Before sound cards, the basic PC speaker was only there for operation (error) beep codes. Nowadays sound cards are built in to almost every motherboard produced. Today, the better sounding 'add-in' sound cards are just a small niche market.
Before SoundBlaster, I had one of their competitor's products - AdLib. Both were good but, truthfully, SoundBlaster was better.
Voodoo3 3000 is about where they hit their peak quality "Wow!" factor.
I remember picking up a Voodoo 5 5500 and being totally disappointed at the slight performance increase in the games I played, vs. a card that was from the previous gen. It was way too expensive for the marginal increase, so I returned it.