Yes 16 bit ISA cards usually have CD audio.
The audio quality of sampled sound (atleast on my Vibra16) is pretty neutral

Hmm, yeah I had ruled out Vibra I think from a video on the sound comparison. So I'm thinking probably SB 16, Pro or some form of AWE.
How are the compatibility with games on these cards?

Most all do analog CD audio, unless you go much farther back.
Sound Blaster Pro 2 - Most authentic sounding but your stuck at 22khz.
Sound Blaster 16, will do you OK if your looking for stock OPL-3 sound, and still want 16-bit audio playback.
Sound Blaster Vibra, All but a few models have creatives version of OPL3 on them, there not emulations but they sound different.
ISA YMF-71x's are clear + authentic sounding, and cheap.
ESS ISA cards, sound nearly identical to a SB-PRO, and in windows with the VXD drivers have this awesome sounding FM-Synth specific to them.
Early Awe32's have YMF-262's, many seem to have noise issues, has wavetable sound.
Sound Blaster 32's and Awe64's have different variant of OPL-3 that sounds different, but is not emulation, and also have wavetable sound.
You can attach a daughtercard to the wavetable header on many of these cards for wavetable playback. Assuming you can get one easy.

You can also find YMF-262's on EARLY non PNP ESS cards, and Some Crystal based cards.

So the way that CD audio works on older machines, is that the CD drive actually contains the logic for redbook audio playback-- and then the analog output is simply re-routed through the soundcard itself. So the sound cards are not responsible for its output, per-say.

Your best bet for a cheap OPL3 / CD audio combo would be a sound blaster 16. As alphawing said, there are also ESS Audiodrive cards that have ESFM which is ESS's spin of OPL3 (with a few enhancements like more channels). Crystal also has their Crystal FM synthesis, although the only one worth getting is CS4236B. Later chips have damaged FM outputs.

The only caveat with a sound blaster 16 is that creative used low-end capacitors, and didn't use proper decouplers-- so it sounds pretty dark and muddled. It can be fixed, but takes a lot of soldering and ordering of components. Later sound blasters use EMU's 'CQM' emulator, which only does a moderate job on the standard general midi instruments for OPL3-- custom parameters result in high pitch squealing and screeching as the emulator was never designed to emulate the chip properly... contrary to what the press release said (claiming the sound difference was indistinguishable... ha!)...

Is CQM really emulation, if its being done on a chip?
It does sound like crap if its, being used for sound effects, like on the Floppy versions of X-wing or Tiefighter.

AlphaWing wrote:

Is CQM really emulation, if its being done on a chip?
It does sound like crap if its, being used for sound effects, like on the Floppy versions of X-wing or Tiefighter.

It's digital-- digital can be software or hardware and behave exactly the same... because it consists of binaries, it's not analog. I believe however CQM is software as there's no "CQM chip", it's just some code put on another one of the chips.

Of course to get an audio signal from a digital chip you need a DAC and a filter. Filters are what give soundcards and synthesizers their primary characteristic sounds (such as the lovely Roland IR3109).

The term 'emulator' is very broad. In the case of CQM regardless of its implementation, would be considered an emulator because it's 'attempting' to do OPL3 but fails miserably.

Thats interesting, ESS, would be technically an emulation too?
What about Yamaha's 7xx series?

AlphaWing wrote:

Thats interesting, ESS, would be technically an emulation too?
What about Yamaha's 7xx series?

ESFM and Crystal FM are more likened to "clones" as they attempt to replicate OPL3 and can actually respond to all of the commands (CQM has trouble doing so when you load up a custom program that attempts to push all parameters of OPL3), but do so slightly differently. In a few areas Crystal can sound spot-on, but also generates true squares which are unnatural for YMF-262. The noise generators on all implementations are completely different-- even from OPL2 to OPL3.
--> I think OPL2 has a way better noise generator.

The 7xx series is real yamaha OPL3, but the sample rate is different and I think the pitch may be *ever so slightly* lower.

I dont mean to derail this conversation from the original post, but my SB16 has a bunch of Rubycons on it. The guy I got it from is a soldering master, so is it reasonable to assume that he recapped it at some point because of the noise issues?

I think you changed my opinion of CQM now 🤣 .
I do like the ESS cards, some dos games even target them, and have a special mode to select for them.
Super Street Fighter II for instance.

ODwilly wrote:

I dont mean to derail this conversation from the original post, but my SB16 has a bunch of Rubycons on it. The guy I got it from is a soldering master, so is it reasonable to assume that he recapped it at some point because of the noise issues?

