First post, by Silent Loon
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I confess, I never paid much attention to the SB16 series, as I found the sound quality and / or SNR rather mediocre. The cards I came along were allways somehow noisy.
Now I stumbled over this card
It is a Soundblaster 16, model no. CT2800 and it has a real OPL3 (!) on it. Chipset is labled "Vibra 16-S" CT2504-TCQ. Sound quality and SNR seem to be okay, at least if you avoid the amplified SPK out and use the line out instead. There is a waveblaster connector on it that also seems to work. It has a jumper to choose the base adress, but the rest (IRQs, DMAs, Midi port adress) are set up by software, so I wonder if it is somehow "half" pnp? I used the standard SBbasic driver package for SB16s for this, you still get it from creative
In the SB diagnostics the channels were reversed - I'm not sure why. Was this a common bug of the SB16s? Same as the infamous SBPro bug?
Does anyone know more about this specific model?
Who produced the vibra chips and what where the differences to the "normal" SB16 chipsets?
Is this card SBpro compatible? (B.t.w.: Is there any way to finally test SBPro compability? - maybe by using a game setup - Dos Soundcard Testing Utility?)
What about the reverse channels?
Which troubles (hanging notes etc.) will I encounter when I finally overcome my SB16 aversion?