Dreamblaster S2

Before MP3-files and multi-gigabyte harddrives, there were the humble MIDI-file. Music in a very small file size, as the file does not contain the music as such, rather it is a list of commands to a MIDI-compatible instrument, typically a synthesizer keyboard.

MIDI-files rarely sound good on a soundcard from the 90s, as they are pretty bad at creating (or synthesize) the sounds. You could usually recognize what was playing, but listening to it was not exactly pleasurable. If you wanted them to sound as intended, where you could actually identify the instruments playing and have it sound almost as an MP3-file today, you needed to play them through a MIDI synthesizer module like the Roland MT-32. For that, you had to part with USD 695 at its release in 1987 - the equivalent of USD 1,975 in 2025.

1992 saw the launch of the Sound Blaster 16, the first sound card with a 16-pin wavetable header, to which you could connect a Wave Blaster, a MIDI synth that made MIDI music sound much closer to professional (and much more expensive) equipment.

The first sound card with a built-in wavetable was the Gravis Ultrasound (aka. GUS), also released in 1992. This card, however, suffered from not very good Sound Blaster emulation (the de-facto standard at the time). 

Dreamblaster S2

If your sound card has a wavetable header and you want a wavetable daughterboard to connect to it, consider the Dreamblaster S2. It is a "modern" MIDI daughterboard that sounds (in my opinion) fantastic, and at EUR 35 (≈USD 41) it is pretty cheap compared to trying to get an old one from back in the day.

Want to hear the difference? I played canyon.mid on my sound card - a Sound Blaster 16 Value (CT2980) - with and without the Dreamblaster 2. This is the result:

Canyon.mid - or "Trip Through the Grand Canyon" - was composed by George Stone and included in Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions 1.0 (aka. Windows 3.00a) and aIl subsequent versions of Windows through Windows 2000.