Oh yeah the rubycons are going to help a lot. The only problem is that creative used some polarized caps where bipolars are called for, and under-rated a few to save some bucks. Also there are some 104 tantalums in the picofarad values which should promptly be replaced with films to eradicate the darker tones. My microchannel soundblaster had that problem prior to recapping.

But yeah I wouldn't be too worried about it if you already got it rubycon'ed up.

AlphaWing wrote:

I think you changed my opinion of CQM now 🤣 .
I do like the ESS cards, some dos games even target them, and have a special mode to select for them.
Super Street Fighter II for instance.

Load CQM up in adlib tracker 2, and choose something like the 'WHEELCHAIR' track, and your ears will bleed from the screeching and distortion.

Once my ebtech Hum X arrives (to kill ground loop) I'll do an extensive comparison of crystal FM, SB 16, ESS ESFM, adlib gold, CQM and others with extensive cross comparing. I haven't forgot about it, I just want zero ground loop noise in the recordings..
We may as well have the ultimate comparison 'OPL3' on vogons since no one has done this yet.

Don't get an SB32, because the compatibility is a bit spotty in my experience. It is hard to get drivers correctly installed.

Alternate answer: DO get an SB32, learn everything you can about it, and report back to me! 😁

All of these cards have full capability to produce sound effects right?

King_Corduroy wrote:

All of these cards have full capability to produce sound effects right?

Oh yeah, even a Sound Blaster 2.0 can do PCM (although I don't recall a CD pass-through interface).

Hmm ok well are there any funky things to watch out when buying a SB 16 (I mean weird OEM versions and Value cards I should try and avoid)? Because I'm thinking that may be what I'll buy in the end. That is to say I'm looking for specific model numbers I should keep an eye out for.
Also are there any other cards I should look at for high compatibility and real synth chips? I'll be playing windows games as well as DOS games here. Most of the games I play are windows games but when I go to play the occasional DOS game like Gateway or something I want the midi to sound fantastic. 🤣

@Aidan When you say SB32 do you mean Awe32? If so, darn! Cause those sound rad. 🤣

Sound Blaster 32 is a newer name of AWE32 Value. The classic example would be CT3670 - the most popular audiocard from AWE series in Russia. I have only had good experience with it. It's a tiny bit limited compared to AWE32 (visually it just does not have 512K onboard RAM, who cares about that?).

My idea of best SB would most likely be some SB16, preferably with real OPL3 chip. It should be compatible with whole range of games and software and music players. VIBRA cards tend to be noisy. Obviously SB16 does not work on real vintage machines that have only 8-bit ISA bus, and SB16 does not support CMS chips.

raymangold wrote:

The noise generators on all implementations are completely different-- even from OPL2 to OPL3.
--> I think OPL2 has a way better noise generator.

They have identical noise generator. Output of YMF-262 (OPL3) noise generator was found to match an algorithm found in YM3812 (OPL2) emulator. Algorithm in the emulator was verified to match the OPL2 chip. So what you are able to hear is not the noise generator, but perhaps analog portions of the sound card. For example the original Adlib card has pretty decent 4th order analog reconstruction filter after the DAC, while my YMF262-based Sound Blasters have none. Of course later OPL3 models worked at different frequency so they are not comparable. Clones are not comparable either.

raymangold wrote:

The only problem is that creative used some polarized caps where bipolars are called for, and under-rated a few to save some bucks.

Can you direct me to some source of the information about which these underrated or wrong type of electrolytic caps are? I've had no reason to recap my cards so far, so this could be good enough reason.

raymangold wrote:

Also there are some 104 tantalums in the picofarad values which should promptly be replaced with films to eradicate the darker tones.

Something does not add up here. Can you be a bit more specific what you mean? If a board has 104 identical capacitors, they most likely are ceramic bypass capacitors, not tantalum. Also, tantalums do not usually come in picofarad values, smallest commonly available today are in the range of 10nF to 100nF.

For a Sound Blaster 16, I recommend the CT2230. OPL, waveblaster header and in my experience no hanging note bug. I own 4 CT2230's. 2 with DSP 4.11 and 2 with DSP 4.13. All very clear and not noisey like the older CT17xx series. I found it strange how the DSP 4.11 ones didn't suffer from the hanging note bug.

My overall favourite sound blaster though is the CT3900 AWE 32. Again, OPL, waveblaster header, IDE interface, no hanging note bug, non PNP and sounds great. Problem is, they're quite rare these days. Saw one sell for $199 on eBay a week or two ago.

Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600
or
Sound Blaster 16 CT2290
or
Sound Blaster AWE32 CT2790
or
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold CT4390 (CQM FM)

Of course it all depends on era of games you are going for. If you wanna play a combination of old and late DOS and possible some Windows games you should combine a Sound Blaster Pro 2 and a Sound Blaster AWE64.