I had one of those cards. Very awesome. They really went to town on the analog audio quality. One thing I noticed about my card was the analog Cd audio plug. They had used a guard ground for the braided shield in the audio cable, and used separate ground for the left and right channel. The guard ground was only connected to the case ground, the left and right grounds went to their own pre amplifier. They would use any signal accidentally generated on the guard ground to subtract it from the audio, and the separate grounds were "mixed" back into their respective channel. This would really reduce the digital noise that would leak into the cable and cause noise to appear and was really good in preventing the channels from "leaking" into each other.
In addition to the quality problems, Creative were surprisingly shady with their business practices too. LGR has a good video on how they screwed the competition with artificial chip shortages by contracting out Yamaha
Yes, unfortunately Creative was more busy with eliminating opponents in different unfair ways, than with making good products. They've stolen the OPL2 idea from AdLib and killed that company by silent agreements with yamaha. All the Creatives PCI sound cards were from Ensoniq, which they bought previously, because Creative didn't get managed to make own products. Later, as MediaVision became Aureal, Creative couldn't compete again in technological way, so they sued Aureal and actually lost, but the case costed Aureal so much, that they wen bankrupt. And again, Creative killed a company with the better products with money. Not "Creative" at all, if you ask me.
@@necro_ware You could argue it caught up with them: by the time they had eliminated all of their competition (in the late Windows 98 era) Microsoft was well on the way to rendering Creative irrelevant with the reworked audio system in Vista onward.
@@ironhead2008 DirectSound pretty much started taking over between Win98SE and XP, long before Vista came out. It was really the death of DOS games that put the nail in the coffin. At the same time you have the proliferation of AC'97 in the budget sound card market, and typically better products from the competition in the mid-high end market.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 I was more thinking in the realm of hardware accelerated audio. Vista all but nuked that. I don't think creative was ever more than a bit player in integrated audio in the pre Vista era. I suspect if they had been a bigger player though, they might have managed to get MS and Intel to let them have a seat at the table going forward. However, tat would require Creative to play well with others, which just is not in the corporate DNA
I had a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 in a hand-me-down 486 system that was the family computer as a kid. That card got lost somewhere in the shuffle of upgrades and parts trades with friends, because I didn't appreciate its features and quality back then, but retrospectively, it was a great card with a great sound. I never should have let it go. I just bought another one on Ebay to put into the retro gaming build I'm getting together to replay those old DOS and early Windows games. It was absolutely my first choice, over anything from Creative, given how well I remember it being a superior standout.
In the 90s, I bought a bundle with PAS16 and a SCSI CD-ROM for $100. I didn’t appreciate this card enough as a kid. I remember being annoyed by the driver requirement and compatibility issues. I quickly sold it for the same price I paid and went back to SB cards and IDE CD-ROMs. I wish I kept it.
Seeing that A3D logo taking shape actually gave me goosbumps! I had NO IDEA that the Aureal Vortex was actually born from the ashes of the Pro Audio Spectrum!! :-O
The tidbit at the end about Aureal delighted me. My Diamond Monster MX300 is my favorite Win98 era sound card. I'm proud that it has such great heritage.
As a techie with a huge passion for the tech *just* before my time, I must thank you for uploading such insights into history. Very surprised you don't have more subscribers, it's only a matter of time!
More copper doesn't necessarily mean higher costs, because PCBs are made starting with a board completely covered in copper and by removing all the copper the design doesn't need. More layers are more expensive though, as are more vias in some cases. Having the same number of layers, a card with a bigger ground plane can be the one with the more careful design compared to the other one but not the better manufactured one.
Thank you very much for the interesting post. I'm mostly agreed, since I tinker a lot and order quite a lot of PCBs myself. However, I would like to add two things, first of all the amount of PCBs you order and the time play an important role. If you order only some PCBs today the manufacturer simply charges you the whole copper on the PCB, regardless how much you need on the final project. The copper they remove from the PCBs will be reused and not thrown away, but with a small batches it's not wort it to take every mg into account. However if you order millions of PCBs it can matter and the companies can negotiate about it. Furthermore back then the techniques of PCB manufacturing were quite different as today and since Creative was very much profit oriented, they negotiated about every cent. About all the other things you said, I'm absolutely agreed with you.
@@necro_ware You make a very good point. Having ordered and etched quite a few pcbs over the years I definitely come from a tinkerer's standpoint. Thanks for the interesting insight!
Thank you for this wonderful documentary and configuration tutorial for the PAS 16. I grew up with this card in my 486 and Pentium but didn't have as many fond memories with it as presented. I blame my own inexperience as a kid, not the hardware though. Many of the games I wanted to play had little PAS support and I spent a lot of time in Soundblaster Compatible "mono" mode. Occasionally I'd hear something like SimCity 2000 with that glorious OPL3 FM sound and I remember just how much better that sounded than every other game in Soundblaster mode. I didn't know enough at the time what was going on with the card and my experience (surrounded by friends with Sound Blasters) was that my card emulating a Sound Blaster sounded worse than theirs through computer speakers of the day. I'm ashamed I misplaced my PAS 16... I would love to apply what I know now to really exercise what I missed as a kid. I, too, graduated from the PAS 16 to an Aureal Vortex, then eventually and Aureal Vortex 2. After Creative stifled them, I swore off Creative for good. Absolutely excellent video. I've enjoyed watching it several times now... usually when a listing for a PAS 16 pops up on eBay.
Just found your channel and love it. All these retro parts bring back so much memories. Back in the day compatibility was a battle not as easy as today
I owned a PAS16 for many years and loved it dearly. My biggest issue I ever had: Adaptec AHA-1542B SCSI HA compatibility issues. Not one, but TWO of them! 1. To boot from the AHA-1542, I had to use the default port of 0330H. Hmmm, something must use this.. . OH YES,. THE MPU-401 USES THAT PORT! 2. The AHA-1540 and AHA-1542 cards are busmastering cards. If you have one of those motherboards where you can adjust/tweak bus speeds/DMA speeds, you WILL have problems when you have both card types in the system, guaranteed, EVEN IF THERE ARE NO CONFLICTS. The moment I went to a Buslogic Bt-445C, those problems went away because transfers happened over VLB, not ISA. I later supplemented this card with a Gravis UltraSound ACE, which was designed to work with an existing sound card. Later, I upgraded the ACE to a full megabyte (came with 512K). Pure bliss. Thanks for showing up to give me some nostalgia~!
Awesome video. I never owned a PAS card in the past, but I'm really interested in checking it out for the better audio quality. Some of the creative cards I've heard have bad noise levels (especially the SB32 I own). Thanks for sharing!
The Pro Audio had one distinct advantage for me at the time: that SCSI bus at the back. At the time, there were no IDE CD-ROMs as far as I can remember. My first was a 1x speed with a caddy. I don't think the DOS software that came with the card supported any SCSI devices besides CD ROMs, but when I started using Linux in '93, there was general SCSI support off the Pro audio, so I was able to scrounge a couple external drive enclosures and a scanner at the university. I don't even remember the sound capabilities!
Had a Crystal Semiconductor card (brand owned by Cirrus Logic) which i can not forget all the noises of the poor OPL2 playback of that. Had various on-board soundcards later. C-Media, ESS Allegro and SoundMAX to name some, but they had software wavetable for midi playback.
Thanks for this video, comes right in time since I got a Pro audio spectrum 16 today that someone gave away. I had no idea what that sound card was all about but now I am better informed
Wow this is an awesome video. 👏 I was a Sound Blaster user but discovered the PAS16 sometime after and I was impressed. I still have good memories that this video helped bring back. I really should have kept one of the PAS cards. Anyway it's great to see someone revisit them and do the comparisons etc.. I love PC industry history. The companies that battled it out with competing products. Great stuff for sure. 😃
Nice, I have a PAS 16, but have never really taken it into action (yet). I should change that... One correction: The SB Pro doesn't have two DSP chips, I'm not sure what the second one (on the left) is doing, but probably not the same - maybe it does the Stereo setup/channel switching handling. It has about the same DSP chip as the SB 2.0. In fact, it STILL outputs mono as first step. The channels are separated by switching L/R for every sample (one of the smaller ICs beneath the amps should do that). That's the reason why it can play 44.1 in Mono, but only 22.05 KHz in Stereo - it's essentially halved. I remember the SB16 "DMA" clicking from my expensive AWE32 "value" edition as well - but from Day of the Tentacle, the intro scene where Purple Tentacle says something. So if this is at hand, it may be an alternative.
@@necro_ware So I confused them as well, or their order ;). Good to know! Also explains part of my theory: The mixer chip also handles the stereo setup programming wise, so indeed it handles at least partially the stereo part.
I remember having an Creative Labs and a Gravis Ultrasound in my 386 and 486 so that I could have sound in different programs and constantly having to switch the speaker cables.
@@necro_ware in later years I did it that way, but in dos days it meant having to close the current program, run the program for volume controls and then go back to the other program. But when I had windows and still needed 3 or4 cards, because there was no direct X yet, I ran line out to line in and my AWE64 gold was the main card because it had RCA jacks to my amp. I mostly used my computer for making music and needed to play more than 1 sound/program at a time and had midi devices plugged in.
18:06 I can confirm the PAS16 (studio XL) which has the waveblaster header has the hanging notes bug, most likely if you plug a an external MIDI synth such as MT-32 through the mpu401 joystick port would be the same. Edit: btw I have never in my life purchased a Creative product, after the PAS16 I got a TurtleBeach and never looked back.
You really took me down memory lane as I had a PAS16. Look at those discrete output transistors! That is something SB hasn't done until recently. I loved the Trakblaster mixer! Also remember setting up EMS / XMS memory like you said! Also having multiple boot sequences for different games! The audio card I bought after PAS had passed, pun intended, was an Xitel A3D card. I still have it to this day... too bad windows destroyed compatibility. By far my favorite devices in the computer to this day! Gimme that sweet sound!
Trackblaster I remember spending a whole bunch of time just listening to the mod files it came with. But I remember a issue that we had with our AMD 386DX-40 where if you tried playing in 44kHz mode (Which I think it warned against, memory is fuzzy) it would play for a seemingly random duration then hard lock on a hanging note.
Back in the day I had a PAS16 and GUS in my family's computer, and there were only a few times I missed SBpro compatibility. SCSI was also an incredible feature, but the card did not have option ROM to enable booting from SCSI devices. I went through my larval Linux phase in the mid-90s with a PAS16 and surplus SCSI hard drives. It wasn't fast, but it worked.
