Labels:text | screenshot | red | document OCR: SOUND CARD REVIEW 11 1. Contents A. Disclaimer Quick Intro C. SoundBlaster-16 D. Pro Audio Spectrum-16 E. Gravis UltraSound F. Acknowledgements Author's Disclainer Maybe I'm all wrong about this. Maybe there will be a new version of the emulating driver that will fix all problems. Maybe I didn't have the card itself all the way in the bus slot. Maybe if you bought a GUS and a SB you'd be in sound heaven, Who knows. . . . 7 QuickIntro This article will basically review 3 sound cards based on performance, based on the opinions of the original author (Tony DiMitto), a small portion of the article was charged for clarifications and the differences of formats Sound Blaster-16 To start off I'd like to talk a little about the Sound Blaster 16. The Sound Blaster 16 is a great card and I found its Installation a smap, merely rumming a little program and putting in the card itself. It's sound performed micely in most areas I was interested in and it was also compitable with the regular Sound Blaster in case older games didn't support the SB16. Unforunately the mixer, which was a program that controls the volume and various other things, was not the easiest to understand and also if you ever wanted to use it you had to have an estimated 20k of DOS drivers in your memory to get it to rum. Therefore, if you were in a gane and had headphones without a volume control there was no way to control the sound at all unless you exited out of the gane and went through the mixer progran and you had to hope that you loaded the drivers otherwise it didn't work. The S816 will probably be around for quite a long time, since most games comes out supporting it or it's little brother, the original SB. The SB16 uses the FM technology, which is widely used in other popular sound cards. Creative Labs, the makers of Sound a good deal. Blaster, also provided an internal CD-ROM interface, which I consider Pro Audio Spectrum-16 With the PAS16, Installation was quicker incredibly fast and easy. It's great emulation of the SoundBlaster is excellent and had little or no difference can be heard, it could also emulate the Adlib and the ThunderBoard sound card. With this card there were no drivers that ever needed to be installed to do something. I believe it had a mixer but I never tested it considering that it had the capability of turning the volume up and down by hitting CTRL-ALT-D, U, or M <Down, Up, and Mute>. Those controls worked in most games except say DOOM and maybe a couple others that used the Ctrl and Alt key. I would say, this is much better than SB16 considering the fact that it has yet a better volume control without taking much of your memory. I suggest you take this card over Creative Labs's SB16, and you can save around $10 if you buy it other than 3816. This card also uses FM. Gravis UltraSound Ah, here we are the true sound card to talk about. Everyone I've net has a different opinion with this sound card. This sound card, unlike the others, uses wavetable synthesis. What that means is, instead of using fake instruments such as FM, this one uses true and realistic This card sounds great when playing MIDI files and such. But wait, everyone knows that such a great thing has its drawbacks and that it instruments. does. First off, it's patches, Instruments when playing sound, requires 15 or so meys of harddrive space. So you say "Ah. . . I've got 15 megs of drive space." But wait theres more, if you rum a program that uses the GUS it uses its patches so it goes off and looks for then and tries to load then making the game sound like its scratchy or like a skipping record. If you have a HD thats slower than 20ms then forget ever buying this card until you get a faster one. After reading the small troubleshooting section, I went to IOS to defrag ny hard drive and that helped a little just to play one game. Thus, this made the GUS installation not very fun nor easy. The fact of hearing junky sound and thinking that's what it'll sound like forever will almost make you have a heart attack after paying more than $120 for the card. After I went through a day or so of installing and fine tuning the GUS, sounded great. In its midi files instead of coming out as a plink plink it sounded like a big band playing with all their night delivering great rich and full music. If you like the full and rich sound you'll like the GUS. If you like the plain, easy to listen to sound that gets to the point without the other Instruments go with a PAS16 or SB16. The GUS, as it sound to ne, puts in every single instrument it can think of without it ruining the sound. At times it sounded like a marching band, since it puts so many instruments Im one selection of music. Many programs that come out are now supporting the GUS and many companies, like Sierra, have distributed "sound patches" that you run and it will make most of their games support the CUS. I tried one of them and couldn't get it to work at all, but I didn't take too long om that either. It seems that GUS is mot for the impatient people, nor the cheap ones. If something still doesn't support the GUS you're gonna have problems. I don't care what the little ad says "emulates SB, MT-32, General MIDI", I say you're going to have problems. Instead of the SB 16 or PAS 16 emulation this board requires you to use a driver that will support different cards. You type SBOS for Sound Blaster enulation and it takes up arout 20k of DOS memory and it then pretends that a GUS doesn't exist. So you can't use a GUS for music and a SB for sound. Unlike the flawless SB16 or PAS16 emulation, the GUS uses the crazy It's one or the other. little drivers. Well, I tried to use the MT-32 emulation in a few ganes and it sounded pretty darn good about Box of the time and im other parts it would sound like it was getting instruments confused. For example instead of the normal bong in a grand father clock it used a bunch of off tuned horns. Its Sound Blaster and Adlib emulation is hardly the best either. The SB emulation will almost definitely not run in any game that's programned in protected mode, like DOOM and so forth, giving you a lock up if you try it. It also locks up in other games also. If it does work it usually comes out pretty lowsy compared to the real thing. Emulation with this card is terrible. You should not buy this card relying on it to make great emulations of other cards. I can't really give a true rating than the above advice, I'll hear one emulation that's quite amazing, then the next one sounding like a nad man with a twisted vocal cord. There is however Advanced Gravis's UltraSound, which cost more than SB16, PAS16 or the original GUSS. This board, which has an astonishing 32 digital channels (14 at the full 11 kitz, 16-bit sampling tables on your hard drisk, and you can swap them out. ) If you don't like the sound of an acoustic guitar, for example, you can replace it with a third-party audio wavetable sample. And the board, which is MIDI-compatible as well, sounds great. Unlike the RAP-10, the UltraSound has a Sound Blaster enulation mode so good that it sounds better than the Sound Blaster itself. Acknowledgenents SoundBlaster is a registered trademark of Creative Labs, Inc. Amy other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
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