ESS sound cards. 10 bucks and they work in 2000

[Santilli]

Hi
I've had good luck with ESS 1968(IIRC) or some such number, sound cards in 2000.

For some reason, they just work, and without conflicts and problems, with older hardware, that I've had with Phillips sound cards.

Who makes them, and why aren't they advertized more?

Thanks

gs

 

[timwhit]

It seems that the majority of new motherboards have onboard sound, and it doesn't really cost any more to get one with onboard sound. So whenever I build someone a computer I have just started to use the onboard sound. It sounds good enough for the average user anyways.

I just built a computer based on the Asus A7N266-VM which has a nForce chipset. That thing is a deal, came with onboard LAN, Geforce2 video, and nForce sound. All for under $100, plus it has a AGP slot if the video gets too slow.

 

[Tea]

Yup. Us too. We rarely use a stand-alone soundcard anymore. Back a couple of years ago, we always did. Now it's only for the keener gamer.

Santilli, ESS have been making sound chips (just the chips - not the actual cards) for many years. They became famous for cheap, rather nastly little ISA cards that actually worked rather well, and had surprisingly good sound quality if you could get the drivers to load and (an even bigger if) stay loaded. Windows 95 used to be dreadful for dropping the ESS drivers. 95A used to drop all sorts of stuff, but ESS sound cards were its favourite.

Later on, towards the end of that Windows 95 to Windows 98 period, ESS cards really settled down and their final ISA products were actualy rather good. Their PCI cards, such as the ESS Solo, were (I gather) very competitive, and certainly no more trouble than the (by now quite problematic) Sound Blasters. But I shall always remember them for the horrible mish-mash of confilcting and incompatible drivers they had. Quite often, it used to be cheaper to throw the sound card away and buy a new one than it was to spend yet another half hour trying yet another dozen of the carefully hoarded collection of ESS driver discs I built up.

At least with a Sound Blaster, you could take a SB-16, any SB-16, and load any SB-16 driver. With the ESS ISA cards, you often had to have the exact right driver for the exact right card from the exact particular card manufacturer. I hated them with a passion. The only modern equivalent I can think of in the driver-mix-up-from-hell department is those appalling Connexant internal modems.

You can look them up at www.ess.com.tw

 

[Buck]

ESS ISA cards have impressed me too in recent times. Windows XP does a fine job of loading ESS drivers and running that little card. But, as others have mentioned, with the advent of onboard sound, add-in sound cards for the average user have gone away.

 

[time]

They became famous for cheap, rather nastly little ISA cards that actually worked rather well, and had surprisingly good sound quality ...

Sums it up beautifully. For making attention getting noises or playing CDs, they were quite satisfactory. Interestingly, some of them had considerably better signal to noise ratios than SB16s of the time.

I must have been lucky. The cards we used never gave much trouble with drivers, but then I think we started with the 17xx series, rather than the 1688 (or 688). The 16xx were quite problematic, and went a long way to giving ESS its poor quality reputation. Even sold a couple of wavetable versions of the 17xx, although from memory I was happiest with the 18xx. The only issue I can remember is DOS operation under Windows, particularly initializing the card interrupt and I/O.