The SCSI on the PAS16 cards didn't have a boot ROM because it was never intended to be used as a hard drive controller. The SCSI controller was there so that the card could be bundled with SCSI CD-ROM drives in high-end multimedia kits. It was a great one-stop solution for adding a CD-ROM drive to a 486. Occasionally, if you're really looking, you can still find new-old-stock kits using PAS16 cards on Ebay.
Dang! Fool of me that got into the marketing BS and really tough that I was always getting the best by purchasing the creative products, SB 2.0, AWE32, SB Live... I really should had known better but the press always ended their reviews with the same conclusion, SB compatibility rules! 🙄 Thanks for such an history lesson, you are a wonderful box full of surprises!
Honestly, you were better off. I had an SB Pro, and saw a friend using the PAS16 with TrakBlaster Pro, and just HAD to have a 16-bit sound card. So I ended up getting a Pro Audio Studio 16 - just a PAS16 in a bigger bundle. I loved the 16-bit stereo DAC, but there were so many games and trackers that didn’t have native PAS support that I was frequently falling back to SB 2.0 support. When I finally replaced that PAS with an AWE32, I was relieved to finally have a card that _just worked_ again. The PAS was a good card, don’t get me wrong. Was it better than a SB16? I mean... maybe...? I dunno. It’s hard to say. Yeah, there’s the DMA bug. If you surveyed people in 1994 about whether they were aware of their audio card adding clicks to samples, next to nobody would’ve noticed. Those 8-bit samples _all_ sound clicky - what are you talking about? And the noise levels? Well, most people were using crappy amplified speakers that hissed like a feral cat. And had a CD-ROM connected via a cable that probably wasn’t shielded, and ran right through the memory sticks and by the hard drive ribbon cable. And then there’s the hanging note bug. That is a first world problem if ever there was one. Who, in the 90s, actually had an MT32 or Sound Canvas anyway? No, everyone was using FM synth, because it’s all any of us could afford. ;-) So, yeah, the SB line was far from perfect. Yeah they were aggressive a-holes to other audio companies. But the only thing that mattered, as a consumer, was having a card that worked in all the software you had. And that... was Sound Blaster. Everything else was a distant second. (Although the GUS was pretty cool for its time! But you really had to be a MOD or demo scene fan to make it worth it.)
@@nickwallette6201 After a few weeks with the SB Pro 2.0, I changed to a Trust 32 card with a Gravis Ultrasound MAX in tandem. The Trust 32 card was cheap and wonderfully compatible with the SB16 and it had GM and GS wavetable.
@@turrican4d599 Oh man yeah! I have a GUS Ace that I considered pairing with an SB Pro. That would be an early-mid 90s dream machine. But, I also have a bad habit of using SCSI cards for external Zip and CD drives, so it makes things tight trying to assign unique IRQs. It would’ve worked better back in the day when a SCSI card cost $300, plus peripherals, so I didn’t have to worry about making room for all that hardware I couldn’t afford. ;-) My solution now is to just have a GUS box, where I installed a Max, and I don’t worry about running software that requires SB support because I have other machines for that.
This whole video I was trying to remember what sound card I had in my first machine, a 486. Then you mentioned Jazz16 and my mind triggered! NO idea which card I actually had, but it was a Jazz16 based card. Thanks!
That music from Descent brings back memories. Recognized the Ultima VI music from the first note. The entire Ultima series is absolutely fantastic and I am sad that EA don't want to sell the Ultima IP to Richard Garriott :-(
I loved this video, there are very few videos regarding this card in youtube. Back in the 90s (around 92 or 93) My dad bought our first CD/sound kit. Came with many games like civ1, mantis, comptons encyclopedia, battle chess and many others. I was lucky to have that kit, few people back then had one of those and they all played with internal speaker. The kit came with a sony CDrom with a media vision pas16 and labtec speakers. I trully love the sound of it on DOS gaming, and years after i was able to compare against all the bugs that SB16 had, like hanging not bug and i just go back to my PAS16. Im currently building a k6-3 retro pc, i has AT + ATX connector, maybe i will not need a voltage blaster at all.
Cool! Many older ATX power supplies do provide -5V as well, so you don't need AT. However, they were usually produced before 2004 and unfortunately a lot of power supplies from that time were very low quality. So take a look at least at the caps inside before you connect it.
There was an in-between model, the PAS “plus”. I’m assuming it was the same as the PAS 16 but with 8-bit audio. I think it had the Thunderboard chip for backward SB compatibility. Once again, great video.
Thanks! I didn't mention some of the cards indeed, since they were not really historically relevant. If I got it right, the PAS Plus was a cut down version of the PAS16 and was released later. So PAS Plus is more a PAS16 Minus :) Unfortunately that card is also super rare to get details about it, so I just didn't mention it eventually...
I used the MPU401 support on my PAS16 quite a bit, outputting to an external general MIDI keyboard for music. Never had any issues or game compatibility problems with it. I understand a real MPU401 has some seldom-used features that often aren't supported in compatibles, but that never got in my way. I've always kind of hated OPL/Adlib music, and switched to real MIDI at every opportunity.
Well, I'm not sure about that point, just relying on experience of others, because I have no external MPU-401 device at hand. As far as I heard, the MPU-401 on the PAS16 suffers badly of hanging note bug, similar to the Creatives one. In many games you don't realize it, but some games like Doom can sound really annoying. I can confirm such a bug for the Creative SB16 with a wavetable for example and some people write about similar or even worse issues on PAS16. Unfortunately can I neither confirm nor dismiss that statements.
@@necro_ware Hmm, not sure about any bug, but sure if you send a note on and then exit or reboot before sending a note off, yeah the keyboard is going to keep playing the note. I probably just power cycled the keyboard at that point, never really considered that a bug. If you mean notes getting stuck on while playing a song, due to note off events randomly getting dropped, I guess maybe that did happen rarely now that I think about it. I guess I never knew for certain that it was the card and not my keyboard or the MIDI cables to blame though. In any case again it was easy enough to resolve by cycling the keyboard, though that would make all voices play as piano until the next song.
I had one! Got it at a computer show and wasn't sure if i'd gotten ripped off. It was amazing. I think i saved 20$ over a sb16 or sb16 pro at the time if not more.
I had some AWE32, but I sold them all and left only AWE64 in my collection. It is almost the same card and it sounds really good, but I it is quite common and the most people know it quite good. Since most of AWE32 and all AWE64 don't have the Yamaha OPL3 FM sound anymore, but use Creatives CQM instead, they sometimes sounds quite disappointing in older games. That's why this cards are not too much appreciated in the retro community. Anyway, they are still good and easy to find, so there are many videos on youtube about them already. I currently don't really feel the need to make another one. May be some day in the future, but for now I instead prefer to show something, what not everybody can find so easily.
@@necro_ware I can appreciate that, but thanks for the shout-out to the card here :) I was frankly blown away by the difference in midi between the SB16 and the AWE32, like, for example, the old star wars games beatifully showed, Tie-Fighter and X-Wing come to mind ;)
Finally, some long-awaited recognotion for the PAS cards :) Как всегда информативно и доступно, мой лайк и респекты :) У меня были две карточки PAS, звучание очень нравилось. ДОСовские утилиты у них конечно дичь, даже не знал про половину функций ) А в Win98 дрова на PAS встроены, кстати, и работают там карты безупречно
Спасибо! Да, я в очень хорошем впечатлении от этой карты. И железо и софт шикарные. Звук, просто рядом ничего не валялось. Под винду не пробовал, так как я на ретро компах, всё таки, dos люблю, но спасибо за инфу, буду знать, если понадобится.
Great video. I worked for a PC clone company back in the 90s and I built a lot of pc's with Sounblasters but rarely any PAS. I always wanted a PAS 16 but I had to settl for a Soundblaster because of price. lol
Nice video, man! I’m quite familiar with the PAS but even I learned a few things here. I never thought to try setting the native and TB IRQ and DMA to the same value. Does that actually work? I could imagine it might, so long as you don’t use them both at the same time.
Young PC consumer at the time, I sticked with Creative, first with a soundblaster pro, then a AWE32... I don't remember seeing any pro audio spectrum box in computer shops...
Well, as I said in the video, Creative made a much more aggressive marketing and even used illegal tricks to push the competition out of the market. Also the Sound Blaster Pro and especially AWE32 came much later to the market, than the Pro Audio Spectrum. At that time PAS was much more expensive, than Creatives products, but you could find already Jazz16 cards, which were still good quality products, but not as revolutionary as the PAS was before.
Wow, Trackblaser Pro! I had that! LOL We had one of these cards for a while, really good. Strangely I recall us having this card, GUS and AWE32. Not sure why we changed sound cards so many times....maybe mom listened to me dream about this and that from magazines? Those were awesome days!
I have been looking for the Trak Blaster Pro player that came with the PAS16 for years. My uncle had it and I loved just turning down the lights and vibing to the dozen or so tracks that came with it. I've since discovered most of those tracks, but can't find the program or the install disks it came from anywhere. Could you help me out a bit or point me in a direction? This is the most recent thing I've seen posted that might not have been lost to the sands of time.
A friend of mine was getting rid of some old crap in his basement, and I asked him to bring over some old PCs to see if there was anything useful in them. One of them had the LMSI version of the PAS16! I had never heard of this sound card, nor the LMSI connection. In the video you mention LMSI as being a proprietary cd-rom connection. Apparently it was an attempted standard that just never caught on (shame as the cable for it is much much smaller than an IDE or SCSI one). The Compaq that my friend gave me has the CD-ROM with it as well, so nice bonus find. 486DX@50 I think is what was inside. Too bad LMSI didn’t catch on at all, the cable is only a bit wider than SATA…
Yes, LMSI was a proprietary interface by Philips. I'm not sure if they tried to standardize that, but they licensed it to couple of manufacturers. It was designed primary for optical drives, but wasn't universal enough for other data storages AFAIK. May be it could have been developed to s.t. better, but patents and licenses didn't make it possible.
@necro_ware yeah, usually when I think proprietary, I consider it being one that say Creative or MediaVision would have built on. Other manufacturers could have used it. Unlike, say, MCA and IBM. By the way, love your channel, been binging your videos... I screwed up my Atari PC4, and been looking at your methods of repairing traces, which inevitably I need to do...
