Low Cost
Towards the end of the 1990s, Ensoniq was struggling financially. Their cards were very popular with PC OEMs, but their costs were too high and their musical instrument division was fading in revenue. Pressure from intense competition, especially with the dominant Creative Labs, was forcing audio card makers to try to keep their prices low.
The AudioPCI, released in July 1997, was designed primarily to be cheap. In comparison to the wide variety of chips on and sheer size of the older Soundscape boards, the highly integrated two chip design of the AudioPCI is an obvious shift in design philosophy. The board consists only of a very small software-driven audio chip (one of the following: S5016, ES1370, ES 1371) and a companion digital-to-analog converter (DAC). In another cost-cutting move, the previously typical ROM chip used for wavetable patch set storage was replaced with the facility to use system RAM as storage for this audio data. This was made possible by the move to the PCI bus, with its far greater bandwidth and more efficient bus mastering interface when compared to the older ISA bus standard.
Read more about this topic: Ensoniq Audio PCI
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