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Company type | Corporation |
---|---|
Industry | Audio Technologies |
Predecessor | Media Vision Technology |
Founded | November 9, 1995 |
Defunct | September 21, 2000 |
Fate | Bankrupt, dissolved. Assets were acquired by Creative Technology |
Headquarters | Fremont, California |
Key people | |
Subsidiaries | Crystal River Engineering |
Aureal Semiconductor Inc. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-late 1990s for their PC sound card technologies including A3D and the Vortex (a line of audio ASICs.) The company was the reincarnation of the, at the time, bankrupt Media Vision Technology, who developed and manufactured multimedia peripherals such as the Pro Audio Spectrum 16.
In May 1996, Aureal Semiconductor was founded from what previously was Media Vision Technologies Inc. after being involved in a financial scandal that led to then-CEO Paul Jain stepping down. Media Vision incurred approximately $104 million of aggregate losses in 1995 before the company was renamed.
Aureal sustained further losses of $17 million in 1996 and $18 million in 1997. [1] After having acquired Crystal River Engineering in May 1996, Aureal worked with them to develop and market the A3D audio technology. [2] The technology was incorporated into video games, surround sound systems and sound cards.
On March 5, 1998 Creative Labs sued Aureal for patent infringement. Aureal countersued because they believed Creative was guilty of patent infringement. After numerous lawsuits Aureal won a favorable ruling in December 1999, which vindicated Aureal from these patent infringement claims, but the legal costs were too high and Aureal filed for bankruptcy. On September 21, 2000, Creative acquired Aureal's assets from its bankruptcy trustee for US$32 million through the bankruptcy court, with the specific provision that Creative Labs would be released from all claims of past infringement by Creative Labs upon Aureal's A3D technology. The purchase included patents, trademarks, other property, as well as a release to Creative from any infringement by Creative of Aureal's intellectual property including A3D. The purchase effectively eliminated Creative's only competition in the gaming audio market, and with it any requirements for Creative to pay past or future royalties as well as damages for products which incorporated Aureal's technology.
Contrary to OEM companies (such as Creative which builds, brands and sells their own devices), Aureal was a fabless semiconductor company. This changed with their final product: the Aureal SuperQuad. However, to not anger the middlemen, Aureal did no marketing of its self-branded product.[ citation needed ]
The Vortex audio accelerator chipset line from Aureal Semiconductor was designed to improve performance of their then-popular A3D audio technology. The first member of the line, the Vortex AU8820, was announced on July 14, 1997, [3] and was used in by a number of sound card manufacturers, like Turtle Beach and TerraTec. After Aureal's release of A3D 2.0, the Vortex AU8830 (known as the Vortex 2) was announced on August 6, 1998. [4] The Vortex 2 chipset won numerous industry awards, and was used among other places in the Diamond Monster Sound MX300, which achieved near-cult status with audiophiles and gamers for the high quality of its positional audio.
Near the end of Aureal's existence, they released a Vortex Advantage budget sound card aimed at systems integrators, which ran on the Vortex AU8810 chipset. [5] Towards the end of 1999, the SQ3500 was announced, which ran on the Vortex AU8830 chipset, with the main addition being a new "Turbo DSP" daughter-board module. [6]
All Vortex soundcards are still functional with latest Windows 2000/Windows XP drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32 bit editions only). While Windows XP will recognize and work with the 8830 Vortex 2 chipset, there is an official Final Beta (v5.12.2568.0) available for download from a variety of sites which can be found via most internet search engines. There is also a modified version of the XP driver that can provide basic audio functionality for the Windows Vista operating system and may also function with Windows 7 beta releases.[ citation needed ]
A3D (Aureal 3-Dimensional) is the technology used by Aureal Semiconductor in their Vortex line of PC sound chips to deliver three-dimensional sound through headphones, two or even four speakers. The technology used head-related transfer functions (HRTF), which the human ear interprets as spatial cues indicating the location of a particular sound source. Many modern sound cards and PC games incorporated A3D via license from Aureal. Due to Aureal's acquisition (see below) the A3D technology is now part of the intellectual property of Creative Labs.
The technology was originally developed by Crystal River Engineering for NASA's Virtual Environment Workstation Project (VIEW). Crystal River later commercialized the technology with a series of products including the Convolvotron and the Acoustetron. Aureal acquired Crystal River in May 1996 [7] and rebranded the technology A3D.
A3D differs from various forms of discrete positional audio in that it only requires two speakers, while surround sound typically requires more than four. The particular advantage of A3D is for dynamic or interactive environments such as simulations, games, video conference, and remote learning. A3D is not as effective for static productions such as movies which typically employ surround sound.
A3D uses a subset of the actual in-game 3D world data to accurately model the location of both direct (A3Dspace) and reflected (A3Dverb) sound streams (A3D 2.0 can perform up to 60 first-order reflections). EAX 1.0, the competing technology at the time promoted by Creative Labs, simulated the environment with an adjustable reverb—it didn't calculate any actual reflections off the 3D surfaces.
A3D was supported by 3DMark along with many other software titles of the late 1990s, including Half-Life , Unreal , Quake II , Soldier of Fortune , Jedi Knight , SiN , Quake III Arena (up to version 1.25), Unreal Tournament and Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force .
