Well... they already succeeded in screwing some hardware and software this way.
When Windows Vista was about to launch, MPAA pushed hard for DVD copy protection, this resulted in a sudden push against CRT monitors, in favor of then lower quality LCD, to force the usage of HDMI cables (because they have DRM), they also pushed hard for Microsoft to change what soundcards were allowed to do, again because of DRM.
This contributed to a sudden death of CRTs right when some companies were about to have breakthrough in lightweight CRT, and also basically killed the soundcard market... they still exist, but nowhere near important as they were, and nowhere near awesome, the changes that were pushed to support DRM killed 3D Audio, back then you had people buying sound cards as if they were like GPUs but for audio, some games used this to great effect (Thief for example), where the game would raytrace the audio, calculating it reflecting, refracting and difracting around the 3D models, allowing for sound simulations that let players to figure out the environment by audio alone...
Vista came and changed drastically how the driver stack for video and audio worked, MS back then blamed "stability" but they killed hard anything that could be used to circunvent DVD, HDMI and related DRM.
> were about to have breakthrough in lightweight CRT
Never heard of this. There's a limit on how lightweight a CRT can be, compared to what amounts to essentially a large chip. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Also, unless this breakthrough no longer used an electron gun, they are power hogs.
> to force the usage of HDMI cables
What's preventing one from driving a CRT with a HDMI signal? You can generate the analog signals the CRT needs quite easily. This is in fact done by dirt cheap dongles today.
> where the game would raytrace the audio, calculating it reflecting, refracting and difracting around the 3D models, allowing for sound simulations that let players to figure out the environment by audio alone
Why can't we do this today? This can in fact be done by GPUs. Possibly even in the CPU.
The way I understand there are a few reasons why people stopped buying sound cards:
* Capabilities such as MIDI and pre-loaded instruments were no longer used. Games had more space to burn so they just used digitized waveforms
* The built-in audio became "good enough". Any built-in cheap can output audio at high sample rates. Decent audio can be provided even from the analog outputs, not to mention digital signals carried by optical outputs, HDMI, Display Port. Some of these may not even be routed through the audio card
* Similarly, many people use USB headsets. They have their own audio device. In fact, many computers have multiple - in my case, my camera has one, the Oculus has another, so does the monitor. All through USB or DisplayPort
* Most sound processing tasks are not really that taxing on a modern system. Thief might be an exception and even then, given some AMD and NVidia offerings, this is probably doable without dedicated audio processing hardware
* Also Creative had a chokehold on the industry as a whole. Lots of libraries and products were purchased or killed. They still make audio cards today, but I can't understand why.
SED. Patent bullshit killed it off, Canon decided to end the project instead of producing what could have been the greatest display technology of all time.
Microsoft removed all capabilities of user software to directly interface with audio hardware, MS at the time officially blamed BSoDs that were caused by soundcards, but this change also made very hard to write software that could circunvent audio DRM (ie: when you had total access to soundcard hardware, it was easy to write a program to just stream to disk whatever the soundcard calculated, before it encoded the HDMI DRM on the output).
The new "driver API" for soundcards was extremely limited, basically you could tell windows some details of your hardware, and software could ask windows to do certain tasks, like raise volume, lower volume, etc... any Windows game since that has their own 3D audio, is done by the game itself calculating the audio, and asking Windows to play that audio.
But when you could tinker with the hardware directly, you could build audio processors that would take as inputs some audio samples, then 3D models, material definitions, and then raytrace (in way almost identical to video, since light is also wave, thus same rules apply, this also mean it has same computational expense) the results, then you could play on the speakers the result.
If the user had multiple speakers, he could explain to the soundcard where they are physically in his RL room, then the soudncard could act as if each speaker was a "camera" in the 3D world, and raytrace how the audio would act, for example suppose the player was underwater in a pool room, and there was a loud explosion outside, the game would figure out the sound would reflect on the hallway corridors, reach the door, difract, reach the water, refract, and reach the player.
One way of doing so was EAX from Creative, but OpenAL also worked too, it even intentionally had API at the time simialr to OpenGL, so it a graphics coder would feel confortable also coding the 3D audio, Doom3 for example supports OpenAL 3D audio.
As for the high-tech CRT, DiabloD3 awnser is accurate, there was also Sony's "Field Emission" tech too.
And no, analog signals are not easy to generate, the "dirt cheap dongles" or aren't cheap (good converters from digital to analog are often in the 50 USD+ range having good proper RAMDACs) or are crap and can't do high-res high-refresh rate, and might struggle with colour, in analog era some crazy stuff regarding colours were possible, for example SGI sold a videocard that could output the analog data to display image files that had 48 bits per pixel, one of its purposes was HDR photo editing, "cheap dongles" absolutely can't do that.
When Windows Vista was about to launch, MPAA pushed hard for DVD copy protection, this resulted in a sudden push against CRT monitors, in favor of then lower quality LCD, to force the usage of HDMI cables (because they have DRM), they also pushed hard for Microsoft to change what soundcards were allowed to do, again because of DRM.
This contributed to a sudden death of CRTs right when some companies were about to have breakthrough in lightweight CRT, and also basically killed the soundcard market... they still exist, but nowhere near important as they were, and nowhere near awesome, the changes that were pushed to support DRM killed 3D Audio, back then you had people buying sound cards as if they were like GPUs but for audio, some games used this to great effect (Thief for example), where the game would raytrace the audio, calculating it reflecting, refracting and difracting around the 3D models, allowing for sound simulations that let players to figure out the environment by audio alone...
Vista came and changed drastically how the driver stack for video and audio worked, MS back then blamed "stability" but they killed hard anything that could be used to circunvent DVD, HDMI and related DRM.