So with regards to the YMF724... what you describe about how spartan the offering was to you doesn't surprise me in the least. That specific chip was pretty much offered to OEMs very cheaply by Yamaha, and a ton of Chinese card makers (mostly of the generic variety) snapped them up and implemented the chip however they saw fit. As for Yamaha, they apparently did produce their own branded soundcard based on a later revision of the YMF724 chip called the WaveForce WF-192XG.
There is some guy on Youtube that reviewed his specific generic YMF724-based sound card many many years ago that did have SPDIF on board and he seemed quite fond of it. Though later on, he redacted his initial recommendation due to how hard it is to find a YMF724 card built exactly like his was. So to be honest, it's likely you didn't miss out after all.
Regarding the SPDIF implementation on the Creative AWE-series cards, those SPDIF brackets turned out to be very important due to their proper support for the TTL-level signal, yet back in the day, most users discarded it or lost them in the shuffle, making them exceedingly rare in the long run. If you are out shopping for any AWE32 or AWE64, good luck finding one with the bracket! Frankly, I wish Creative just slapped the coaxial SPDIF port on the card itself rather than on a separate bracket, though I suppose Creative wanted the world to know how they half-assed the implementation anyway. I digress. :)
That ESI Juli@ was the most interesting sound card I ever used, and I've not seen one like it since. I even recall ensuring that it had a dedicated PCI slot for it that did not connect over a PCI-to-PCIe bridge, in case that would introduce latency. Hilariously though, my needs were never particularly stringent. I was just being OCD.
For me? As far as Linux audio subsystems go, I preferred the ease of PulseAudio, even if it was rather buggy in its earlier days. I even played around with JACK many years later, but would go right back to PulseAudio, since it's truly set-it-and-forget-it in the current era... or I guess we default to pipewire now? I kinda stopped paying attention since audio is so seamless now.
That's a ton of good information about the YMF724.
You know, I don't think I ever played with the synth on that card at all. I was even a bit surprised earlier: I was trying to jog my memory about what the card looked like, and found the XG branding again (a quarter of a century after ignoring it the first time) and said to myself "Oh! That. I probably should have played around with that."
But MIDI music was never really my thing. I'm not much of a musician, and I found myself enjoying downloaded mod/669/s3m a lot more than any of the various notation-only formats. The games with revered synth work just never really crossed my radar. By the time I got into shooters, CD-ROM was definitely a well-entrenched concept -- along with PCM soundtracks. I still have the shareware Quake CD that I bought from a local record shop (which they only stocked because Trent Reznor did the soundtrack -- software wasn't their thing at all).
In the 1990s, I really hoped that SPDIF would become a common audio interface, with preamps and receivers and source devices (like computer sound cards) using it for IO. One cable. Perfect signal integrity using digital audio and affordable fiber optics -- at home! In a marketplace that was driven by buzzwords, it could have been a huge hit.
Instead: Even though it was common on things like MD, DCC, and unobtanium DAT gear, it was barely known amongst regular folks -- and receivers with digital IO didn't really become common until DVD.
But CRTs ruled during the peak DVD era, and many of those TVs had perfectly-adequate speakers for casual use that folks were content with. So the likelihood of them just happening to have two bits of kit in the same pile that could talk together with SPDIF was always very low, even then.
It seemed very much like a Catch-22: People didn't know about it because it was uncommon, and manufacturers didn't take it seriously because people didn't know enough about it to select gear that used it. It thus defaulted to remaining uncommon.
Its greatest market success seems to have been its utility in plugging a sound bar into a flat TV with terrible built-in speakers. Which is great, and all: It's a perfectly-cromulent use. But that started a decade or two too late.
I myself didn't own a CD player with an SPDIF output until 2012 or so, which is just bizarre in retrospect. What's even weirder is that it was an $8,000 Krell (that someone gave to me), and I found that I consistently preferred the sound of its internal DAC over that of anything else that I could connect it to digitally.... so I wound up never using the SPDIF outputs anyway. (But as experiences go, that's definitely in the realm of an outlier.)
