What is 'Circle xxxx on Inquiry Card'?

bristlehog wrote:

What is 'Circle xxxx on Inquiry Card'?

BYTE Magazine (or any magazine for that matter) would have a perforated "inquiry card". It would have a mail-back address and sometimes already a special kind of postage ("No postage if mailed anywhere within the United States") on the front side of the card. On the back side would be a list of numbers. It was only for advertisers and such found in the magazine. A reader would circle (with a pen) the number(s) on the back of the card of what interested them. The reader would then mail it back to the magazine. I'm not sure exactly what would happen next since I never did this, but in theory from *somewhere* (from the advertiser direct, probably) even more marketing information for the company or product would be sent through the mail to the reader directly, or perhaps the advertiser might otherwise contact them.

Something like that, at least. 😉

Here's the BSR Media Master. Seems to be the same as Omni Labs Audio Master, apart from "BSR Media Master" paper sticker on it.

Jeez you always seem to find these rarities... Well done! Now the AIL2 music driver is MMSYNTH.ADV right? I see port 338h is the default. DO you have any recordings of this card synth?

carlostex wrote on 2025-07-06, 09:14:

Now the AIL2 music driver is MMSYNTH.ADV right? I see port 338h is the default.

AIL2 music driver is MMSYNTH.ADV, DIGPAK PCM driver is MASTER.COM.

carlostex wrote on 2025-07-06, 09:14:

Do you have any recordings of this card synth?

I don't have any recordings. Maybe I will make some in the near future, should this BSR Media Master card turn out to be working. I sold my boxed Audio Master long ago.

Summing it up, it now seems that there was just one sound card, marketed either as Omni Labs Audio Master or as BSR Media Master. ASC Media Master was not a card, but a standard, while DAK was a company selling computer hardware, including BSR Media Master. V&V was a company that manufactured the card (it had the same co-founder as Omni Labs, so it's not that some OEM shenanigans took place).

It also seems that the product flopped hard, judging by how rare it is. In 10 years I only saw two boxed ones and two bare cards on eBay.

P.S. Can we move this topic to "Sound" subfolder? I keep failing to find it there. Not sure how it ended up here in the first place, maybe due to moving Marvin out of Milliways.

Back in 2017 I purchased a MIDI breakout box for Omni Labs Media Master. Here are its photos, courtesy of Batyra, to whom I later sold both the sound card and the breakout box alike.

I also vote on this thread being moved to Marvin\Sound.

I third the suggestion to move this thread!

Also - I have a boxed example of the Audio Master with the OPL2 card (and also a picture of both sides of the RAM card in an Omni Labs catalog). Bit short on time to provide better pics at the moment, but will try to get around to it when work isn't as busy.

Wow that's pretty nice, quite a rarity. It seems, who developed the card felt that emulating OPL2 with their own internal synth wasn't a good enough solution. The pins on the Media Master card probably expose the proper ISA bus pins for that module to work like an AdLib card.

The card also seems to have a RAM expansion module that might be more unobtanium than anything else.

Apparently, there was not only a daughterboard adding Adlib compatibility, but also a whole Sound Blaster-compatible daughterboard.

These photos were uploaded to a Facebook group by some PC recycling company owner. I tried contacting them but no luck.