I think you are using the inverse meaning of 'prosumer' that I know.
That is, you are talking about consumers who actually are (or want to become) professionals.
The way I know the word 'prosumer' is people who are actually consumers/amateurs/hobbyists, yet have the budget to buy more high-end gear than your average consumer/amateur/hobbyist (basically people who are already well-paid professionals in a different field, and have no ambition to become a professional in this particular field, but do enjoy it as a hobby). A good example where the term 'prosumer' is often used, is amateur photographers. The 'prosumers' in that market will buy relatively expensive DSLR cameras, lenses, and other equipment. That, as far as I know, is how the term 'prosumer' came to be. This in turn led to companies developing and marketing products specificially for this 'prosumer' market: products that are not average consumer products, but also not full-on professional stuff. They are something in-between: offering some/most of the professional features, but at a reduced price, in order to get more potential 'prosumers' engaged, people who don't have the budget for real professional kit, but who are interested enough to spend considerably more than your average amateur/hobbyist.
I think the SB Pro fits that definition perfectly: it basically cost twice as much as a regular SB 2.0. And the regular use for an SB 2.0 is games. Although it had a MIDI port, I don't recall Creative actually marketing that feature much, if at all. And for games, let's face it, the SB Pro had basically no additional value at first. No game supported the OPL3 or the stereo DAC, so you could only use it as an overpriced SB 2.0 (and I reiterate that the SB 2.0 itself wasn't exactly a bargain in the day, if you compare it to the price of a high-end SVGA card like the ET4000, which in itself is more than twice as expensive as a budget Trident or such. The added value of an ET4000 over a Trident is obvious though: the ET4000 gives you the best VGA-performance that money can buy, way better than a Trident). So it was a difficult sell to your average consumer/gamer. But I was a 'prosumer' in the sense that I was willing to pay considerably more to get better quality and more features than just the 'standard' consumer stuff.
So the main reason to buy an SB Pro was if you were actually going to use it to do your own recording, sequencing and whatnot. In theory, another reason should be that the 'Pro' version would deliver better sound quality than a regular SB 2.0 (much like how Creative later marketed 'Gold' versions of their cards to audiophiles). Sadly Creative could not deliver there. And sadly this was before the days of the internet, so it was not like there were any reviews available. I didn't know anyone who had a sound card at all, let alone an SB Pro (soundcards weren't something that everyone had in their PC, they were this mysterious thing you read about in magazines, and saw in menu options in games. I had no idea what an AdLib sounded like until I installed my SB Pro in my PC and started up the first AdLib game). So when I bought it, I had to 'go in blind'. My standard for computer audio quality was the Amiga, which I was intimately familiar with. So I figured the SB Pro would be at least as good, given it costs as much as an entire Amiga did, as I already said before (now that we've proven that the SB Pro indeed cost 600 guilders in 1992, you can no longer doubt this statement).
The notion that you'd buy any kind of PC to be the next David Guetta, or to do 'professional' mixing/mastering/whatever at home, is ridiculous in that timespan. Professional recording studios used multitrack recording, generally at more than 44.1/16-bit sound quality by the early 90s. This required specialized hardware and storage. It would take years until any PC was actually even capable of any kind of DAW-like recoding/editing, at any level of quality at all (you know, the days when there were these special extra-expensive 'multimedia' SCSI harddrives, which had better temperature-control, because regular harddrives would need to recalibrate periodically because of temperature changes, which would lead to dropouts with any kind of high-bandwidth data, such as (multitrack) audio or video recording/playback).
What the SB Pro did allow you to do though, was to use it as a MIDI sequencer, or to use it as a sample editor. You could certainly use the MIDI sequencer to generate 'studio quality' music, that just depended on what kind of MIDI synths you would connect it to, and what you would use to record them. Likewise, it could be used just fine for editing, mixing and playing samples, and using those as 'snippets' in your music. They do not necessarily have to be super-high-quality, and in fact, in various cases artists deliberately look for lo-fi sounds. Being stereo would obviously be a big advantage here.
So the SB Pro was certainly an interesting tool for creating music at home on a budget, even if you would later re-do the music in a real studio with better equipment.
I've done a few songs on my SB Pro back in the day. Some of them was just created from creating sample loops and splicing them together.
That is something that was just beginning to become possible on computers around the time of the SB Pro: your average computer now had a harddisk to store and play enough of the samples to do a complete song (as opposed to tracker music), and the SB Pro added stereo recording and playback.
And no, I never wanted to be the next David Guetta or whatever. My professional career is in an entirely different direction: software architect. But I do enjoy making music on the side, and have actually been a guest musician on some other people's projects, which means there are actually some songs on which I play available on iTunes and other media. Does that make me a 'pro'? Whatever.
And yes, obviously I had my MIDI synth next to my PC, and I had the whole thing connected to a dedicated home-stereo setup (even at the somewhat limited audio quality, playing Second Reality on that thing for the first time was quite the experience).
I also plugged my Amiga or C64 in there from time to time. When a game or demo has really good music, it's great to just play it on a big stereo (almost like on a real demoparty). Which is also how I am quite familiar with just how good these machines sound on a decent installation. The Amiga is actually quite impressive. The C64 is dirty, but great fun, because it has an absolutely devastating low-end response.
Also, I would really appreciate it if people would stop arguing about what I say, or even respond at all, when they weren't actually there, and didn't actually live through the experience like I did.
I mean, what's the point of all these people simply arguing: "I can't believe an SB Pro actually cost 600 guilders" or "Just because it says Pro and is twice as expensive as a high-end SVGA card doesn't mean you should expect it to be any good" etc.
Franky, I really don't care if you don't understand it because you weren't there at the time. I told you in great detail how things were, and that's the end of it. I don't feel like I have to argue about this, it simply is what it is (I didn't even feel like I had to prove that an SB Pro actually cost 600 guilders in 1992, but hey, I threw you a bone. I thought it would change your perspective on what I said, and how reliable my account was, but no, the goalposts were just shifted).
Basically, when you argue anything I say, you are implicitly calling me a liar. And when you are arguing that I shouldn't expect 'studio quality' just because I bought a product that was labeled 'Pro', with a gold logo on the box, you are insulting my intelligence. Obviously I knew it wasn't going to be studio quality. Heck, just by the specs alone it would be obvious, I mean: OPL3, 8-bit, 22 KHz stereo. The ballpark is obvious. Don't argue about that stuff, it adds nothing but insult to me. But that is what you want, isn't it? Call me a liar? Paint me like some fool who thought he was getting professional quality equipment because it said 'Pro' on the box? That is what you're doing, and I'm fed up with it.