I still miss my PAS16. I swapped it out for an AWE32. The AWE wave table was nice, but the PAS audio was better on the whole. Great to remember this card!
so i pulled out my pas16, recapped it and got to looking at it closely... there's no -5v pin on it. my sb2.0 has it, but not my pas16. in fact, out of the plethora of sound cards i have, the sb2.0 is the only one with a -5v pin that connects to anything. seems some 16 variants didn't bother with the -5v. how odd.
I had a computer with both a PAS16 and a SoundBlaster 16, all configured so that I didn't have to have a boot menu but I still had plenty of low RAM. Each DOS game was setup to use whatever sound features were the best it supported. The PAS16 wasn't actually made by MediaVision, it was a "Reel Magic" combination VGA and sound card, minus all the video and SCSI parts. Apparently the company intended it to be used as a second PAS16 alongside the full video+sound+SCSI Reel Magic card. Simpler to just not populate most of the parts rather than make a different PCB design for the sound only card. Yup, the PAS16 supported having TWO of them in the same PC. I assume there must have been some software that supported four OPL3 channels or may have been able to use the the mono OPL2 support on two cards for stereo, or 4 channel PCM or??? The SCSI controller on PAS16 cards with it was automatically recognized as a Trantor SCSI controller by Windows 95, and a daisy chain of several SCSI devices could be connected, but lacking a BIOS the sound card couldn't be used to boot the computer. Not that you'd want to because it was SLOW. Just fast enough to handle the transfer speed of a 4x CD-ROM. MediaVision may have produced a "holy grail" of sound cards, or it may have been vaporware. I saw an announcement or advertisement for a card named "ProZonic", described as supporting just about every PC sound card standard there was. PAS16, Jazz16, all the SoundBlasters, Covox etc. IIRC the only one it was not claimed to support was Gravis UltraSound. Would have been the ultimate in ISA audio, one card, no configuration hassles, plays well with ALL the games. That was probably right around the time MediaVision went bankrupt, then was reorganized and the new MediaVision insisted several products with their company name, logo etc printed right on the card did not exist. I had one, a Jazz16, said so right on the card. The guy I talked to at MediaVision (at the time I knew nothing about the bankruptcy and reorganization) insisted there was no such soundcard, they'd never made any soundcard named Jazz16. So if there are any ProZonic cards, even prototypes or engineering samples, it would be quite a collector's item.
Im trying to figure out where the Media Vision products went after bankruptcy. I know they rebooted as Aureal, but someone else got the assets before they rebooted. I think it was an Indian company....random question i know but thought id ask...
Thank you very much. You can't compare sound cards from back then with today's solutions, since the CPUs in modern PCs are able to mix hundreds of digital channels simultaneously and any FM sound can be simulated in software easily as well. Such immense calculating power was not available in the early 90s, so of course this cards are children of their time.
Weird decision from Creative. As far as I understand PCB design. When you already have a two layer PCB it doesn't cost any extra to leave a large ground plane on the rear side for example. Maybe you need more layers to complete routing in combination with such a ground plane though. More layers is more expensive.
It does make it tad more complex as you need to tie all the ground planes together and with just 2 layers that can be difficult. Also just adding a ground plane doesn't magically solve everything, it also causes new problems and challenges as you now all your traces basicly are capacitors.
My only experience with media vision was with our first pc. It came with the media vision Memphis system. There is almost no info out there about it, but it to me at least seemed like a really great product. The sound was quite good with there own audio amp and speaker system, and it came with a cdrom built into the external speaker enclosure. It worked with all the games I ever played or tried to play even into the windows 9x days. Eventually the cdrom was too slow, so we had to upgrade when I tried to play riven. Would like to build a retro system and find one of these systems again.
Sounds interesting, never saw such product. Just googled for it and there is really not much of information about it. Some images, and couple of words on some forums.... exciting.
I was starting to think that all RUclips Videos were in Stereo or Mono only until watching this Video, WOW, All 5 Channels sprung to life at times such as at: 18:46 & 26:24 🙂🇬🇧
Yes, I know, they were also very interesting. Another nice example from a long list of companies, which were killed by Creative. Unfortunately I have none.
No matter what I do I can’t get this card to work with my cd rom drive at the same time. I have the version with the lmsi plug onboard and I’m wondering if that is giving me trouble. As soon as I install the card with the software it works perfect but It stops recognizing my cdrom as drive D and I get a wrong dos version error.
Spent 10 years looking on ebay and got this thing in a complete box. This was the first sound card my family had in our PC (486 66mhz). Later on I remember replacing it with a Sound Blaster 32. I had no idea Aureal is what became of Media Vision. I wish this company still existed as Creative's products have had a terrible run in quality...once in a while a good card does come out (SB X-FI series).
I found a very interesting card, a bit different from the ones I can find info on. It's named Pro Audio MTBL, made also by Mediavision, has both a Jazz16 chip and a Spectrum chip on it. Haven't installed it yet, does it mean I have both SB16 and PAS16 compatibility in a single card??
Another great video walking me down memory lane. I certainly appreciate the advancements in sound technology for my computers I like to use aftermarket high quality sound cards where applicable on board sound is ok but now with Graphics cards with HDMI audio qualitiy is is high but you do not get the features you may want to produce music for example even though you can but it isn't specific for that. They are good for gaming and everyday computing but if you want the highest quality Audio you do have to pay a premium for the pleasure. However I remember the old days of various Adlib/Sound blaster/Creative cards and generic compatible clones with really poor quality static sounding audio output. Especially when it was the days of analog CD ROM audio to soundcard via the CD ROM to Sound card analog cable that had no shielding the EMI interference was bad but when computers became faster and audio was read digitally in data form it was a game changer then mp3 came out and then the rest.
@@necro_ware That would be great! I often put soundcards in XT class systems but finding these old 8 bit ISA soundcards is getting harder. Luckily some soundcards use the 16 bit slot portion only for the IDE interface, like the Aztech Sound Galaxy.
@@ms-dosman7722 It doesn’t seem like the PAS16 is exactly abundant either. :-) Unless you already have one, of course. The (8-bit) PAS and Thunderboard are even more rare though. It took me forever to find one of each.
I had one of those because I could afford it, and my local WalMart sold the ProAudio Spectrum 16s.. I loved it, as I just had a system with a PC speaker at the time :-)
How about a video on Aztech sound cards? They had some quite good ISA cards, some of which they used their own chip designs on. Some of their products were sold as Reveal, usually with Reveal stickers put onto the Aztech chips. I remember having one "Reveal" sound card I was having problems getting to work. I peeled the Reveal sticker off to find an Aztech sticker. Peeled the Aztech sticker off to *ahem* reveal the actual manufacturer. I found drivers for *that* and was able to make it work. At some point Aztech had a huge clearance sale where they were getting rid of all their old stock of hardware that was out of production. I had an 8 bit Aztech card at the time and bought their special wavetable upgrade for it. I don't recall how much $ but it was super cheap - sounded super good though. I do remember I sold the card a while later with wavetable upgrade to a computer store for $50.
I have a lot of different Aztech sound cards in my collection. They were stuffed with features, that's why they are interesting too, but were always a really low quality products. Noisy like hell in both ways on the data bus as well as white noise on the output. I still like them too, because they had some features, which other cards didn't have.
Just bought it. It would be the best option for my 486 DX2/66 build. My card has LMSI interface but I cannot find pinout for it. As I understand, it provides some analog CD ROM output among other pins. And Windows 3.11 mixer definitely has CD input (at least on pictures). Does anybody have LMSI pinout? Is it possible to use connect its pins to the CD ROM analog output?
I had this card for a very short period of time. Every time I turned on my computer, I can hear a pop sound. It was annoying, so I decided to return it.
I love this untold story against evil, and lucky to keep one PAS16 in my collections. One of my favorite war game supported PAS16 natively is Panzer General from SSI, try it ^&^
i think the other factor with creative is they marketed more towards gamers and not sound studio designers, together with price this was the more tempting offering to most general household non-business consumers. even the name soundblaster sounds more gamer oriented than media vision.
The difference in sound quality is still huge. If you play games with PAS, you hear it from the first second, especially if playing with headphones. Creative sucks badly compared to PAS in games too, not only in professional use cases.
I have 15 of these and for some reason windows 3.11 on my 486DX2 VLB system refuses to detect the hardware and anything that plays module files soft hangs.
Sound Blaster audio quality wasn't a problem. People used cheap speakers anyway. The real sound blaster issue was lack of hardware mixing like Amiga or SNES had. Gravis Ultrasound tried to fix this, but it's lack of real SB compatibility stopped GUS from becoming new PC Audio standard. Sound Blaster used up to 20% of CPU, especially in games that used amiga modules. GUS on the other hand had barely any performance loss. Playing PCM samples on GUS was as lightweight as FM synth on Adlib/SB. Later Crative cards had similar features. Very popular SB LIVE could mix up to 128 channels. This had impact in windows 9x games. Especially those with MOD music. Unreal games used 12+ channel mods.
Ahm, no, there is a reason, why Sound Blaster 1.0 through 2.0 were called noise blaster. The amount of noise bleeding through the data bus was simply incredible, doesn't matter how bad your speakers were. I'm not talking about white noise, that was also bad, but compared to the data bus noise that can be completely ignored. That sound cards were even completely unusable with the headphones, since there you even sometimes couldn't hear the main sound, when during playback an IDE access happened for example. That was definitely the biggest problem of that sound card by a huge margin. In regards of performance drop due to missing hardware mixer, yes, you are kind of right, but that lost very fast on importance back than. The first sound cards end of 80's were made for the XT and 286 class machines. They supported only FM sound and were not very CPU hungry. As the first sound cards with digital sound support hit the market, the 386DX was already coming strong and there were yet almost no games available with digital sound support. As the first games appeared, they were made backwards compatible with XT and 286 and there the processing of digital sound took really up to 20% of performance. But that CPUs were usually to slow for the games anyway and the number was already under 10% on a 386DX and under 5% on a low end 486 around 1993. The game developers limited the amount of digital channels to keep the CPU load low and the GUS, with it's 32 hardware channels (with some limitations in the sampling rate), was theoretically a win, but usually not in games, since nobody wanted to make a special implementation for GUS. So the benefit remained basically in the demo scene and had no relevance for the most users. This was one of the reasons by the way, why GUS failed eventually. Hardware mixer would be good, if they would come 5 years earlier with it on a 286. I am a devoted collector of sound cards from that time and was a games developer in the mid 90's. So I was confronted with all that stuff not only as a user, but also as a developer back then. And today I'm often evaluating the technology and sound card innovations for fun.
