Diamond Multimedia
More info
- Creator
- Chong-Moon Lee
- Released
- 1982
- Type
- Graphics cards, sound cards, MP3 players
- Successor
- Merged into S3 in 1999, then SONICblue
The San Jose board maker that put other people's graphics chips in handsome boxes, and accidentally won the lawsuit that made the MP3 player legal.
Diamond never designed its own silicon. It bought chips from S3, Tseng Labs, Cirrus Logic and Nvidia and sold finished cards under names like Stealth, SpeedStar and Viper. The Monster 3D (1996), built on the 3dfx Voodoo, was many people's first 3D accelerator: an add-in board that sat next to the regular graphics card, joined to it by a stubby VGA pass-through cable.
The Rio PMP300 (1998) was one of the first portable MP3 players. The RIAA sued, and in 1999 a federal appeals court ruled that the Rio was not a digital audio recording device under the law the labels were relying on. That same year S3 bought Diamond, renamed itself SONICblue and went bankrupt in 2003. The court ruling outlived every product.