That would be around 1991 and it was the decline for Adlib, SoundBlaster Pro was around the corner and relation where quite tense with Yamaha playing fools with Adlib and CreativeLabs. My uneducated wild guess is that Adlib was desperate at reaching new market opportunity and did not felt spending much effort in the video game industry. I have no evidence to support this other than some impression from vague memory reading they where trying to reach professional and commercial market with the Adlib Gold that must had been in development at this time.

Weird but maybe the representative over there had no idea about games and actually was there because his experience was with broadcasting equipment? It could explain the behaviour...

It's interesting to look back on these things with hindsight. Clive Sinclair had a similar disinterest in games, yet his product line hit the stratosphere despite that.

I wonder what appeal they thought the Adlib's FM synth would have to broadcasters. News hour chimes?

Very amusing attitude. Perhaps it could partly explain why AdLib didn't make a stopgap product to keep the company afloat.

Pierre32 wrote on 2023-06-30, 06:05:

It's interesting to look back on these things with hindsight. Clive Sinclair had a similar disinterest in games, yet his product line hit the stratosphere despite that.

I wonder what appeal they thought the Adlib's FM synth would have to broadcasters. News hour chimes?

Sir Clive had a dis-interest in computing as a whole really, he just wanted a cash cow product line to milk to make enough to get on with making electric vehicles. I'm not even sure the C5 was the ultimate goal or just a baby step to what he really wanted.

Doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me that they might prioritise that, like "Hey if we sell to 100 broadcasters and make $100 profit, we'll be tenthousandaires." .... umm is that enough to actually pay anyone to staff a booth, or more a slight reason to do a $200 ad in a broadcast industry newsletter one time.

If cheaper competitors are undercutting you at the bottom of the market then you try to go upmarket. Professionals, broadcasters, advertisers, etc. (Apple survived the PC clone onslaught by appealing to this small but wealthy demographic.)

Errius wrote on 2023-06-30, 17:41:

If cheaper competitors are undercutting you at the bottom of the market then you try to go upmarket. Professionals, broadcasters, advertisers, etc. (Apple survived the PC clone onslaught by appealing to this small but wealthy demographic.)

I suppose that makes sense. Trying to market an FM synth card to broadcasters, though, really betrays a lack of understanding both of the product's strengths and the target market, or just desperation.

I don't know. The early 90s were a weird time, not in a bad way, though.
There were several "fads", such as electronic music, multimedia, video effects/blue screen technology, virtual reality&cyber space etc.
In that time, maybe, Ad Lib must have felt that they need to participate. Just think of the Amiga Video Toaster, a voluminousness creature of an expansion card.
Perhaps the company felt that the Ad Lib Gold or any other next-gen product has a chance as a core component in a new entertainment system ?
Just think of the Philips CD-i and Video CD. Or Commodore CD32.. They're from about that moment in time.
Back in the early 90s, these multimedia systems were trying to go away from the filthy image of video games.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2023-06-30, 04:32:

This is from Bobby Prince's blog, an excerpt from a letter he wrote in April 1991:

[About this same time, I spoke with someone at AdLib and was told they were going to be in Atlanta for the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention in a few weeks. I went to that convention where AdLib had a booth. Surprisingly, they were not very interested in music for games. I never understood that. Evidently, AdLib felt that the sound card was going to sell well to Broadcasters?]

Really odd attitude from Adlib that late in the game after their card had already become the most popular card for games and their own advertisements emphasized that, and probably part of the reason they sunk.

Got a link to that blog?

Hezus wrote on 2023-06-30, 20:50:

Got a link to that blog?

Here it is: https://bobbyprincemusic.blogspot.com/2017/08 … f-pc-games.html

Sounds like AdLib had management that fundamentally misunderstood their product and the market.

