Covox Speech Thing
More info
- Creator
- Covox Inc.
- Type
- Parallel-port DAC
- Released
- 1988
- Bit depth
- 8-bit mono
A cheap 8-bit DAC that clipped onto the PC's parallel port back when real sound cards were a luxury.
The Covox Speech Thing, from Covox Inc. in 1988, was little more than a resistor ladder (R-2R) in a connector: write a byte to the LPT port, get an analog voltage out. Mono, 8-bit, no clock of its own — the CPU had to feed it in real time. It became the demoscene and tracker crowd's poor-man's sound card anyway, and plenty of PC MOD players listed "Covox on LPT1" as an output option well into the 90s. The Disney Sound Source was a near-identical clone. When Sound Blaster took over, Covox became a footnote — a fondly remembered one.