@@necro_ware Software mixing never got good enough. Even PS5 has dedicated audio chip, to not use CPU for mixing or GPU for audio ray-tracing. Sound Blaster could play 22 KHz samples and later cards were able to do 44 kHz at 16 bit, yet DOS games rarely supported anything better than 11 kHz at 8-bit. On the other hand Amiga games used 44 Khz at 8-bit by default. Software mixing was heavy. Jazz Jackrabbit recommended Pentium CPU for high-quality music, while Amiga with 7 MHz CPU could easily run games that had better graphics and music. It takes nearly 100% CPU power on fast 386SX to play 44 kHz 8-bit amiga modules in stereo. You needed 486 to play modules at 16-bit and 44kHz, but it took nearly all CPU to do so. Mod4Win had a feature to record mods to WAV files, so they could be played in the background without taking most of the CPU time. Original Sound Blaster beat Adlib, because it was 100% compatible, affordable and could play PCM samples. GUS had a chance to be the next PC standard. It was affordable and had so needed hardware mixing. There were two problems. First, very poor compatibility with Sound Blaster. Second, they didn't include SDK or documentation with retail cards. Developers had to pay additionally to get technical documentation. GUS wasn't good enough to replace Sound Blaster and had no software support. This gave time for Creative to bring AWE32 and games started to rely on MIDI and CD Audio anyway. Consoles on the other hand relied on hardware mixing. Many Playstation games used music modules like Amiga or SNES, just at higher fidelity instead of CD-Audio.
Ah I remember those days. My first card ever was the 8-bit ATI Stereo FX. It had 8w amplifiers instead of the SB 4watts. I made my own speakers out of a set of Pioneer Car Woofers and the box of some old Sony Boombox Woofers. Duke Nukem 2 was POUNDING!
I also have the ATI Stereo FX. A super rare card, which I'm proud to have in my collection. It has an outstanding audio quality as well and supports aside Sound Blaster, also Game Blaster aka Creative Music System. Awesome card.
@@necro_ware Ah I'm jealous man. I sold my car literally decades ago. I think I bought it back in 1998? And I probably had it until around 2002, when I could finally afford a better card, and that ended up being the Logitech SoundMan Wave, which I got specifically for the MPU-401 compatibility so I would use my Korg X5 synthesizer as a MIDI playback device. I used to compare the wavetable of the SoundMan Wave to the X5. Sure it couldn't match up to the quality, but it was pretty damn good. The other card I was looking into was the AudioTrix Pro, but that was way too expensive for me at the time, like twice as much as the SoundMan Wave
back then ...their were many sound card scalpers of the day back then...crazy true during 90's ...$600 just for sound cards...its crazy era until the collapse of sound mining then gpu cards start their thing
Yes, I know at least one PAS16 card, which was released under the name Logitech. Still it was a MediaVision card, just with Logitech logo on it. As MediaVision became Aureal, they never made their Vortex sound cards under the own name, but sold the technology and produced the cards for Diamond, Hercules and many others.
@@necro_ware aye, I have an MX-300 (need to get the daughterboard for MIDI, as well as the digital audio bracket), and at one point had a few OEM Turtle Beach AU8830 cards.
Fantastic overview of the card, and very comprehensive tests, great job! About the only thing I can think of to add is that the PAS16 is special in another way: It can reroute the PC speaker audio through the card not using any wires. I touch on this briefly here: ruclips.net/video/wi2tW23qb9c/видео.html
Yes! I tested it in multiple mainboards, but it didn't work everywhere. Unfortunately I was short on time to dig deeper into it and forgot to mention it eventually.
That card was usually unproblematic in respect to the time. However, that times were not as simple as today and messing around with IRQs, DMAs and other resources was too much for a lot of people. In the most cases the issue was sitting between the chair and the keyboard ;)
I loved my Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Vortex 2 card. Under windows 98 it was amazing. But then Windows XP happened and all support for Vortex 2 was gone. There were no official drivers for the Vortex 2 under Windows XP. Only generic Microsoft drivers that came with XP that didn't support any of the Vortex 2's special features. Under XP it essentially became a generic sound card. Wish I still had the card to build an awesome Win98 gamebox but it died on me while using it in my XP gamebox. Now I have a POS Creative SoundBlaster PCI. Which is not a POS because Creative. I like their cards. No it's a POS because it's a post buyout Ensoniq card in disguise. It works though but has no hardware accelerated audio support and XP was the last Microsoft OS to support hardware accelerated sound. Would like to pick up an Audigy2 card to replace it.
I had an SB16 with a date of 1992. It was loaded with capacitors and jumpers. It sounded perfect and never had a problem with it. I used that card for 10years, it eventuality got noisy. My mate had a PAS16, not sure of date. It sounded like shit compared to mine, and it gave no end of problems.
I guess, that's a very subjective opinion. Of course I don't know the system setup of your friend back in the days, but at least in terms of quality PAS16 is technically by far a better sound card. Apparently, I collect ISA sound cards and investigated and reverse engineered them quite a lot. I have almost all Creative cards at hand and three different SB16 among them. One with new Panasonic high-quality caps, which Creative didn't even think to use back in the days. So I can compare them quite good. If you are interested in details, as I said in the video SB16 improved very much compared to its predecessor SB2.0. Creative finally got managed to get rid of the data bus noise, but they were still not as good as PAS16 in regards of the white noise. One of the reasons was, that SB16 made the digital to analogue conversion very early in the chain and was trying to mix and filter the audio signal afterwards. PAS16 on the other hand postponed this step and worked with digital sound as long as possible. They added high quality DACs and moved them out of the DSP to the very end of the signal processing. Not only did it give us very impressive sound control features, which were non existent otherwise at that time, this is also why you will see almost none of the electrolytic caps on the PAS16, except of two bigger decoupling caps right before the output. SB16 on the other hand used a lot of cheap electrolytic caps, which degraded over the time and introduced even more noise. PAS16 didn't need to use them, since in digital part you can better use tantalum caps, which are a lot more expensive. That was the reason for Creative to make their design in the first place - the price, just as always! Also the fact, that PAS16 didn't use electrolytic caps makes this sound card sound today just the same as it did sound 30 years ago. Without the need to recap it. Comparing those two cards is a hard thing, since one was a cheap consumer oriented product and the other was a semi-professional high quality product, which was probably too expensive. It's like with digital cameras today, you won't buy an expensive DSLR, if you want to make your pictures in Auto-Mode all the time. It's not worth the money, since in Auto-Mode it is probably just as good (or sometimes worse) as a smartphone. But if you need to get more out of it, you will reach the limits of a simple camera quite fast. A sad fact is, that as soon as MediaVision was dissolved, Creative dropped the quality dramatically and introduced all the cost reduced SB16 Value and Vibra cards, again with only dual layer PCBs, noisy and with CQM instead of OPL3.
@@necro_ware Big reply... The SB16 92 or 93 is the only product I've ever liked from creative, The non plug and play ones. It did sound pretty good with that fresh at the time CD quality sound... I have noticed how cheap any other product looks, including other SB16s... I couldn't recommend anything from them. My mate only had a 386, im thinking now maybe he didnt have the PAS16 but just a PAS. Maybe he had frequency and/or sample bit limitations. Anyway I subbed, cheers dude
the bare PCB said, double sided PCB, has both copper clad at their sides. then desired circuit is edged out chemically. so, it is by design it has bigger ground plane, nothing to do with the cost.
This was already discussed in the comments below. What you say is true for small amounts of PCBs, like what you'd do for yourself. But if you order amounts in millions, it works a little bit different and there the weight of copper plays a big role in the final costs.
@@necro_ware i beg to differ. the pcb process is standard. the bare pcb cost depends on the copper thickness (how many OZ per area) that you asked for and how many layers. if they are using same thickness of copper and same size, the material cost is the same. when the copper is etched to solution, it is hard to recover.
Again, you think too small :) You have to thing in industrial style. I was working for a big company, which produced huge amounts of hardware many years ago. There even every gram of the solution left after etching was measured in thousands of €. It was turned back into coper and reused. It would be a huge waste to just throw it away. So, if you order a PCB at let's say PCBway, you just pay for the whole coper, which covers the surface completely. Doesn't matter how much you really use in the final product. It is not worth to negotiate about it, if you make only couple of PCBs, but if you produce millions, it's just another dimension.
@@necro_ware for machining such as connector manufacturer, yes. but for the costing of the pcb, it is just that. it has nothing to do with trace/ pattern on board due to etching time is the same.
This channel must be one of the best kept secrets on RUclips.
Agreed
I had one of those cards. Very awesome. They really went to town on the analog audio quality. One thing I noticed about my card was the analog Cd audio plug. They had used a guard ground for the braided shield in the audio cable, and used separate ground for the left and right channel. The guard ground was only connected to the case ground, the left and right grounds went to their own pre amplifier. They would use any signal accidentally generated on the guard ground to subtract it from the audio, and the separate grounds were "mixed" back into their respective channel. This would really reduce the digital noise that would leak into the cable and cause noise to appear and was really good in preventing the channels from "leaking" into each other.
Very interesting, shows once again how much MediaVision cared about the quality. Thank you for the information.
In addition to the quality problems, Creative were surprisingly shady with their business practices too. LGR has a good video on how they screwed the competition with artificial chip shortages by contracting out Yamaha
Yes, unfortunately Creative was more busy with eliminating opponents in different unfair ways, than with making good products. They've stolen the OPL2 idea from AdLib and killed that company by silent agreements with yamaha. All the Creatives PCI sound cards were from Ensoniq, which they bought previously, because Creative didn't get managed to make own products. Later, as MediaVision became Aureal, Creative couldn't compete again in technological way, so they sued Aureal and actually lost, but the case costed Aureal so much, that they wen bankrupt. And again, Creative killed a company with the better products with money. Not "Creative" at all, if you ask me.
@@necro_ware You could argue it caught up with them: by the time they had eliminated all of their competition (in the late Windows 98 era) Microsoft was well on the way to rendering Creative irrelevant with the reworked audio system in Vista onward.
@@ironhead2008 DirectSound pretty much started taking over between Win98SE and XP, long before Vista came out. It was really the death of DOS games that put the nail in the coffin. At the same time you have the proliferation of AC'97 in the budget sound card market, and typically better products from the competition in the mid-high end market.
