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                            SOUND CARD REVIEW II                             
                                                                             
                                                                             
I.  Contents                                                                 
                                                                             
    A. Disclaimer                                                            
    B. QuickIntro                                                            
    C. SoundBlaster-16                                                       
    D. Pro Audio Spectrum-16                                                 
    E. Gravis UltraSound                                                     
    F. Acknowledgements                                                      
                                                                             
                                                                             
Author's Disclaimer                                                          
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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....?                            
                                                                             
QuickIntro                                                                   
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This article will basically review 3 sound cards based on performance,       
based on the opinions of the original author (Tony DiNitto), a small portion 
of the article was changed for clarifications and the differences of formats.
                                                                             
SoundBlaster-16                                                              
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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 snap, merely running a little program and putting in the card itself.      
It's sound performed nicely 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 run. Therefore,     
if you were in a game and had headphones without a volume control there      
was no way to control the sound at all unless you exited out of the game     
and went through the mixer program and you had to hope that you loaded the   
drivers otherwise it didn't work. The SB16 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       
Blaster, also provided an internal CD-ROM interface, which I consider        
a good deal.                                                                 
                                                                             
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 SB16.  This card also uses FM.           
                                                                             
Gravis UltraSound                                                            
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Ah, here we are the true sound card to talk about.  Everyone I've            
met 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       
instruments.  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   
does.  First off, it's patches, instruments when playing sound, requires 15  
or so megs of harddrive space.  So you say "Ah...I've got 15 megs of drive   
space."  But wait theres more, if you run a program that uses the GUS it     
uses its patches so it goes off and looks for them and tries to load them    
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 DOS to defrag my 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 might 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 me, 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     
in 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 GUS.  I tried  
one of them and couldn't get it to work at all, but I didn't take too long   
on that either.  It seems that GUS is not 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 emulation 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.  It's one or the other. 
Unlike the flawless SB16 or PAS16 emulation, the GUS uses the crazy          
little drivers.  Well, I tried to use the MT-32 emulation in a few games     
and it sounded pretty darn good about 80% of the time and in 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   
programmed 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 lousy 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 mad        
man with a twisted vocal cord.                                               
                                                                             
There is however Advanced Gravis's UltraSound, which cost more than SB16,    
PAS16 or the original GUS.  This board, which has an astonishing 32 digital  
channels (14 at the full 44 kHz, 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 emulation mode so      
good that it sounds better than the Sound Blaster itself.                    
                                                                             
Acknowledgements                                                             
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SoundBlaster is a registered trademark of Creative Labs, Inc.                
                                                                             
Any other trademarks are property of their respective owners.                

