Covox

~ the last words ~

The Covox Speech Thing was a resistor ladder in a plastic shell. There was no chip inside it and nothing that kept time. Eight resistor pairs at 100 and 200 kilohms hung off the data lines of a PC parallel port, deliberately high in value so as not to load the port, with a jack on the other end and a pass-through so your printer still worked. Write a byte to the port and the ladder turned it into a voltage. Do that several thousand times a second and an IBM PC that could otherwise only beep played recorded sound.

The patent, US 4,812,847, was filed on 2 October 1987 by John L. Stewart and his son Bradley, and what it actually claims is the pass-through rather than the ladder. That distinction decided the product's whole afterlife. A resistor ladder is something a teenager can solder for under ten dollars, and the Speech Thing cost about seventy at launch and $79.95 by 1989.

Covox was the microcomputer arm of SRT Inc, which John Stewart founded in Southern California in 1975 and named for Santa Rita Technology, the imprint he had been self-publishing cochlear research under since 1964. His earlier product was a synthesized-sound bird scarer for vineyards. He moved the operation to Eugene, Oregon in 1982 because the state was cheaper to run a business in, and set Covox up there the same year; by mid-1987 Covox products were 85 percent of everything SRT sold. Brad Stewart designed the hardware. What started the company was the Voice Master, a C64 speech digitizer and voice recognizer that shipped around 1983, four years ahead of the thing Covox is now remembered for.

With no sequential logic at all, the device had no sample rate of its own. The processor had to be interrupted at the sampling frequency and write every byte by hand, so audio quality came down to how fast your machine was and how well the resistors were matched. A 286 managed something like 12 kHz, while a 33 MHz 486SX in 1991 could push it to 44. Sloppy resistor tolerances shifted the voltage steps and you heard it in the quiet passages.

~ the record ~

~ the three cards that failed ~

Covox tried three times to sell a real sound card and lost all three times, for reasons that were about compatibility rather than engineering. The Sound Master of 1989 used a General Instrument AY chip for music plus an 8-bit DAC, and gave you two DA-15 ports for joysticks and MIDI that neither AdLib nor Creative offered. It was not AdLib compatible, and AdLib had a two-year head start on game support. The Sound Blaster launched the same year, carrying AdLib compatibility and DMA-driven digital audio on a card that also had the game port.

The Sound Master Plus in 1991 swapped in the YM3812, the FM chip AdLib and Creative both used, so it played AdLib music, but its DAC still would not answer Sound Blaster digital calls and Covox deleted both game ports to save money. Exactly one game is known to have supported it. The Sound Master II, on the market by mid-1992, finally shipped a resident program claiming full Sound Blaster compatibility, which needed a 386 to run. COMPUTE! reviewed it that July and put the list price only slightly above its competitors, which by then meant the cards everybody already wrote drivers for.

~ the name came loose ~

Trackers listed it. Scream Tracker 2.3 drove a Covox directly and 3.21 reached it through a virtual Sound Blaster driver, while FastTracker 2 listed it alongside the Gravis Ultrasound and the PC speaker. ModPlay and Inertia Player both output to it, and the Galaxy Music Player would play a module on an 8088 through one. Games listed it too, across most of the older Sierra adventures, Pinball Fantasies, Star Control II and the Build Engine shooters including Duke Nukem 3D. Impulse Tracker supported the hardware but called the option a DAC on LPT1, which is the first sign of what happened next.

The brand detached from the company and became a common noun. In the ex-Soviet 8-bit scene especially, a covox is any passive printer-port digital-to-analog converter, usually one you built yourself. ZX Spectrum clone documentation lists a covox as available sound hardware alongside the beeper and the AY chip, the word lowercase and generic. An MSX knowledge base article from 2012 is titled "Adding a multimedia capability: a Covox device." There was a demoscene compo in 2003 named for it. Drivers called covox shipped for Windows and for Linux, and someone wrote a covox music player for Linux as recently as 2021. None of this involved Covox Inc, which had been gone for years and never licensed anything to any of it.

~ how the money went ~

Late in 1992 the Stewart family, short of capital to expand, sold a 60 percent controlling stake to an investment company called Sound Trends. Larry Stewart later said Sound Trends spent frivolously and pointed at a failed advertising campaign that ran to more than $250,000. At that point Covox had 23 employees and roughly $3 million in annual revenue, with a regional office in London, and three years earlier it had been confident enough to lease a 17,000 square foot airplane hangar in Vancouver, Washington for extra production lines.

Then came the lawsuit. Covox had named a voice product Voice Blaster. Creative Technology sued over it on 14 September 1993 and won a settlement on 10 January 1994. Six months after that the Register-Guard in Eugene ran a front-page story on 14 July 1994 headlined that the local company had hit the skids: the last 25 employees laid off, the company evicted from its own building, and creditors lining up that included its software co-developer, its box maker, its printer and the publisher it had been buying ads from. PC Week reported on 1 August that Covox had shut down but vowed to reopen. It did not. No source names a day for the closure, so the obituary date here is the day the collapse was first reported.

~ the fifth of the price ~

The Disney Sound Source arrived around 1990 and cost fourteen dollars. It was a better-behaved device than the Covox despite being a fifth of the price, because it had a chip in it: one IC holding a 16-byte buffer and a DAC, running off a 9V battery and clocking samples out on its own at a fixed 7 kHz. Software could detect it and throttle it. Game developers found it easier to target and more of them did. Whether Disney licensed the Speech Thing design or simply had Covox build the things is reported both ways, and the board itself is marked with a 1983 patent belonging to neither company.

Nothing in this story reached Turkey while it mattered. The first sound card I owned was a Sound Blaster clone, bought long after the standards argument had been settled, and nobody within reach of me was soldering resistors into printer plugs. What did arrive was the word itself, sitting in a DOS tracker's setup screen as an output option called Covox, which I took for the name of a format. It was the name of a company: twenty-five people in Oregon who got walked out of their building in July 1994.

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