It's a piezo speaker, it will work and produce all kind of speaker sounds but it will be of inferior quality when compared to the old cone speakers... I just found out myself , never payed attention to quality but after scali pointed it out in another thread and I tested there is indeed a difference.
You can use it without problems until you get a cone speaker, you'll still hear sounds, music, etc

I use it for quick test motherboards. Newer motherboards had them on-board. I can test it in Pinball Fantasy or F1GP as those, I remember, had "nice" PC Speaker sound.

Not a big fan of these when playing DOS games. Granted, I tend to avoid PC Speaker whenever there is another option, but Dangerous Dave just isn't the same without the loud PC Speaker noises 😊 .

The disadvantage of these piezo buzzers is that the piezo element doesn't move very far to do its thing. This has the obvious consequence of lower amplitude, but it goes deeper than that.

Remember that the speaker-out on your motherboard is a digital output. It can only output a square wave. The change of state between 'ON' and 'OFF' is nearly instantaneous. However, speaker assemblies have mass, and so take time to accelerate and decelerate. So even though current is applied instantaneously, the magnet and paper cone take some time to travel.

Therefore, if you toggle the signal while the speaker is mid-travel, you can achieve an non-square-ish output.

Obviously, due to the construction and mechanism of the piezo buzzer, this travel time is relatively non-existant (orders of magnitude shorter!)

Some games (Dangerous Dave (3?), IIRC, maybe Duke Nukem) create unique effects by exploiting this, and they will probably sound either crappy, or totally wrong, if using one of these piezo buzzers.

These games also sound wrong in mainline DOSBox. Some of the CVS builds go some way to correcting for this, but I'm pretty sure Dangerous Dave still sounds wrong in ykhwong.

Anyone know of any other games that sound wrong with a piezo? I don't have a lot of PC speaker games on my list but Duke was one of them

I'm going to examine this in one of my upcoming videos. Should be interesting!

Several of the effects in Keen 1 and Keen 4 sound quite different on a piezoelectric transducer. Notably, I find the level complete and the overworld entry sounds seem to miss something, as if an underlying harmonic is not being properly produced. I would go so far as to say it sometimes sounds more like a second note is playing much lower than when a normal speaker is used.

Anything which plays music through the buzzer will be drastically different too, such as Leisure Suit Larry, though this is just because of the fact it's a little buzzer and not a paper speaker. I doubt the composer ever gave it any thought.

* To me, the piezo is the right way, because that's what I played on first because of IBM's unfailing knack for choosing the worst hardware available - but it sure sounds better on a real speaker. I am always mad when boards only provide a piezo or even no buzzer option AT ALL - it was useful for warnings and alerts from scripts or utilities if nothing else. Most annoying thing though, which happens on both speakers and piezos, was that low "bzzztbzzztbzzzt" that happened if you ran Keen in XP and walked for more than a couple of seconds, happened in loads of applications and occasionally drove me to angrily snap pencils at school when playing the game instead of doing the work I was meant to do. I didn't own a Windows XP system at home until 2005, I put it off as long as I can. Never tested if this bug affects all NT systems though I think 2000 acted the same way.

HighTreason wrote:

* To me, the piezo is the right way, because that's what I played on first because of IBM's unfailing knack for choosing the worst hardware available - but it sure sounds better on a real speaker.

Real IBM PCs (5150/5160) have a real speaker. I'm not sure when the piezo arrived, and who did it first, but a real PC is supposed to have a real speaker, not a piezo. Quite a big speaker as well.

I use Ken Silverman's MP3PC.EXE to test PC speaker quality.

caveat:
- The program need to be run on DOS with dos extender such as Dos4GW,CWSDpmi,DOS32a, or something similar,
- The program can only play MP3 file which is smaller than available extended RAM,
- And I also found out that MP3PC dislike MP3 with ID3v2 tag enabled

@ Scali

for informative reasons my IBM PS1/pro 2123 (386sx20) uses a piezo speaker... I plan to add a real speaker soon-ish 😀

Yes, my ~1987 era 8088 clones have piezo as well, as did my 386SX-16 from 1990. Those are 'brand' clones though (Philips and Commodore), with their own custom motherboards. Generic clones tended to have real speakers in their generic cases.
I tried to check if the Compaq Portable has a real PC speaker, but I think it might have a piezo, because I don't see a speaker. Piezo is easier to hide 😀
So that might be where it all started to go wrong.
I wonder how compatible its CGA card is 😀

I saw some article a while back about how the cones work with the case to help amplify the sound that you hear, and as such it makes it difficult to accurately capture their sound on recordings.

I would like to use a cone speaker in my computer case. But this case doesn't have any clips where the speaker could be attached as many cases do. What would be the best way to attach a speaker reliably?

screws , zip ties , glue , velcro , essentially anything designed to attach something to something

I've been wondering. if you have a motherboard with just a piezo speaker on it is it possible to desolder it and add a real PC speaker?

soviet conscript wrote:

I've been wondering. if you have a motherboard with just a piezo speaker on it is it possible to desolder it and add a real PC speaker?

It's just two wires. One positive an one negative.
My verdict on these beepers are that they are loud and only produce screaming high pitch noise.
Compared to a real PC speaker.

soviet conscript wrote:

I've been wondering. if you have a motherboard with just a piezo speaker on it is it possible to desolder it and add a real PC speaker?

Yup. I've done that before.
What I did though, was to drill a few holes in the board where the piezo used to sit, and put a regular 4-pin header on there, so you could connect the speaker in the same way as on real IBM PC/XT motherboards (and most clones).

I didn't like the sound of the piezo speaker, so I added a normal speaker taken from some HP Compaq computer. I then used zip ties to fasten it to the HP Vectra chassis. Works well, I just had to solder new wires to the speaker.