reached. The competing Monster Sound from Diamond Multimedia was limited to running DOS games in Windows DOS boxes, which reduced game compatibility; therefore, DOS compatibility was only reliably possible with a real ISA sound card. Creative was struggling with the challenge of legacy support as well, and had created a special SBLink port for motherboards to get DOS compatibility with their newest Sound Blaster AWE64-variant PCI sound cards. Along came Ensoniq, with their fully functional DOS driver that worked almost as well as having a real Sound Blaster-compatible ISA sound card in the computer. This was a tremendous step forward for the time. However, the DOS driver was a TSR with the requirement to have a memory manager loaded, which reduced game compatibility.

The AudioPCI DOS driver would run nearly all DOS games, and included native SoundScape support along with support for Sound Blaster Pro, AdLib Gold, General MIDI, and MT-32. The DOS drivers emulated the existence of an ISA sound card through software, and redirected audio to the AudioPCI for output.

Part of the deal when Ensoniq was purchased by Creative Labs was to integrate the AudioPCI DOS driver into the upcoming Sound Blaster Live!. Creative added Sound Blaster 16 emulation to the driver, and removed the Ensoniq SoundScape support. AudioPCI itself was rebranded as several Creative Labs sound cards, including the Sound Blaster PCI 64, PCI 128, Vibra PCI, and others. The Ensoniq ES1370 audio chip was revised as well and used for several more years.

The DOS and Windows drivers supported wavetable MIDI through Ensoniq's ".ecw" (Ensoniq Concert Wavetable) wave sets varying in size (2, 4, or 8 MiB). The 8 MiB set was delayed for several months after AudioPCI's release while it was being developed. Unfortunately, the quality of these wave sets, although relatively large in size for the time, was less than the 2 MiB ROM aboard the Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000 and especially the revised 2 MiB set on the Soundscape ELITE. They were better than the 1 MiB patch sets of Soundscape VIVO90, Soundscape OPUS, and SoundscapeDB, however.

The ".ecw" file format was never open-sourced as had been hoped for by enthusiasts. Consequently, there are no custom wave sets available, in contrast to the huge availability of home-made releases in E-mu's SoundFont 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 before used. It is also disappointing when one considers the incredible popularity and longevity of the Ensoniq ES1370 chipset and its descendants, some of which were still in use 6 years after the original AudioPCI board, and the fact that DOS drivers for the far newer Sound Blaster Audigy still use ".ecw" wave sets. These newer cards are unable to used SoundFonts in DOS, limiting them to the 3 official .ecw wavesets from the late '90s.

[edit] Specifications

[edit] References

  • AudioPCI Home by Ensoniq Corp., Multimedia Division Product Information, 1998, retrieved December 29, 2005
  • "Ensoniq Corp. Web Site" by Ensoniq Corp., Multimedia Division Product Information and Support Pages, 1998, retrieved December 25, 2005
  • "Ensoniq FAQ" by Ensoniq Corp., Multimedia Division Product Information and Support Pages, 1997, retrieved December 27, 2005

[edit] External links


Ensoniq audio cards

Soundscape S-2000 | SoundscapeDB | Soundscape Elite | Soundscape OPUS | Soundscape VIVO90 | AudioPCI
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