| HN Mirror

There was a time before Pentium when hardware was not named with trade name but by standard it implements. For instance you had your 486 with VGA, were it Cyrix CPU with Trident graphics card or Intel CPU with S3 graphics card didn't matter much.

For consumers only sound expansions broke this mold because they came with cool names such as Sound Blaster, Gravis Ultrasound, etc. They carried that over from audio market where equipment had "cool" names for some time already (since 70s at least).

Interestingly, Intel made "Pentium" trademark to distance and distinguish themselves from other x86 CPU vendors, but Creative failed to protect Sound Blaster trademark in a way that in mid90s everyone called every OPL3 card "a sound blaster". In that age real Sound Blasters had quality synthesizer, big wavetable with a quality soundfont and a DSP for effects on top of it, a feature which became less and less relevant as 90s went by. In mid 90s games were already moving to MIDI+CD Audio combination and by late 90s MIDI based soundtracks were largely gone. When you were playing Duke for the first time the type of "sound blaster" you had and hardware around it mattered. A clone would render worse MIDI than real Creative hardware and then came the external hardware such as Roland SC series, etc. The differences were real. When you were playing Half Life or UT for the first time just a few years after, there was no difference.

So Creative never managed to actually stamp "Sound Blaster" with something particular. It always remained a synonym for the entire standard and something even cheap hardware was described by. "Sound Blaster Audigy" was mostly reffered to as Audigy or Creative Audigy and it didn't have an ubiquitous meaning because it was clearly separated from all the junk audio cards of the day.