I see it a lot - it's all about the volume vs value thing. Companies would rather do a single deal with another B2B partner than have to do thousands or millions of individual retail sales. Just take a look at home networking products (my field of expertise, working with one of those large companies walking around broadcaster shows). If you go to the local electronics shop you'll see lots of retail brands. However even where one has a massive market share (here in NL a certain Shenzhen-based company acheives more than 50% of retail sales), they will pale in comparison with little-known ODM whitebox manufacturers who supply equipment to large providers in deals for millions of devices at a time. The latter earn less per sale, but make up for it in huge, long-term assured volumes.

Even though there is certain amount of overlap, sales, marketing and product focus need to be completely different for the two markets, even if the devices are technically identical. Mass marketing is very different to having three guys to talk to someone like me (for the technical stuff) and my commercial colleagues. Some companies manage to service both markets adequately (Creative comes to mind...), but AdLib clearly thought they were the non-retail kind of company. History says they weren't.

Back in 1990, audio in PCs was totally niche, so you weren't going to convince the big players to ship all their systems with a sound card in it. That wasn't even on the cards before Microsoft's MPC initiative, and even that was slow off the ground. I'd argue that sound cards didn't become standard until Windows 95. Until that time, sound was an almost purely retail activity. Moreover a lot of early multimedia PCs had custom sound solutions manufactured by (or at least for) the box vendor themselves, think IBM mWave Dolphin cards and Compaq's ESS-based cards with proprietary PC speaker connection behind the ISA slot. Possibly AdLib could have wanted part of that market, but they were at least 4 years too early - and a lot of the selling points of the custom solutions relied on other technologies that weren't possible or relevant in 1990: modems were even less standard than sound cards, PCs weren't powerful enough and didn't have enough storage to act as answerphones and the idea of putting a CD player into one was alien.

They should have firmly focused on retail, and on gamers. Still, the comparison to Sir Clive - and many others including IBM themselves - is valid: AdLib was far from the only company failing to understand what this new "Personal Computer" market was turning into and where succesful money could be made with it.

I think it would be pertinent to look at the other side of the story. What made Adlib the de-facto soundcard in most game of that era ? Ain't they had to push very hard with Sierra to democratize audio on the PC scene when the alternative to those maddening PC-Beeper and external DAC where those extra luxurious tone generator ?

My interpretation of the situation is that they did not like the experience of being stabbed in the back by CreativeLabs, Yamaha playing puppets with them, and decided to set sail for a more serious market.

Makes perfect sense to me. As others have touched on, if they were flanked on one side by Creative, and the other by Roland, they couldn't achieve a lot more in the PC market. Although, this all begs the questions:
1. Why didn't they stay in the PC market while they worked on new markets, and offer different models to compete either at a lower or higher end? (Assuming a profit could be made in either scenario.)
2. How does a FM synth card (no digital sound) work for broadcasters?
3. Realistically what market was this product, or new products with similar tech, going to serve in any market?

I guess it's easy to look back 32 years on and say "A sound card that only does FM synth is a dead product", but in 1991 probably thousands or more people were using this tech.. Although just guessing, but in 1988-9 it was probably huge.

Worthwhile remembering Bobby Prince's primary company Apogee was a market lagger, not a leader, in terms of game audio - so Apogee was using old tech for music in most of their games. They had no music beyond very basic PC speaker stuff in 1990 (Keen 1, Duke 1) whereas Sierra (for example) had the MT-32 playing scores in 1988. Apogee had Adlib in 1991 when the MT-32, Sound Blaster and shortly after Roland SC-55 (GM) existed, and Apogee didn't support General MIDI until 1994 I believe.

I guess it's easy to look back 32 years on and say "A sound card that only does FM synth is a dead product", but in 1991 probably thousands or more people were using this tech.. Although just guessing, but in 1988-9 it was probably huge.

I doubt that Adlib had anything interesting to present for broadcasting with off-the-shelf parts. Adlib Gold probably had some potential, but came too little, too late. But oh well, not like it was the first time some company totally lost the plot.

Maybe they had a killer fart noise box for Radio Shock Jocks, 🤣

Back then (and even now, although to a lesser degree), many musicians considered themselves artists and looked down upon computer gaming, thinking it was a realm for nerds and geeks.