Following Aureal Semiconductor's acquisition by Creative, support for the API was discontinued.
ATI Technologies Inc., commonly called ATI, was a Canadian semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985, the company listed publicly in 1993 and was acquired by AMD in 2006. As a major fabrication-less or fabless semiconductor company, ATI conducted research and development in-house and outsourced the manufacturing and assembly of its products. With the decline and eventual bankruptcy of 3dfx in 2000, ATI and its chief rival Nvidia emerged as the two dominant players in the graphics processors industry, eventually forcing other manufacturers into niche roles.
Sound Blaster is a family of sound cards and audio peripherals designed by Singaporean technology company Creative Technology. The first Sound Blaster card was introduced in 1989.
VIA Technologies, Inc. is a Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits, mainly motherboard chipsets, CPUs, and memory. It was the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. As a fabless semiconductor company, VIA conducts research and development of its chipsets in-house, then subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing to third-party merchant foundries such as TSMC.
nForce is a motherboard chipset created by Nvidia originally for AMD Athlon and Duron, with later revisions also supporting contemporary Intel processors. The chipset shipped in 3 varieties; 220, 415, and 420. 220 and 420 are very similar with each having the integrated GPU, but the 220 only has a single channel of memory available whereas 420 has the 128-bit TwinBank design. The 415 variant again has the dual-channel memory interface, but has no integrated graphics.
The Environmental Audio Extensions are a number of digital signal processing presets for audio, present in Creative Technology Sound Blaster sound cards starting with the Sound Blaster Live and the Creative NOMAD/Creative ZEN product lines. Due to the release of Windows Vista in 2007, which deprecated the DirectSound3D API that EAX was based on, Creative discouraged EAX implementation in favour of its OpenAL-based EFX equivalent – though at that point relatively few games used the API.
DirectSound is a deprecated software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system, superseded by XAudio2. It provides a low-latency interface to sound card drivers written for Windows 95 through Windows XP and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams. DirectSound was originally written for Microsoft by John Miles.
The nForce3 chipset was created by Nvidia as a Media and Communications Processor. Specifically, it was designed for use with the Athlon 64 processor.
Cirrus Logic Inc. is an American fabless semiconductor supplier that specializes in analog, mixed-signal, and audio DSP integrated circuits (ICs). Since 1998, the company's headquarters have been in Austin, Texas.
Diamond Multimedia is an American 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. They were one of the major players in the 2D and early 3D graphics card competition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Ensoniq AudioPCI is a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)-based sound card released in 1997. It was Ensoniq's last sound card product before they were acquired 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 a very simple, low-cost product to appeal to system OEMs and thus hopefully sell in mass quantities.
Sensaura, a division of Creative Technology, was a company that provided 3D audio effect technology for the interactive entertainment industry. Sensaura technology was shipped on more than 24 million game consoles and 150 million PCs . Formed in 1991, Sensaura developed a range of technologies for incorporating 3D audio into PC's and consoles.
Sound Blaster Live! is a PCI add-on sound card from Creative Technology Limited for PCs. Moving from ISA to PCI allowed the card to dispense with onboard memory, storing digital samples in the computer's main memory and then accessing them in real time over the bus. This allowed for a much wider selection of, and longer playing, samples. It also included higher quality sound output at all levels, quadrophonic output, and a new MIDI synthesizer with 64 sampled voices. The Live! was introduced on August 11, 1998 and variations on the design remained Creative's primary sound card line into the early 2000's.
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.
Media Vision Technology, Inc., was an American electronics manufacturer of primarily computer sound cards and CD-ROM kits, operating from 1990 to approximately 1995 in Fremont, California. Media Vision was widely known for its Pro AudioSpectrum PC sound cards—which it often bundled with CD-ROM drives—it is also known for its spectacular growth and demise.
Sound Retrieval System (SRS) is a patented psychoacoustic 3D audio processing technology originally invented by Arnold Klayman in the early 1980s. The SRS technology applies head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) to create an immersive 3D soundfield using only two speakers, widening the "sweet spot", creating a more spacious sense of ambience, and producing strong localization cues for discrete instruments within an audio mix. SRS is not a Dolby matrix surround decoder but works with normal stereo recordings.
GameCODA is an audio middleware product by Sensaura designed for game developers to create realistic sound environments in video games. It allows development for the following platforms: Microsoft Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2 and GameCube. GameCODA incorporates several audio technologies that were developed by Sensaura, which includes Sensaura's HRTF algorithms, MacroFX™, ZoomFX™ and EnvironmentFX™.
Creative Technology Ltd., or Creative Labs Pte Ltd., is a Singaporean multinational technology company. 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 digital entertainment products. It also partners with mainboard manufacturers and laptop brands to embed its Sound Blaster technology on their products.
Crystal River Engineering Inc. was an American technology company best known for their pioneering work in HRTF based real-time binaural, or 3D sound processing hardware and software. The company was founded in 1989 by Scott Foster after he received a contract from NASA to create the audio component of VIEW, a virtual reality based training simulator for astronauts. Crystal River Engineering was acquired by Aureal Semiconductor in 1996.
OPTi Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that primarily manufactured chipsets for personal computers. The company dissolved in 2001 and transferred its assets to the unaffiliated non-practicing entity OPTi Technologies