At the top of the list, of course, is the X-Fi. Thumbing through Creative's catalog of products, you can see some of the SoundBlasters of yore, like the SoundBlaster 16, still for sale. Back in the virtual world, my reverie gets cut short by an artillery borage. Oh, Creative has had their competition, but by tooth or by nail, it pretty much owned the entire sound card market since. I knew that for better or worse, Creative was here to stay, and AdLib was their first casualty. Shortly after AdLib put out their card, Creative put out the SoundBlaster and put Adlib out of its misery.
Now we have cards with 7.1 channels, 24 bit/96 kHz sampling, 3D positional audio and games that can really use it. It had 2 channel FM synthesis and a meager software bundle. I was playing Battlefield 2 online the other night, testing the X-Fi out and thinking back to playing Wing Commander with the first sound card for the PC, the AdLib. Does anyone out there remember playing Wing Commander without a sound card? Yeah, I'm so old-school that even old-school doesn't have a name for us ( Ed: I think they do, they call you 'old') and games didn't use sound cards.
