Diamond Sonic Pro

The Sonic Pro was Diamond's first sound card. Based on the Sierra Semiconductor Aria 9248 / 9246, it provided Ad Lib, Sound Blaster, and General MIDI audio compatibility. The Sonic Pro was manufactured through a partnership with Oak Technology.

	Released	1992
	Bus	ISA 16-bit
	Chipset	Sierra Semiconductor Aria SC18005/SC18025 Crystal CS4216
	Standards	Ad Lib, Sound Blaster, General MIDI, Roland MPU-401
	Memory	Sierra Semiconductor SC18051 (512 KB ROM)
	CD-ROM	SCSI
	Ports	Line In, Mic In, Speaker Out, Game/MIDI Port, SCSI-2
	Part #
	FCC ID	FTUSONIC
	Price
	See Also

The Sonic Pro could be considered an unusual and semi-professional sound card - its Aria chipset provided a powerful General MIDI-compatible synthesizer with 32 simultaneous voices and a 16-bit DAC with a typical SnR of -92 dB. The Crystal CS4216-KL chip is where the card gets its Ad Lib and Sound Blaster compatibility.

A number of games supported the Aria chipset directly, including:

• Blood & Magic (Interplay)
• Fable (Sir-Tech)
• Sim City 2000 (Maxis)
• Star Wars: Rebel Assault (LucasArts)
• Star Wars: Rebel Assault II (LucasArts)
• Terminal Velocity (FormGen)
• Elder Scrolls: Arena (Bethesda Softworks)
• Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (Bethesda Softworks)
• LucasArts Archives Vol.1 (LucasArts)
• Zorro (Capstone Software)

With a built-in SCSI-2 interface for CD-ROMs and other SCSI devices and full duplex capabilities, the card was full-featured for its time. Sadly it pre-dates the Sound Blaster Pro and the concept of a wavetable header.

The Prometheus Aria16 sound card used the same Sierra SC18005 and SC18025 chipset that this card uses, though it lacked the Ad Lib / Sound Blaster compatibility and didn't have any CD-ROM interface. This means you can potentially use the Prometheus drivers for this Diamond card for Aria chipset support.

These cards are extremely rare.

 

Board Revisions

One board revision is known for the Pro Sonic: A5.

 

Competition

 

In the Media

 

Setting it Up

Downloads

Aria cards MUST be initialized via a software driver to function which for this card presented a problem as the original Diamond drivers are nowhere to be found on the internet except a dead archived link. This forced me to use the drivers for the already mentioned Prometheus line of Aria based cards which fortunately mostly seem to work, at least under MS DOS.

Special thanks to Zdeněk Valečko for providing both of the downloads below!

Operation Manual (missing) Get in touch if you can provide this missing item!

Driver & Utility Disk 1992 This contains both the DOS utilities and Windows drivers for the Sonic Pro / Sonic Sound.

Other Aria-based Drivers This contains both the 16-bit and 32-bit AIL drivers, Aria DIGPAK driver and Sierra Online GM and Digital Sound drivers SDK

 

More Pictures