founder of Creative Labs and Sound Blaster

Today the sound cards integrated into motherboards are much better than those of yesteryear and therefore the use of sound cards has largely disappeared. But if you’re a PC gamer from a decade or two ago, you probably remember the Sound Blaster brand with nostalgia. The family of sound cards Sound Blaster are made by company Creative Labs and knowing this, we announce the sad news of the death of its founder.

In the 1990s, PCs were quite different from what we have today. And it is that, at that time, the PCI slots were mainly used to add sound cards and other additions to the PC, no monstrous NVIDIA or AMD GPUs. In fact, motherboards back then offered far fewer features than they do now. To ensure PC users had decent sound in games, the addition of a sound card was essential. Among these there was a brand that stood out above the rest, the Sound Blaster cards created by Creative Technologies.

Sound Blaster sound card creator dies at 67

The inventor and pioneer of Sound Blaster technology was Singaporean No Wong Hoowhich founded Creative Technology in 1981. This company created the most popular sound cards back then and maintained its dominance and fame for decades. The history of Creative Sound Blaster sound cards dates back to late 1989. This first sound card was so successful that, in less than a year, it became the best selling expansion card for pc.

Although it was not until 1991 when the Sound Blaster Pro, which could record up to 22 kHz and play back 45 kHz. But right after that, in 1992 one of the most recognized appeared, the Sound Blaster 16 PCI who introduced the sampling of digital audio in 16 bit and 44 kHz. If we now move to the 2000s, we have the Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 and Audigy, which debuted EAX technology and 5.1 channel output. The Audigy family was improved until reaching a maximum of 7.1 channels at 96 kHz and 24 bits, to later have a successor.

These were the Sound Blaster X-Fi and many other models like the popular Creative Sound Blaster Z, which despite its years, continues to be sold in stores. We could be talking long and hard about the enormous number of Sound Blaster sound cards that Creative has developed over all these years, but we have to go back to the death of its founder, this happening in the past. January 4, 2023 at the age of 67.

Creative confirms the death and says goodbye to its founder

No specific details have been given about the cause of death of the Creative and Sound Blaster founder, as it has only been mentioned that he died peacefully. Thus, the company itself Creative Labs has confirmed the death on its website. According to the company, this is the farewell to a “visionary, inventor and entrepreneur who gave a voice to the PC world.” Finally, interim CEO Song Siow Hui has written a farewell letter in his honor, which we quote:

“I have known and worked with Mr. Sim for over 30 years. This is a sudden and sad event and we feel a great loss, especially since Mr. Sim and I recently had extensive discussions about the future direction of the company. During those conversations, Mr. Sim was full of innovative vision. Even last night he had a long conversation with the engineering team and was scheduled to meet with the online sales team the next day. The best we can do now is to ensure the continuity of the good creative performanceand also execute and bring to life the vision and strategy that Mr. Sim had for the company.”