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

The Ad Lib Gold 1000 sound card from 1992 sells for crazy high prices. But why? Let's unbox one and see if it lives up to its legendary reputation by delving into its history, determining why it failed, and seeing how it actually performs on early 90s PC hardware. And of course, play Dune. 🎶

● Thanks to Jim for lending me the card!

● LGR links:

● Download an archive of the drivers, software, and docs here:

● Music courtesy of:

#LGR #Retro #Computers

[LGR]

For those asking for a video of all the Juke Box songs, well, that's already a thing:
Video quality is a bit warbly but you're not missing much. It's all about the sound and the sound is superb 👍

[MikeRosoftUK]

Oh dear. I killed the Gold as it was not viable to build. I became technical director for Adlib Multimedia Inc. after Ad Lib went into liquidation. The 1000 was never put back into production as it had been stock piled along with a substantial parts holding.. The main problem was the Gold ISA control chip, we ended up scrapping the whole stock of it (some 100k parts) for not many dollars. Other parts were included in the new products we designed in house which were coded ASB for Advanced Sound Boards ASB16 32 and 64. The stock of gold SCSI board components held was used on the ASB to provide a universal port on the card along with the high quality audio grade components.... All the design and software development was done in house in Québec Canada. The card you have there was a late card, the address on grand allee shows it.. for a year Adlib multimedia operated out of the technology park in ste-foy... With v1 manuals, there were many nights spent rewriting them for V2...

[DreamAsylum]

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

[KingBobXVI]

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.

[DOSdaze]

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.

[willpreston]

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

[TriggerThat]

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!

[SergeantExtreme]

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

[AndreiNeacsu]

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.

[Niberspace]

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.

[SantaFishes]

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

[saxxonpike]

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

[christopherwall]

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

[DeLorean]

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.

[moviesinclusive]

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

[Hirotechnics]

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

[AmazinChannelz]

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.

[mkellyx]

That "Multimedia PC" logo just oozes early 90s:

* Rainbow gradient with heavy dithering
* Black and white clip-art-y CD icon

(Plus, I feel like it was on every box of software back then)

[theHerathrig]

The subtitle is hilarious. 4:05 "stressful yet exiting slicing."

[phRd]

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