The AdLib Gold Experience: Is it really worth $3000?

For those asking for a video of all the Juke Box songs, well, that's already a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATb8zhdINpg Video quality is a bit warbly but you're not missing much. It's all about the sound and the sound is superb 👍

You can't fool me, Clint. This is really a Tech Tales episode, isn't it? Well played, sir. Well played.

There are later models of the Adlib card, I have a gold edition from 1995 (bought it in 96) and I'm still using it in a W95 PC. Back then I had trouble installing the card and I called Adlib since I live in Quebec City. One of the engineers, his name was Mike, told me to bring the computer over at Adlib and he would look at it... 3 days later he called me, he found a tiny ball of solder shorting 2 pins of the CPU of a Miro video capture card I had in there. I was so glad he was the only person who was able to fix my 10K$ PC. That card had a Crystal chip, the sound samples are really good and thats why I'm still using it for playing MIDI files today. Great video!

This seems to have been a theme with Creative Labs. See also: Aureal Semiconductor, a very early leader in binaural audio, breaking ground on the technology in the mid 90's, and not really expanded on until very recently. The tl;dr is it allowed for simulating how audio would react in a defined 3d space, giving significantly more realistic qualities in echo, attenuation, etc. The company was frivolously sued by Creative Labs, and despite winning the suit, Aureal had taken on too much in legal fees and had to file for bankruptcy, resulting in sale of all their assets and patents to Creative, who proceeded to not use any of them, putting the development of binaural audio in general back some 20 or so years. Creative Labs can suck it indeed.

Truly a story of "what goes around comes around". Creative got their footing by being Adlib compatible, then got replaced by everyone else because all sound cards ending up being Sound Blaster compatible.

Well, people seem to forget that Creative was only "creative" in ways of theft, deceit, monopoly, anti-consumer, and corruption practices. Maybe a video on how Creative bankrupt Aureal with expensive lawsuits that they actually lost.

After watching this video, I'd say that Creative Technology deserves what Realtek did to them.

I love that your eBay user tag is literally "LGR (yes, really)"

"Don't meet your heroes- -especially without the surround module installed." LGR, 2021

man these tecnology companies were so shady since the early 90's up until to this day, I wonder how many good products we never saw launch because a bigger company didn't have a better product to compete with it.

Worked with Yamaha to delay chips to Adlib, then sidestepped Yamaha with their own CQM synthesis just a year later. They were aggressive.

This is one of the most valuable expansion cards around . . . just behind a scalped GPU.

Every second of this was beautiful. Imagine being sent back to the early 90ies and sitting up all night long playing these games on that setup, what a dream experience.

I'm originally from Québec, and take pride in how the province is a hub for aerospace and software companies. It breaks my heart to hear that a local start-up specializing in computer hardware was basically destroyed by someone holding back the certification of a chip. Ad-lib could have been a true household name.

"Ahh, smells like a pallet of electronics filled with broken dreams."

Quebec's greatest contributions to humanity: 1- Adlib 2- Matrox 3- Poutine

In 1995-1997ish, I worked for eTek Labs (spun out of Forte Technologies who developed the original Ultrasound) on the then-new AMD Interwave/Gravis Ultrasound PNP cards... We had a ton of dos games for our regression testing, and bug squashing, as well as some sound cards. I remember seeing the original AdLib card but I've never seen the Gold. A lot of the "Creative being the behemoth" story rings true from our side of the story too. It was always frustrating knowing that the Ultrasound/Ultrasound Max and the increased capabilities and performance of the Ultrasound PNP didn't mean much when Creative held so much more of a market share over us... People didn't really care about wavetable support, or how technically impressive SBOS was... That's probably also the reason why the rev C Interwave chips were never finished (with full filtering and effects on each of the 32 channels... oh well...

can you please record the full list of adlib gold songs and upload them to a playlist? I need that in my life right now

Imagine buying one for $19 and selling it for $3000 now. That's quite insane 😄

The clean board design, the sparkling gold, this card is beautiful!