Regarding this though:

“…the 1986 Covox Speech Thing, which was the first widespread PC digital audio accessory.”

Wikipedia gets an “F” for this oft-cited bit of Internet-era misattribution.

The Speech Thing was released in “late 1987,” according to Covox:
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard/M2T95v7EgsI/ibrbO4-KcGQJ

Which can be further narrowed down to December 18, 1987, given the Covox-provided, first-use-in-commerce date:
http://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn73714260&docId=ORC20051215212743

I should probably update the Wikipedia article or something…

In 1989, the VCA was quite old so I’m not surprised it compared poorly to competitors. And yes, telephony appears to have been the first widespread usage for hardware that was later called sound cards. I assume that the term “sound card” came into use with hardware designed (or at least sold) primarily for games, but I don’t know that.

I fixed the date in the article, thanks for the correction. Yeah, it’s Wikipedia… if there’s no citation, it’s probably an error or a lie.

So the Speech Thing came out at more or less exactly the same time as AdLib. One for music, one for digital audio. The IBM VCA is much older but also a much more advanced design. Which it had to be when it needed to do something useful on an 8088-based PC.

About the NEC SAR-10, those were the days. Not just the card but all the complex chips were designed and manufactured by NEC.

There are VCA diagnostic disks on Vetusware.