@@ironhead2008 I'd say Realtek killed them off by outdoing them at their own game. They've been the standard in integrated audio for decades now.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 I was more thinking in the realm of hardware accelerated audio. Vista all but nuked that. I don't think creative was ever more than a bit player in integrated audio in the pre Vista era. I suspect if they had been a bigger player though, they might have managed to get MS and Intel to let them have a seat at the table going forward. However, tat would require Creative to play well with others, which just is not in the corporate DNA
24:06 Perhaps the most haunting music of all time for a computer game.... a world awaits you Avatar
I had a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 in a hand-me-down 486 system that was the family computer as a kid. That card got lost somewhere in the shuffle of upgrades and parts trades with friends, because I didn't appreciate its features and quality back then, but retrospectively, it was a great card with a great sound. I never should have let it go.
I just bought another one on Ebay to put into the retro gaming build I'm getting together to replay those old DOS and early Windows games. It was absolutely my first choice, over anything from Creative, given how well I remember it being a superior standout.
In the 90s, I bought a bundle with PAS16 and a SCSI CD-ROM for $100. I didn’t appreciate this card enough as a kid. I remember being annoyed by the driver requirement and compatibility issues. I quickly sold it for the same price I paid and went back to SB cards and IDE CD-ROMs. I wish I kept it.
Seeing that A3D logo taking shape actually gave me goosbumps! I had NO IDEA that the Aureal Vortex was actually born from the ashes of the Pro Audio Spectrum!! :-O
Yes, most of the people don't know it. That makes the surprise even better ;)
The tidbit at the end about Aureal delighted me. My Diamond Monster MX300 is my favorite Win98 era sound card. I'm proud that it has such great heritage.
I had this card. Best home PC audio card at the time unless you wanted the (expensive) professional-level Roland cards.
I still have mine.
the GUS was better IMHO
As a techie with a huge passion for the tech *just* before my time, I must thank you for uploading such insights into history.
Very surprised you don't have more subscribers, it's only a matter of time!
ESS ES1868Fs are also pretty good ISA sound cards, near perfect OPL3 replication with the ESFM, and no hanging note bug or dma click bug.
I prefer the ESS cards for this reason. Their drivers make them easy to use too.
@@AshtonCoolman i even had good luck with Aztech as well.
Thank You for great presentation great MediaVision cards.
the sheer number of physical parts on those sound cards is impressive
More copper doesn't necessarily mean higher costs, because PCBs are made starting with a board completely covered in copper and by removing all the copper the design doesn't need.
More layers are more expensive though, as are more vias in some cases.
Having the same number of layers, a card with a bigger ground plane can be the one with the more careful design compared to the other one but not the better manufactured one.
Thank you very much for the interesting post. I'm mostly agreed, since I tinker a lot and order quite a lot of PCBs myself. However, I would like to add two things, first of all the amount of PCBs you order and the time play an important role. If you order only some PCBs today the manufacturer simply charges you the whole copper on the PCB, regardless how much you need on the final project. The copper they remove from the PCBs will be reused and not thrown away, but with a small batches it's not wort it to take every mg into account. However if you order millions of PCBs it can matter and the companies can negotiate about it. Furthermore back then the techniques of PCB manufacturing were quite different as today and since Creative was very much profit oriented, they negotiated about every cent. About all the other things you said, I'm absolutely agreed with you.
@@necro_ware You make a very good point. Having ordered and etched quite a few pcbs over the years I definitely come from a tinkerer's standpoint. Thanks for the interesting insight!
Thank you for this wonderful documentary and configuration tutorial for the PAS 16. I grew up with this card in my 486 and Pentium but didn't have as many fond memories with it as presented. I blame my own inexperience as a kid, not the hardware though.
Many of the games I wanted to play had little PAS support and I spent a lot of time in Soundblaster Compatible "mono" mode. Occasionally I'd hear something like SimCity 2000 with that glorious OPL3 FM sound and I remember just how much better that sounded than every other game in Soundblaster mode.
I didn't know enough at the time what was going on with the card and my experience (surrounded by friends with Sound Blasters) was that my card emulating a Sound Blaster sounded worse than theirs through computer speakers of the day.
I'm ashamed I misplaced my PAS 16... I would love to apply what I know now to really exercise what I missed as a kid.
I, too, graduated from the PAS 16 to an Aureal Vortex, then eventually and Aureal Vortex 2. After Creative stifled them, I swore off Creative for good.
Absolutely excellent video. I've enjoyed watching it several times now... usually when a listing for a PAS 16 pops up on eBay.
Just found your channel and love it. All these retro parts bring back so much memories. Back in the day compatibility was a battle not as easy as today
I owned a PAS16 for many years and loved it dearly.
My biggest issue I ever had:
Adaptec AHA-1542B SCSI HA compatibility issues. Not one, but TWO of them!
1. To boot from the AHA-1542, I had to use the default port of 0330H. Hmmm, something must use this.. . OH YES,. THE MPU-401 USES THAT PORT!
2. The AHA-1540 and AHA-1542 cards are busmastering cards. If you have one of those motherboards where you can adjust/tweak bus speeds/DMA speeds, you WILL have problems when you have both card types in the system, guaranteed, EVEN IF THERE ARE NO CONFLICTS. The moment I went to a Buslogic Bt-445C, those problems went away because transfers happened over VLB, not ISA.
I later supplemented this card with a Gravis UltraSound ACE, which was designed to work with an existing sound card. Later, I upgraded the ACE to a full megabyte (came with 512K). Pure bliss.
Thanks for showing up to give me some nostalgia~!
Oh, and here's a subscription for that trip down memory lane.
Awesome video. I never owned a PAS card in the past, but I'm really interested in checking it out for the better audio quality. Some of the creative cards I've heard have bad noise levels (especially the SB32 I own). Thanks for sharing!
I have been binge watching all your videos. Man alive, best trip down memory lane I've had in a long long time!
The Pro Audio had one distinct advantage for me at the time: that SCSI bus at the back. At the time, there were no IDE CD-ROMs as far as I can remember. My first was a 1x speed with a caddy. I don't think the DOS software that came with the card supported any SCSI devices besides CD ROMs, but when I started using Linux in '93, there was general SCSI support off the Pro audio, so I was able to scrounge a couple external drive enclosures and a scanner at the university. I don't even remember the sound capabilities!
Had a Crystal Semiconductor card (brand owned by Cirrus Logic) which i can not forget all the noises of the poor OPL2 playback of that. Had various on-board soundcards later. C-Media, ESS Allegro and SoundMAX to name some, but they had software wavetable for midi playback.
19:00 Oh that's cool!
And that sounds *great*
Its awesome and I want to hear the whole track ;(
Thanks for this video, comes right in time since I got a Pro audio spectrum 16 today that someone gave away. I had no idea what that sound card was all about but now I am better informed
Got one of these for Christmas one year. Loved that card & miss the 90s.
Sick channel and content man. Needs more RUclips traffic, way underrated.
Wow this is an awesome video. 👏 I was a Sound Blaster user but discovered the PAS16 sometime after and I was impressed. I still have good memories that this video helped bring back. I really should have kept one of the PAS cards. Anyway it's great to see someone revisit them and do the comparisons etc.. I love PC industry history. The companies that battled it out with competing products. Great stuff for sure. 😃
Nice, I have a PAS 16, but have never really taken it into action (yet). I should change that...
One correction: The SB Pro doesn't have two DSP chips, I'm not sure what the second one (on the left) is doing, but probably not the same - maybe it does the Stereo setup/channel switching handling. It has about the same DSP chip as the SB 2.0. In fact, it STILL outputs mono as first step. The channels are separated by switching L/R for every sample (one of the smaller ICs beneath the amps should do that). That's the reason why it can play 44.1 in Mono, but only 22.05 KHz in Stereo - it's essentially halved.
I remember the SB16 "DMA" clicking from my expensive AWE32 "value" edition as well - but from Day of the Tentacle, the intro scene where Purple Tentacle says something. So if this is at hand, it may be an alternative.
Yes, makes totally sense, thank you for the correction. I just looked once again, the left IC is the DSP and the right one is indeed CT1345, a mixer.
@@necro_ware So I confused them as well, or their order ;). Good to know! Also explains part of my theory: The mixer chip also handles the stereo setup programming wise, so indeed it handles at least partially the stereo part.
I remember having an Creative Labs and a Gravis Ultrasound in my 386 and 486 so that I could have sound in different programs and constantly having to switch the speaker cables.
You could use a Line-In input of one of the cards to loop through the audio output, so you wouldn't need to switch the cable...
@@necro_ware in later years I did it that way, but in dos days it meant having to close the current program, run the program for volume controls and then go back to the other program. But when I had windows and still needed 3 or4 cards, because there was no direct X yet, I ran line out to line in and my AWE64 gold was the main card because it had RCA jacks to my amp. I mostly used my computer for making music and needed to play more than 1 sound/program at a time and had midi devices plugged in.
18:06 I can confirm the PAS16 (studio XL) which has the waveblaster header has the hanging notes bug, most likely if you plug a an external MIDI synth such as MT-32 through the mpu401 joystick port would be the same.
Edit: btw I have never in my life purchased a Creative product, after the PAS16 I got a TurtleBeach and never looked back.
I'm looking for the Aureal episode now :)
You really took me down memory lane as I had a PAS16. Look at those discrete output transistors! That is something SB hasn't done until recently. I loved the Trakblaster mixer! Also remember setting up EMS / XMS memory like you said! Also having multiple boot sequences for different games! The audio card I bought after PAS had passed, pun intended, was an Xitel A3D card. I still have it to this day... too bad windows destroyed compatibility. By far my favorite devices in the computer to this day! Gimme that sweet sound!
Trackblaster I remember spending a whole bunch of time just listening to the mod files it came with. But I remember a issue that we had with our AMD 386DX-40 where if you tried playing in 44kHz mode (Which I think it warned against, memory is fuzzy) it would play for a seemingly random duration then hard lock on a hanging note.
Back in the day I had a PAS16 and GUS in my family's computer, and there were only a few times I missed SBpro compatibility. SCSI was also an incredible feature, but the card did not have option ROM to enable booting from SCSI devices. I went through my larval Linux phase in the mid-90s with a PAS16 and surplus SCSI hard drives. It wasn't fast, but it worked.
The SCSI on the PAS16 cards didn't have a boot ROM because it was never intended to be used as a hard drive controller. The SCSI controller was there so that the card could be bundled with SCSI CD-ROM drives in high-end multimedia kits. It was a great one-stop solution for adding a CD-ROM drive to a 486. Occasionally, if you're really looking, you can still find new-old-stock kits using PAS16 cards on Ebay.
Why is your channel so excellent? And why didn't RUclips recommend it to me?
