Creative Labs
 |
|
| Public (SGX: C76) | |
| Industry | Consumer electronics |
| Founded | July 1, 1981 |
| Founder |
Sim Wong Hoo Ng Kai Wa |
| Headquarters | Jurong East, Singapore |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
|
Key people
|
Sim Wong Hoo, (CEO) Ng Keh Long (CFO) |
| Products | Multimedia, IT, Consumer electronics |
| Revenue |
 US$ 116 million (2014)
|
| Profit |
US$ -21.8 million (2014)
|
|
Number of employees
|
800 (2012) |
| Subsidiaries | ZiiLABS, E-mu Systems and Ensoniq (merged), Cambridge SoundWorks |
| Website | www |
Creative Technology Ltd. is a Singapore-based global company headquartered in Jurong East, Singapore. The principal activities of the company and its subsidiaries consist of the design, manufacture and distribution of digitized sound and video boards, computers and related multimedia, and personal digital entertainment products.
It also partners with mainboard manufacturers and laptop brands to embed its Sound Blaster technology on their products.
The firm began as a computer repair shop, where Sim Wong Hoo developed an add-on memory board for the Apple II computer. Later, they started creating customized PCs adapted in Chinese. A part of this design included enhanced audio capabilities, so that the device could produce speech and melodies. The success of this audio interface led to the development of a standalone sound card.
In 1987, they released a 12-voice sound generator sound card for the IBM PC architecture, the Creative Music System (C/MS), featuring two Philips SAA1099 chips. Sim personally went from Singapore to Silicon Valley and managed to get RadioShack's Tandy division to market the product. The card was, however, unsuccessful and lost to AdLib. Learning from this, Creative produced the first Sound Blaster, which included the prior CM/S hardware but also incorporated the Yamaha YM3812 chip (also known as OPL2) that was found on the AdLib card, as well as adding a component for playing and recording digital samples. The firm used aggressive marketing strategies, from calling the card a "stereo" component (only the C/MS chips were capable of stereo, not the complete product) to calling the sound producing micro-controller a "DSP" (for "digital sound processor"), hoping to associate the product with a digital signal processor (the DSP could encode/decode ADPCM realtime, but otherwise had no other DSP-like qualities).
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Wikipedia