About the only thing I can think of is the Midiman Dman ISA card. There's a chance Digidesign may have had one, I almost want to think maybe the Audiomedia or Samplecell from that era may have been ISA.

kwyjibo wrote on 2021-03-16, 05:38:

Hello all,

I am building a what it would have been a workstation in late 1995 around a Digital Celebris XL 5133 DP. It is currently lacking any sound card and I would like to hear your opinion about it.

I suppose there were professional aimed audio boards back then or it was consumer products the only or best options?

I am also curious about the hardware and the software used. My guess would be that, at the time, things were less PC-centric and more oriented towards proprietary turn-key hardware solutions . If any of those included ISA sound cards (as part of a PC or Windows based solution), they were likely, custom, niche and probably had drivers that exposed proprietary APIs that only worked with a specific set of vendor locked-in apps (MME would have been only 4 years-old in 1995 and was consumer oriented, AFAIK). So if you found such a card, finding drivers for it and software that could work with it would prove difficult .

EDIT : The question I have, tangential to your own, was what was the first separately sold (not bundled as a complete solution) sound card meant for professional use that was actually usable professionally (not just called "pro" by marketing) for the PC (x86) platform ?

The below link has as bit of a summary of hardware/software of the time.
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/20 … ls-1994-to-2000

And this page has a few interesting cards and not just the usual suspects.
http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php?topic=278.0

and finally when I think 95 and music I think Diablo, found this little article where Matt Uelmen briefly mentions his setup, doesn't list the soundcard though.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3075/a … nd_.php?print=1

So by the looks of it anything with a good clean DAC is all important, the actual "work" is done on external devices or software.

chinny22 wrote on 2021-03-16, 11:10:

and finally when I think 95 and music I think Diablo, found this little article where Matt Uelmen briefly mentions his setup, doesn't list the soundcard though.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3075/a … nd_.php?print=1

Probably because music would more likely be recorded to a multi-track recorder...it's only a few years later that recording music on a PC became easier; earlier machines often lacked the processing power necessary to do so.

Also, look on the Mac or Amiga side of things. Just like with graphics software they were a lot more stable than PCs back in the day (which, considering some of Classic MacOS' issues, says something very negative about Windows...).