1) It's subjective, but thank you. 2) I don't know :D
Dang! Fool of me that got into the marketing BS and really tough that I was always getting the best by purchasing the creative products, SB 2.0, AWE32, SB Live... I really should had known better but the press always ended their reviews with the same conclusion, SB compatibility rules! 🙄
Thanks for such an history lesson, you are a wonderful box full of surprises!
Honestly, you were better off. I had an SB Pro, and saw a friend using the PAS16 with TrakBlaster Pro, and just HAD to have a 16-bit sound card. So I ended up getting a Pro Audio Studio 16 - just a PAS16 in a bigger bundle. I loved the 16-bit stereo DAC, but there were so many games and trackers that didn’t have native PAS support that I was frequently falling back to SB 2.0 support.
When I finally replaced that PAS with an AWE32, I was relieved to finally have a card that _just worked_ again.
The PAS was a good card, don’t get me wrong. Was it better than a SB16? I mean... maybe...? I dunno. It’s hard to say.
Yeah, there’s the DMA bug. If you surveyed people in 1994 about whether they were aware of their audio card adding clicks to samples, next to nobody would’ve noticed. Those 8-bit samples _all_ sound clicky - what are you talking about?
And the noise levels? Well, most people were using crappy amplified speakers that hissed like a feral cat. And had a CD-ROM connected via a cable that probably wasn’t shielded, and ran right through the memory sticks and by the hard drive ribbon cable.
And then there’s the hanging note bug. That is a first world problem if ever there was one. Who, in the 90s, actually had an MT32 or Sound Canvas anyway? No, everyone was using FM synth, because it’s all any of us could afford. ;-)
So, yeah, the SB line was far from perfect. Yeah they were aggressive a-holes to other audio companies. But the only thing that mattered, as a consumer, was having a card that worked in all the software you had. And that... was Sound Blaster. Everything else was a distant second. (Although the GUS was pretty cool for its time! But you really had to be a MOD or demo scene fan to make it worth it.)
The SB Live is crap, because she doesn't use OPL chips anymore.
@@nickwallette6201 After a few weeks with the SB Pro 2.0, I changed to a Trust 32 card with a Gravis Ultrasound MAX in tandem. The Trust 32 card was cheap and wonderfully compatible with the SB16 and it had GM and GS wavetable.
@@turrican4d599 Oh man yeah! I have a GUS Ace that I considered pairing with an SB Pro. That would be an early-mid 90s dream machine. But, I also have a bad habit of using SCSI cards for external Zip and CD drives, so it makes things tight trying to assign unique IRQs. It would’ve worked better back in the day when a SCSI card cost $300, plus peripherals, so I didn’t have to worry about making room for all that hardware I couldn’t afford. ;-)
My solution now is to just have a GUS box, where I installed a Max, and I don’t worry about running software that requires SB support because I have other machines for that.
Thank you for this video, Necroware. Any plans in the MediaVision history to show the Thunderboard in the flesh?
I was very excited! Nice review! Thanks. I will try my PAS16
This whole video I was trying to remember what sound card I had in my first machine, a 486. Then you mentioned Jazz16 and my mind triggered! NO idea which card I actually had, but it was a Jazz16 based card. Thanks!
That music from Descent brings back memories. Recognized the Ultima VI music from the first note. The entire Ultima series is absolutely fantastic and I am sad that EA don't want to sell the Ultima IP to Richard Garriott :-(
I loved this video, there are very few videos regarding this card in youtube. Back in the 90s (around 92 or 93) My dad bought our first CD/sound kit. Came with many games like civ1, mantis, comptons encyclopedia, battle chess and many others. I was lucky to have that kit, few people back then had one of those and they all played with internal speaker. The kit came with a sony CDrom with a media vision pas16 and labtec speakers. I trully love the sound of it on DOS gaming, and years after i was able to compare against all the bugs that SB16 had, like hanging not bug and i just go back to my PAS16. Im currently building a k6-3 retro pc, i has AT + ATX connector, maybe i will not need a voltage blaster at all.
Cool! Many older ATX power supplies do provide -5V as well, so you don't need AT. However, they were usually produced before 2004 and unfortunately a lot of power supplies from that time were very low quality. So take a look at least at the caps inside before you connect it.
There was an in-between model, the PAS “plus”. I’m assuming it was the same as the PAS 16 but with 8-bit audio. I think it had the Thunderboard chip for backward SB compatibility. Once again, great video.
Thanks! I didn't mention some of the cards indeed, since they were not really historically relevant. If I got it right, the PAS Plus was a cut down version of the PAS16 and was released later. So PAS Plus is more a PAS16 Minus :) Unfortunately that card is also super rare to get details about it, so I just didn't mention it eventually...
I used the MPU401 support on my PAS16 quite a bit, outputting to an external general MIDI keyboard for music. Never had any issues or game compatibility problems with it. I understand a real MPU401 has some seldom-used features that often aren't supported in compatibles, but that never got in my way.
I've always kind of hated OPL/Adlib music, and switched to real MIDI at every opportunity.
Well, I'm not sure about that point, just relying on experience of others, because I have no external MPU-401 device at hand. As far as I heard, the MPU-401 on the PAS16 suffers badly of hanging note bug, similar to the Creatives one. In many games you don't realize it, but some games like Doom can sound really annoying. I can confirm such a bug for the Creative SB16 with a wavetable for example and some people write about similar or even worse issues on PAS16. Unfortunately can I neither confirm nor dismiss that statements.
@@necro_ware Hmm, not sure about any bug, but sure if you send a note on and then exit or reboot before sending a note off, yeah the keyboard is going to keep playing the note. I probably just power cycled the keyboard at that point, never really considered that a bug.
If you mean notes getting stuck on while playing a song, due to note off events randomly getting dropped, I guess maybe that did happen rarely now that I think about it. I guess I never knew for certain that it was the card and not my keyboard or the MIDI cables to blame though. In any case again it was easy enough to resolve by cycling the keyboard, though that would make all voices play as piano until the next song.
I had one! Got it at a computer show and wasn't sure if i'd gotten ripped off. It was amazing. I think i saved 20$ over a sb16 or sb16 pro at the time if not more.
I would love to see you have a look at the SoundBlaster AWE32, just the sheer size and sound of it was awe-inspiring :)
I had some AWE32, but I sold them all and left only AWE64 in my collection. It is almost the same card and it sounds really good, but I it is quite common and the most people know it quite good. Since most of AWE32 and all AWE64 don't have the Yamaha OPL3 FM sound anymore, but use Creatives CQM instead, they sometimes sounds quite disappointing in older games. That's why this cards are not too much appreciated in the retro community. Anyway, they are still good and easy to find, so there are many videos on youtube about them already. I currently don't really feel the need to make another one. May be some day in the future, but for now I instead prefer to show something, what not everybody can find so easily.
@@necro_ware I can appreciate that, but thanks for the shout-out to the card here :) I was frankly blown away by the difference in midi between the SB16 and the AWE32, like, for example, the old star wars games beatifully showed, Tie-Fighter and X-Wing come to mind ;)
Finally, some long-awaited recognotion for the PAS cards :)
Как всегда информативно и доступно, мой лайк и респекты :) У меня были две карточки PAS, звучание очень нравилось. ДОСовские утилиты у них конечно дичь, даже не знал про половину функций ) А в Win98 дрова на PAS встроены, кстати, и работают там карты безупречно
Спасибо! Да, я в очень хорошем впечатлении от этой карты. И железо и софт шикарные. Звук, просто рядом ничего не валялось. Под винду не пробовал, так как я на ретро компах, всё таки, dos люблю, но спасибо за инфу, буду знать, если понадобится.
Great video. I worked for a PC clone company back in the 90s and I built a lot of pc's with Sounblasters but rarely any PAS. I always wanted a PAS 16 but I had to settl for a Soundblaster because of price. lol
Das war meine erste Soundkarte. War echt ne schöne Karte. War echt zufrieden damit. Lange her .... *schwelg
Sehr cool!
I dont know where I left my Pro Audio Sprectrum 😞
Very informative, thank you!
I also have the same pas16 :-) found it in a random auction lot last year and it is proudly sitting in a dx2/66
Nice video, man! I’m quite familiar with the PAS but even I learned a few things here.
I never thought to try setting the native and TB IRQ and DMA to the same value. Does that actually work? I could imagine it might, so long as you don’t use them both at the same time.
Thank you. Yes, it does work. I was also curious about it and could save some resources that way :)
Young PC consumer at the time, I sticked with Creative, first with a soundblaster pro, then a AWE32... I don't remember seeing any pro audio spectrum box in computer shops...
Well, as I said in the video, Creative made a much more aggressive marketing and even used illegal tricks to push the competition out of the market. Also the Sound Blaster Pro and especially AWE32 came much later to the market, than the Pro Audio Spectrum. At that time PAS was much more expensive, than Creatives products, but you could find already Jazz16 cards, which were still good quality products, but not as revolutionary as the PAS was before.
Wow, Trackblaser Pro! I had that! LOL We had one of these cards for a while, really good. Strangely I recall us having this card, GUS and AWE32. Not sure why we changed sound cards so many times....maybe mom listened to me dream about this and that from magazines? Those were awesome days!
I have been looking for the Trak Blaster Pro player that came with the PAS16 for years. My uncle had it and I loved just turning down the lights and vibing to the dozen or so tracks that came with it. I've since discovered most of those tracks, but can't find the program or the install disks it came from anywhere. Could you help me out a bit or point me in a direction? This is the most recent thing I've seen posted that might not have been lost to the sands of time.
A friend of mine was getting rid of some old crap in his basement, and I asked him to bring over some old PCs to see if there was anything useful in them. One of them had the LMSI version of the PAS16! I had never heard of this sound card, nor the LMSI connection. In the video you mention LMSI as being a proprietary cd-rom connection. Apparently it was an attempted standard that just never caught on (shame as the cable for it is much much smaller than an IDE or SCSI one). The Compaq that my friend gave me has the CD-ROM with it as well, so nice bonus find. 486DX@50 I think is what was inside. Too bad LMSI didn’t catch on at all, the cable is only a bit wider than SATA…
Yes, LMSI was a proprietary interface by Philips. I'm not sure if they tried to standardize that, but they licensed it to couple of manufacturers. It was designed primary for optical drives, but wasn't universal enough for other data storages AFAIK. May be it could have been developed to s.t. better, but patents and licenses didn't make it possible.