Thanks. Of course, a quarter of a century or so after these went out of production, this isn’t exactly useful information, but fun nonetheless.
That’s the biggest issue with MIDI. No matter the equipment you had, you were never sure what the musician intended the composition to sound like, unless they explictly mentioned the exact synth used in the metadata, like a Yamaha XG synth or a Roland SoundCanvas. I really appreciated how compact the file sizes were, but I can definitely understand sticking with PCM formats off audio CD or even WAV/AIFF/MP3 back then, depending on the application.
So possible fun tidbit about SPDIF. Coaxial SPDIF, despite seeming more old school compared to its optical TOSLINK counterpart, could achieve higher bit depth and frequencies (sometimes up to 24-bit/192 kHz!!) whereas TOSLINK was officially limited to 16-bit/48 kHz, with manufacturers pushing as high as 24-bit/96 kHz off spec. Perfectly fine for your average music enjoyer of the time, but still an interesting limitation.
On mention of DAT and MD, those were two formats I would have loved to get into, if they weren’t so compromised due to RIAA shenanigans or too pricey. Such is life I suppose.
Yeah I’d say overall, I haven’t touched SPDIF in a long while myself. My current TV uses an eARC over HDMI soundbar setup and my PC connects using good old fashioned 3.5mm audio jacks.
One neat thing about specifications like toslink is how flexible they are -- or perhaps, how arbitrary they are.
At the core, both coaxial and toslink were just transport mediums for the same SPDIF bitstream. One used copper, and the other used bendy plastic fiber optics.
And yeah: Toslink was more-limited on bandwidth, by specification.
And one would think that this would be because the optics are not so good (they're definitely not so great), or something.
But then: Alesis showed up with ADAT, and ADAT's Lightpipe could send 8 channels of 24-bit 48KHz audio over one bog-standard Toslink.
They used different encoding, of course. Even at a very low level, rather than detecting a rising edge 1 and a falling edge as 0, it detected any edge as 1 and a lack of an edge as 0. This did let them pack a lot more bits in.
But in doing that (and whatever else they did), they multiplied the functional bandwidth of a lowly Toslink cable by a factor of about 6 -- using the same optical components at each end that Toshiba sold, and the same Toslink cable from the big box store.
I think we've beaten sound cards and SPDIF to death here. :)
It's been fun. Perhaps we can do this again some day.
There is some guy on Youtube that reviewed his specific generic YMF724-based sound card many many years ago that did have SPDIF on board and he seemed quite fond of it. Though later on, he redacted his initial recommendation due to how hard it is to find a YMF724 card built exactly like his was. So to be honest, it's likely you didn't miss out after all.
Initial review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zueKH6CUVqE
Comment on rescinding his recommendation (w/ timestamp): https://youtu.be/fl3D9trFJ8E?t=1410
Regarding the SPDIF implementation on the Creative AWE-series cards, those SPDIF brackets turned out to be very important due to their proper support for the TTL-level signal, yet back in the day, most users discarded it or lost them in the shuffle, making them exceedingly rare in the long run. If you are out shopping for any AWE32 or AWE64, good luck finding one with the bracket! Frankly, I wish Creative just slapped the coaxial SPDIF port on the card itself rather than on a separate bracket, though I suppose Creative wanted the world to know how they half-assed the implementation anyway. I digress. :)
That ESI Juli@ was the most interesting sound card I ever used, and I've not seen one like it since. I even recall ensuring that it had a dedicated PCI slot for it that did not connect over a PCI-to-PCIe bridge, in case that would introduce latency. Hilariously though, my needs were never particularly stringent. I was just being OCD.
For me? As far as Linux audio subsystems go, I preferred the ease of PulseAudio, even if it was rather buggy in its earlier days. I even played around with JACK many years later, but would go right back to PulseAudio, since it's truly set-it-and-forget-it in the current era... or I guess we default to pipewire now? I kinda stopped paying attention since audio is so seamless now.