Diamond Multimedia

» see diamondmm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

diamond multimedia was the brand on the boxes my older friends kept buying through the late 90s. the monster 3d, which was 3dfx's voodoo silicon on a diamond board. the stealth and viper svga cards. monster sound, which slotted in alongside or against the sound blaster. for a window of about three years, 1996 through 1998, diamond was on every other pc gaming magazine cover in the back-half hardware reviews section. the company also shipped the rio pmp300, the first mass-market portable mp3 player, in september 1998.

the company itself started in 1982 in chatsworth, california, founded by chong moon lee and h. h. huh as a graphics card maker. it spent the late 80s shipping vga and svga boards under names like speedstar. the breakthrough year was 1996 with the monster 3d, which packaged the 3dfx voodoo into a retail product that gamers could actually buy in a box. before the monster 3d, voodoo cards were primarily sold to arcade machine makers and oems. diamond made them a consumer product.

i was on a 33.6k modem in ankara when the monster 3d shipped. the card was expensive and i could not have justified one even if my parents had agreed, which they would not have. but the magazines i was reading covered it heavily. ttnet kept getting faster. by 1999-2000 the voodoo era was fading and the geforce 256 had taken over the conversation, but diamond had already had its moment.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what killed the independent company ~

the structural problem for diamond was the same problem 3dfx hit: nvidia and ati started shipping reference designs that they sold to all add-in board partners simultaneously, which collapsed the margins on retail graphics cards. there was no longer a reason for an end user to pay extra for a diamond-branded geforce when the asus, msi, and evga versions used identical silicon and reference layouts. diamond's defensible value-add as a board builder shrank to nothing by 1999.

the strategic response was a merger with s3 incorporated in september 1999, the silicon vendor whose savage graphics chips diamond had been shipping on its viper boards. the merged entity tried to pivot toward consumer electronics: more rio mp3 players, the replaytv dvr, set-top boxes. on november 15, 2000 the combined company began trading on the nasdaq as sonicblue under the ticker sblu, formally retiring the diamond corporate name. the diamond brand continued as a product line label inside sonicblue but the company called diamond multimedia stopped existing on that day.

~ the long fade ~

sonicblue itself filed chapter 11 bankruptcy on march 21, 2003, after losing money in the dvr business and getting sued by every tv network over replaytv's ad-skipping features. the diamond brand and assets were sold to best data products in october 2003 for a small fraction of what diamond had been worth at its peak.

best data resurfaced the diamond name on low-cost networking gear and expansion cards, none of which had any cultural footprint. the diamond brand still exists in some form under tul corporation, the parent of powercolor, but it is a different company in every meaningful sense. the diamond that mattered, the one that put the voodoo on every gamer's wishlist and the rio in the courtroom that legalized the mp3 player, ended on november 15, 2000.

~ what it left behind ~

the rio pmp300 lawsuit is the most lasting thing diamond touched. when the riaa sued in october 1998 to block the rio, the ninth circuit eventually ruled the device was a playback machine for files the user already had, which fell outside the audio home recording act. that ruling sat under napster, under itunes, under the ipod, under every portable music device that followed. without it the consumer electronics industry would have spent another decade asking permission.

the other thing diamond left was the template for a 90s pc enthusiast brand: heavy retail presence, magazine ad buys, named product lines that gamers could ask for by name. that template died with the silicon-vendor reference design era, but it was the model that gave 3dfx, creative, matrox, and diamond their moment before the consolidation arrived.

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