Media Vision

~ the eulogy ~

Media Vision started in Fremont in may 1990, at the exact moment the PC stopped being a machine that beeped. Sound cards were a real market for about six years, roughly 1989 to 1995, and in that window the question of which card was in your machine determined what your games sounded like. Paul Jain and Tim Bratton went at that market hard and, for a while, they were winning it on merit.

The Pro AudioSpectrum 16 was the good one. It arrived before Creative's Sound Blaster 16, it had cleaner output, and reviewers who cared about audio said so at the time. Media Vision also sold the multimedia upgrade kit, which was the sound card boxed together with a CD-ROM drive. That kit is what actually put CD-ROM drives into home PCs, and it is the reason a certain generation associates the whole idea of multimedia with a cardboard box containing an encyclopedia.

Then the accounting. In 1993 the company lost ninety nine million dollars and reported a profit of twenty million, achieved by counting product as sold while it was still sitting on ships. The SEC later found that three executives took $2.3 million out of the misstatements. The stock broke in early 1994, Jain resigned on 17 may, and the company went into bankruptcy that year. Jain pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirty months, serving thirteen, and the chief financial officer went down with him. The case dragged on so long it got described as the longest running securities fraud prosecution Silicon Valley had produced.

By the time I had a PC that could make a noise, the fight was over and nobody mentioned there had been one. Every game's setup screen asked which card you had, and the honest answer for most machines around me was a no-name board claiming Sound Blaster compatibility and delivering about eighty percent of it. That word is the whole Media Vision story. They built the better card and lost the only thing worth having, which was being the card everybody else had to be compatible with.

~ the dossier ~

~ the card ~

The Pro AudioSpectrum line ran from an 8-bit board in 1991 to the PAS-16 in 1992, and the design decisions were consistently the ones an audio person would make rather than the ones a cost accountant would. It carried a CD-ROM interface, which mattered when drives shipped with proprietary connectors and no standard way to attach them. It also had to emulate the Sound Blaster to be useful at all, which meant Media Vision's better hardware spent most of its life pretending to be worse hardware so software would talk to it.

~ the numbers ~

What makes this fraud strange is that the underlying business was not hopeless. The product was competitive and the category was growing. The executives were not papering over a dead company, they were smoothing a real one into a shape the market would pay more for, which is how most of these start. Booking sales on inventory that had not been delivered is not a clever scheme, it is the oldest one there is, and it fails the moment somebody counts the containers.

The stock fell from $46.50 to $4.875 in four months. Employees who had taken options instead of salary got nothing. The bankruptcy came the same year, and the criminal case ran for years after that, which meant the company was legally dead well before anyone finished arguing about why.

~ what got buried with it ~

Media Vision's remains were renamed Aureal Semiconductor in may 1996, and Aureal went on to build A3D, the positional audio technology that PC enthusiasts still get sentimental about. Aureal won its patent fight with Creative and then died of the legal bills anyway, with Creative buying the assets in 2000. So the lineage runs from a company that lost to Creative by fraud to a company that beat Creative in court and lost anyway.

What went into the ground in 1994 was the last real chance to have a PC audio market with two serious players in it. After that, Creative owned the standard for a decade, until motherboards started shipping with sound built in and the entire category quietly stopped existing.

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