@necro_ware yeah, usually when I think proprietary, I consider it being one that say Creative or MediaVision would have built on. Other manufacturers could have used it. Unlike, say, MCA and IBM. By the way, love your channel, been binging your videos... I screwed up my Atari PC4, and been looking at your methods of repairing traces, which inevitably I need to do...
I still miss my PAS16. I swapped it out for an AWE32. The AWE wave table was nice, but the PAS audio was better on the whole. Great to remember this card!
so i pulled out my pas16, recapped it and got to looking at it closely... there's no -5v pin on it. my sb2.0 has it, but not my pas16. in fact, out of the plethora of sound cards i have, the sb2.0 is the only one with a -5v pin that connects to anything. seems some 16 variants didn't bother with the -5v.
how odd.
I had a computer with both a PAS16 and a SoundBlaster 16, all configured so that I didn't have to have a boot menu but I still had plenty of low RAM. Each DOS game was setup to use whatever sound features were the best it supported. The PAS16 wasn't actually made by MediaVision, it was a "Reel Magic" combination VGA and sound card, minus all the video and SCSI parts. Apparently the company intended it to be used as a second PAS16 alongside the full video+sound+SCSI Reel Magic card. Simpler to just not populate most of the parts rather than make a different PCB design for the sound only card.
Yup, the PAS16 supported having TWO of them in the same PC. I assume there must have been some software that supported four OPL3 channels or may have been able to use the the mono OPL2 support on two cards for stereo, or 4 channel PCM or???
The SCSI controller on PAS16 cards with it was automatically recognized as a Trantor SCSI controller by Windows 95, and a daisy chain of several SCSI devices could be connected, but lacking a BIOS the sound card couldn't be used to boot the computer. Not that you'd want to because it was SLOW. Just fast enough to handle the transfer speed of a 4x CD-ROM.
MediaVision may have produced a "holy grail" of sound cards, or it may have been vaporware. I saw an announcement or advertisement for a card named "ProZonic", described as supporting just about every PC sound card standard there was. PAS16, Jazz16, all the SoundBlasters, Covox etc. IIRC the only one it was not claimed to support was Gravis UltraSound. Would have been the ultimate in ISA audio, one card, no configuration hassles, plays well with ALL the games.
That was probably right around the time MediaVision went bankrupt, then was reorganized and the new MediaVision insisted several products with their company name, logo etc printed right on the card did not exist. I had one, a Jazz16, said so right on the card. The guy I talked to at MediaVision (at the time I knew nothing about the bankruptcy and reorganization) insisted there was no such soundcard, they'd never made any soundcard named Jazz16.
So if there are any ProZonic cards, even prototypes or engineering samples, it would be quite a collector's item.
Im trying to figure out where the Media Vision products went after bankruptcy. I know they rebooted as Aureal, but someone else got the assets before they rebooted. I think it was an Indian company....random question i know but thought id ask...
Great video! .. how's the quality compared with today's built-in sound cards?
Thank you very much. You can't compare sound cards from back then with today's solutions, since the CPUs in modern PCs are able to mix hundreds of digital channels simultaneously and any FM sound can be simulated in software easily as well. Such immense calculating power was not available in the early 90s, so of course this cards are children of their time.
You're right: "good enough" always wins.
Weird decision from Creative. As far as I understand PCB design. When you already have a two layer PCB it doesn't cost any extra to leave a large ground plane on the rear side for example. Maybe you need more layers to complete routing in combination with such a ground plane though. More layers is more expensive.
It does make it tad more complex as you need to tie all the ground planes together and with just 2 layers that can be difficult. Also just adding a ground plane doesn't magically solve everything, it also causes new problems and challenges as you now all your traces basicly are capacitors.
My only experience with media vision was with our first pc. It came with the media vision Memphis system. There is almost no info out there about it, but it to me at least seemed like a really great product. The sound was quite good with there own audio amp and speaker system, and it came with a cdrom built into the external speaker enclosure. It worked with all the games I ever played or tried to play even into the windows 9x days. Eventually the cdrom was too slow, so we had to upgrade when I tried to play riven. Would like to build a retro system and find one of these systems again.
Sounds interesting, never saw such product. Just googled for it and there is really not much of information about it. Some images, and couple of words on some forums.... exciting.
Another quality video.
I was starting to think that all RUclips Videos were in Stereo or Mono only until watching this Video, WOW, All 5 Channels sprung to life at times such as at: 18:46 & 26:24 🙂🇬🇧
The other card you may want to look at are those from turtle beach.
Yes, I know, they were also very interesting. Another nice example from a long list of companies, which were killed by Creative. Unfortunately I have none.
I’d love to see a video just on track blaster pro and the bundled mod files!
What about OpTi sound cards? They are also only emulating Soundblaster pro?
No matter what I do I can’t get this card to work with my cd rom drive at the same time. I have the version with the lmsi plug onboard and I’m wondering if that is giving me trouble. As soon as I install the card with the software it works perfect but It stops recognizing my cdrom as drive D and I get a wrong dos version error.
Spent 10 years looking on ebay and got this thing in a complete box. This was the first sound card my family had in our PC (486 66mhz). Later on I remember replacing it with a Sound Blaster 32. I had no idea Aureal is what became of Media Vision. I wish this company still existed as Creative's products have had a terrible run in quality...once in a while a good card does come out (SB X-FI series).
I still use an audigy 2 zs & have an old pci 128 in storage.
I found a very interesting card, a bit different from the ones I can find info on. It's named Pro Audio MTBL, made also by Mediavision, has both a Jazz16 chip and a Spectrum chip on it. Haven't installed it yet, does it mean I have both SB16 and PAS16 compatibility in a single card??
Wow that was amazing details and history thank you 😊
Another great video walking me down memory lane. I certainly appreciate the advancements in sound technology for my computers I like to use aftermarket high quality sound cards where applicable on board sound is ok but now with Graphics cards with HDMI audio qualitiy is is high but you do not get the features you may want to produce music for example even though you can but it isn't specific for that. They are good for gaming and everyday computing but if you want the highest quality Audio you do have to pay a premium for the pleasure. However I remember the old days of various Adlib/Sound blaster/Creative cards and generic compatible clones with really poor quality static sounding audio output. Especially when it was the days of analog CD ROM audio to soundcard via the CD ROM to Sound card analog cable that had no shielding the EMI interference was bad but when computers became faster and audio was read digitally in data form it was a game changer then mp3 came out and then the rest.
Very well executed research and video! Do you know if the PAS16 is 8 bit ISA compatible?
Interesting question, I don't know. I'll try to find some time to test it....
@@necro_ware That would be great! I often put soundcards in XT class systems but finding these old 8 bit ISA soundcards is getting harder. Luckily some soundcards use the 16 bit slot portion only for the IDE interface, like the Aztech Sound Galaxy.
@@ms-dosman7722 It doesn’t seem like the PAS16 is exactly abundant either. :-) Unless you already have one, of course.
The (8-bit) PAS and Thunderboard are even more rare though. It took me forever to find one of each.
Wow, where have you been all this time? Subscribed.
amazing video, it pleased my heart :-)))))
I had one of those because I could afford it, and my local WalMart sold the ProAudio Spectrum 16s.. I loved it, as I just had a system with a PC speaker at the time :-)
How about a video on Aztech sound cards? They had some quite good ISA cards, some of which they used their own chip designs on. Some of their products were sold as Reveal, usually with Reveal stickers put onto the Aztech chips. I remember having one "Reveal" sound card I was having problems getting to work. I peeled the Reveal sticker off to find an Aztech sticker. Peeled the Aztech sticker off to *ahem* reveal the actual manufacturer. I found drivers for *that* and was able to make it work.
At some point Aztech had a huge clearance sale where they were getting rid of all their old stock of hardware that was out of production. I had an 8 bit Aztech card at the time and bought their special wavetable upgrade for it. I don't recall how much $ but it was super cheap - sounded super good though. I do remember I sold the card a while later with wavetable upgrade to a computer store for $50.
I have a lot of different Aztech sound cards in my collection. They were stuffed with features, that's why they are interesting too, but were always a really low quality products. Noisy like hell in both ways on the data bus as well as white noise on the output. I still like them too, because they had some features, which other cards didn't have.
So are there games out there that you need to have a pro audio spectrum to get the best quality sound from?
Just bought it. It would be the best option for my 486 DX2/66 build. My card has LMSI interface but I cannot find pinout for it. As I understand, it provides some analog CD ROM output among other pins. And Windows 3.11 mixer definitely has CD input (at least on pictures). Does anybody have LMSI pinout? Is it possible to use connect its pins to the CD ROM analog output?
I had this card for a very short period of time. Every time I turned on my computer, I can hear a pop sound. It was annoying, so I decided to return it.
I love this untold story against evil, and lucky to keep one PAS16 in my collections. One of my favorite war game supported PAS16 natively is Panzer General from SSI, try it ^&^
I did throw away a GUS in my madness, now i miss it. good info though, thanks.
i think the other factor with creative is they marketed more towards gamers and not sound studio designers, together with price this was the more tempting offering to most general household non-business consumers. even the name soundblaster sounds more gamer oriented than media vision.
The difference in sound quality is still huge. If you play games with PAS, you hear it from the first second, especially if playing with headphones. Creative sucks badly compared to PAS in games too, not only in professional use cases.
I have 15 of these and for some reason windows 3.11 on my 486DX2 VLB system refuses to detect the hardware and anything that plays module files soft hangs.
Sounds like a resource conflict for me, check your IRQ/DMA settings.
Sound Blaster audio quality wasn't a problem. People used cheap speakers anyway.
The real sound blaster issue was lack of hardware mixing like Amiga or SNES had.
Gravis Ultrasound tried to fix this, but it's lack of real SB compatibility stopped GUS from becoming new PC Audio standard.
Sound Blaster used up to 20% of CPU, especially in games that used amiga modules.
GUS on the other hand had barely any performance loss. Playing PCM samples on GUS was as lightweight as FM synth on Adlib/SB.
Later Crative cards had similar features. Very popular SB LIVE could mix up to 128 channels. This had impact in windows 9x games. Especially those with MOD music. Unreal games used 12+ channel mods.
Ahm, no, there is a reason, why Sound Blaster 1.0 through 2.0 were called noise blaster. The amount of noise bleeding through the data bus was simply incredible, doesn't matter how bad your speakers were. I'm not talking about white noise, that was also bad, but compared to the data bus noise that can be completely ignored. That sound cards were even completely unusable with the headphones, since there you even sometimes couldn't hear the main sound, when during playback an IDE access happened for example. That was definitely the biggest problem of that sound card by a huge margin.
