Creative Wave Blaster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wave Blaster port was an internal connector on many early soundcards that allowed wavetable MIDI playback capability to be added to soundcards that lacked that ability. The standard was first available on cards produced by Creative Labs and soon became a standard adopted by other soundcard manufacturers who produced both soundcards and daughterboards, such as Yamaha, Ensoniq, Orchid, Oberheim, Guillemot, Diamond, Terratec, Roland, and Turtle Beach. Beyond soundcards, the Wave Blaster port has appeared on some non-soundcard devices such as the Korg NS5R MIDI sound module, and the Oberheim MC-1000/MC-2000 keyboards, and Axon AX-100 Guitar-to-MIDI converter.
The 26-pin WaveBlaster port is simply an internal MIDI interface, carrying the same MIDI signals to the daughterboard that would otherwise be carried over a MIDI cable, and two analog audio lines carrying stereo left and right channels from the daughterboard.
Although new WaveBlaster-capable soundcards for computers haven't been produced for many years, Terratec still produces their popular and highly-regarded Axon AX-100 Guitar-to-MIDI converter that uses a WaveBlaster port to add sound-generation capability to their product. In 2005, they released a new WaveBlaster daughterboard called the Wave XTable with 16mb of on-board sample memory comprising 500 instruments and 10 drum kits.
