A 1992 Throwback
The year 1992 brought us many things; we had the first female black astronaut (Dr. Mae C. Jemison), Windsor Castle caught fire, Rodney King met a few ‘nice’ policemen; prompting the LA riots and finally a well known Rap artist by the name of ICE-T released the Cop Killer single to great controversy. However in the computer world there were two major stories that were exploding around the world. The Gravis Ultrasound card and a new product from an unknown company called id Software with the game that was entitled Doom!
Though this review is for the Asus Xonar Essence card and is billed as a musician’s sound card, Overclockers Tech wishes to take you back to the above year in order to help the reader to understand the strategy employed by Asus!
Whilst Creative was enjoying its well deserved monopoly on the sound card market, a company from Canada, best known for its joysticks and game pads released the Ultrasound to critical acclaim. Whilst Creative were still releasing new cards, there was little difference between them; being based upon tweaks of an existing design. All of a sudden Advanced Gravis came into play and turned this thinking upside down. This product was the first to use wave table synthesis, a system based upon actual REAL instruments rather than that of sound card generated ones, programmable instruments (in other words if one did not like the standard instruments available, you could record and use your own) and finally, to allow for those features Gravis’s innovated on board RAM! Creative unleashed the AWE32 to combat this, and whilst it did capture the gamers minds, the musicians gave the Ultrasound a place of their own!
| Year Released 1992 | 1994 |
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Despite the groundbreaking features, the Gravis’s unique sample-RAM architecture proved too much for the industry. Some game developers of the time noted problems with the software development kit and the product’s hardware design. On the user-side, the Sound Blaster emulation was especially hard to get right out of the box, and this resulted in a substantially high number of product returns at the store level, and thus soured the retail channel on the product. Bundled software was refined over time, but Gravis could not distribute updates effectively. However, if we now move onto the present, we no longer use MS-DOS and we are GUI based, so in essence there is no need to emulate a Sound Blaster in any game.
Back to the present and Company Background
ASUS comes from the last four letters of Pegasus, the winged horse in Greek mythology that represents the inspiration of art and learning. ASUS embodies the strength, creative spirit and purity symbolized by this regal and agile mythical creature, soaring to new heights of quality and innovation with each product it introduces to the market.
Asus was formed in 1989 by four engineers whom wanted to do things a little different from anyone else. Since then if one were to say that Asus was popular, then it would be a gross understatement. It would be akin to saying that Tony Blair is ever so slightly craven, when infact he is missing a spine!
The company is well known for producing high quality motherboards and graphics cards (Asus Mars) it is with high hopes that the Xonar Essence can continue this tradition.
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