In regards of performance drop due to missing hardware mixer, yes, you are kind of right, but that lost very fast on importance back than. The first sound cards end of 80's were made for the XT and 286 class machines. They supported only FM sound and were not very CPU hungry. As the first sound cards with digital sound support hit the market, the 386DX was already coming strong and there were yet almost no games available with digital sound support. As the first games appeared, they were made backwards compatible with XT and 286 and there the processing of digital sound took really up to 20% of performance. But that CPUs were usually to slow for the games anyway and the number was already under 10% on a 386DX and under 5% on a low end 486 around 1993. The game developers limited the amount of digital channels to keep the CPU load low and the GUS, with it's 32 hardware channels (with some limitations in the sampling rate), was theoretically a win, but usually not in games, since nobody wanted to make a special implementation for GUS. So the benefit remained basically in the demo scene and had no relevance for the most users. This was one of the reasons by the way, why GUS failed eventually. Hardware mixer would be good, if they would come 5 years earlier with it on a 286.
I am a devoted collector of sound cards from that time and was a games developer in the mid 90's. So I was confronted with all that stuff not only as a user, but also as a developer back then. And today I'm often evaluating the technology and sound card innovations for fun.
@@necro_ware Software mixing never got good enough. Even PS5 has dedicated audio chip, to not use CPU for mixing or GPU for audio ray-tracing.
Sound Blaster could play 22 KHz samples and later cards were able to do 44 kHz at 16 bit, yet DOS games rarely supported anything better than 11 kHz at 8-bit. On the other hand Amiga games used 44 Khz at 8-bit by default.
Software mixing was heavy. Jazz Jackrabbit recommended Pentium CPU for high-quality music, while Amiga with 7 MHz CPU could easily run games that had better graphics and music.
It takes nearly 100% CPU power on fast 386SX to play 44 kHz 8-bit amiga modules in stereo. You needed 486 to play modules at 16-bit and 44kHz, but it took nearly all CPU to do so.
Mod4Win had a feature to record mods to WAV files, so they could be played in the background without taking most of the CPU time.
Original Sound Blaster beat Adlib, because it was 100% compatible, affordable and could play PCM samples.
GUS had a chance to be the next PC standard. It was affordable and had so needed hardware mixing. There were two problems. First, very poor compatibility with Sound Blaster. Second, they didn't include SDK or documentation with retail cards. Developers had to pay additionally to get technical documentation.
GUS wasn't good enough to replace Sound Blaster and had no software support. This gave time for Creative to bring AWE32 and games started to rely on MIDI and CD Audio anyway.
Consoles on the other hand relied on hardware mixing. Many Playstation games used music modules like Amiga or SNES, just at higher fidelity instead of CD-Audio.
Ah I remember those days. My first card ever was the 8-bit ATI Stereo FX. It had 8w amplifiers instead of the SB 4watts. I made my own speakers out of a set of Pioneer Car Woofers and the box of some old Sony Boombox Woofers. Duke Nukem 2 was POUNDING!
I also have the ATI Stereo FX. A super rare card, which I'm proud to have in my collection. It has an outstanding audio quality as well and supports aside Sound Blaster, also Game Blaster aka Creative Music System. Awesome card.
@@necro_ware Ah I'm jealous man. I sold my car literally decades ago. I think I bought it back in 1998? And I probably had it until around 2002, when I could finally afford a better card, and that ended up being the Logitech SoundMan Wave, which I got specifically for the MPU-401 compatibility so I would use my Korg X5 synthesizer as a MIDI playback device. I used to compare the wavetable of the SoundMan Wave to the X5. Sure it couldn't match up to the quality, but it was pretty damn good. The other card I was looking into was the AudioTrix Pro, but that was way too expensive for me at the time, like twice as much as the SoundMan Wave
back then ...their were many sound card scalpers of the day back then...crazy true during 90's ...$600 just for sound cards...its crazy era until the collapse of sound mining then gpu cards start their thing
To me the sound makes the vintage computer. The mechanical sounds, the pc speaker, the OPL sound cards
It's a whole experience that emulation can't replicate
If I remember right, didn't some of the PAS cards also Logitech's "SoundMan" line?
Yes, I know at least one PAS16 card, which was released under the name Logitech. Still it was a MediaVision card, just with Logitech logo on it. As MediaVision became Aureal, they never made their Vortex sound cards under the own name, but sold the technology and produced the cards for Diamond, Hercules and many others.
@@necro_ware aye, I have an MX-300 (need to get the daughterboard for MIDI, as well as the digital audio bracket), and at one point had a few OEM Turtle Beach AU8830 cards.
Fantastic overview of the card, and very comprehensive tests, great job! About the only thing I can think of to add is that the PAS16 is special in another way: It can reroute the PC speaker audio through the card not using any wires. I touch on this briefly here: ruclips.net/video/wi2tW23qb9c/видео.html
Yes! I tested it in multiple mainboards, but it didn't work everywhere. Unfortunately I was short on time to dig deeper into it and forgot to mention it eventually.
my favorite card is still the creative awe64 gold for win98..
Uah, Thunderboard, my friend had that and had more problems with game audio than I had with my Gravis Ultrasound :)
That card was usually unproblematic in respect to the time. However, that times were not as simple as today and messing around with IRQs, DMAs and other resources was too much for a lot of people. In the most cases the issue was sitting between the chair and the keyboard ;)
I loved my Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Vortex 2 card. Under windows 98 it was amazing. But then Windows XP happened and all support for Vortex 2 was gone. There were no official drivers for the Vortex 2 under Windows XP. Only generic Microsoft drivers that came with XP that didn't support any of the Vortex 2's special features. Under XP it essentially became a generic sound card. Wish I still had the card to build an awesome Win98 gamebox but it died on me while using it in my XP gamebox. Now I have a POS Creative SoundBlaster PCI. Which is not a POS because Creative. I like their cards. No it's a POS because it's a post buyout Ensoniq card in disguise. It works though but has no hardware accelerated audio support and XP was the last Microsoft OS to support hardware accelerated sound. Would like to pick up an Audigy2 card to replace it.
I had an SB16 with a date of 1992. It was loaded with capacitors and jumpers. It sounded perfect and never had a problem with it. I used that card for 10years, it eventuality got noisy.
My mate had a PAS16, not sure of date. It sounded like shit compared to mine, and it gave no end of problems.
I guess, that's a very subjective opinion. Of course I don't know the system setup of your friend back in the days, but at least in terms of quality PAS16 is technically by far a better sound card. Apparently, I collect ISA sound cards and investigated and reverse engineered them quite a lot. I have almost all Creative cards at hand and three different SB16 among them. One with new Panasonic high-quality caps, which Creative didn't even think to use back in the days. So I can compare them quite good.
If you are interested in details, as I said in the video SB16 improved very much compared to its predecessor SB2.0. Creative finally got managed to get rid of the data bus noise, but they were still not as good as PAS16 in regards of the white noise. One of the reasons was, that SB16 made the digital to analogue conversion very early in the chain and was trying to mix and filter the audio signal afterwards. PAS16 on the other hand postponed this step and worked with digital sound as long as possible. They added high quality DACs and moved them out of the DSP to the very end of the signal processing. Not only did it give us very impressive sound control features, which were non existent otherwise at that time, this is also why you will see almost none of the electrolytic caps on the PAS16, except of two bigger decoupling caps right before the output. SB16 on the other hand used a lot of cheap electrolytic caps, which degraded over the time and introduced even more noise. PAS16 didn't need to use them, since in digital part you can better use tantalum caps, which are a lot more expensive. That was the reason for Creative to make their design in the first place - the price, just as always! Also the fact, that PAS16 didn't use electrolytic caps makes this sound card sound today just the same as it did sound 30 years ago. Without the need to recap it.
Comparing those two cards is a hard thing, since one was a cheap consumer oriented product and the other was a semi-professional high quality product, which was probably too expensive. It's like with digital cameras today, you won't buy an expensive DSLR, if you want to make your pictures in Auto-Mode all the time. It's not worth the money, since in Auto-Mode it is probably just as good (or sometimes worse) as a smartphone. But if you need to get more out of it, you will reach the limits of a simple camera quite fast.
A sad fact is, that as soon as MediaVision was dissolved, Creative dropped the quality dramatically and introduced all the cost reduced SB16 Value and Vibra cards, again with only dual layer PCBs, noisy and with CQM instead of OPL3.
@@necro_ware Big reply... The SB16 92 or 93 is the only product I've ever liked from creative, The non plug and play ones. It did sound pretty good with that fresh at the time CD quality sound... I have noticed how cheap any other product looks, including other SB16s... I couldn't recommend anything from them.
My mate only had a 386, im thinking now maybe he didnt have the PAS16 but just a PAS. Maybe he had frequency and/or sample bit limitations.
Anyway I subbed, cheers dude
a Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster 16 or ESS Audiodrive doesn't need -5v but a Pro Audio Spectrum and SB 2.0 does need -5v.
Exactly.
I am watching this video with sound blaster ct4780 thx for kx driver devs
@ 13:28 the sound of descent :-)
MYSTERIOUS MYTH
or
LEGENDARY LEGEND?
the bare PCB said, double sided PCB, has both copper clad at their sides. then desired circuit is edged out chemically. so, it is by design it has bigger ground plane, nothing to do with the cost.
This was already discussed in the comments below. What you say is true for small amounts of PCBs, like what you'd do for yourself. But if you order amounts in millions, it works a little bit different and there the weight of copper plays a big role in the final costs.
@@necro_ware i beg to differ. the pcb process is standard. the bare pcb cost depends on the copper thickness (how many OZ per area) that you asked for and how many layers. if they are using same thickness of copper and same size, the material cost is the same. when the copper is etched to solution, it is hard to recover.
Again, you think too small :) You have to thing in industrial style. I was working for a big company, which produced huge amounts of hardware many years ago. There even every gram of the solution left after etching was measured in thousands of €. It was turned back into coper and reused. It would be a huge waste to just throw it away. So, if you order a PCB at let's say PCBway, you just pay for the whole coper, which covers the surface completely. Doesn't matter how much you really use in the final product. It is not worth to negotiate about it, if you make only couple of PCBs, but if you produce millions, it's just another dimension.
@@necro_ware for machining such as connector manufacturer, yes.
but for the costing of the pcb, it is just that. it has nothing to do with trace/ pattern on board due to etching time is the same.
@@jayjwin1178 okay
Interesting history not to mention gravis ultrasound.