It's an 8-bit card, so quantization noise is guaranteed 😜
But OK, if the goal is just to play games with FM music and 8-bit samples, then SB Pro 2 is a good choice indeed.

Grzyb wrote on 2023-03-19, 03:36:

It's an 8-bit card, so quantization noise is guaranteed 😜
But OK, if the goal is just to play games with FM music and 8-bit samples, then SB Pro 2 is a good choice indeed.

To be fair, I’m willing to admit I’m not an audio file 🤣. My hearing isn’t the best, I can’t hear CRT wine at all for example so to me it sound super clean but I’m sure there are people that can hear noise. I was capable of hearing the noise the SB16 made though very easily, this is way quieter than that.

I've recently come to appreciate the low-pass filter of the SBPro (and some of its clones) for DOS games from the early '90s. Especially for those "talkie" adventure games, where the voice samples seemingly use a very low bitrate. On SB16/AWE cards, those sound quite harsh, while the low-pass filter on the SBPro (and compatibles) smooths them out just enough to be pleasant for listening.

Of course, for later DOS titles (around 1995 and newer) I prefer the SB16/AWE cards since technology had improved sufficiently by then to allow developers to use (slightly) higher quality samples. In games such as Mortal Kombat 3, the improved clarity of the 16-bit cards is perceptible to me.

If https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/bl … aster.cpp#L1982 is faithful to the real hardware, ESS cards (starting at the ESS688, so basically anything with stereo support) automatically programmed their software-controllable low-pass filter to 80% of the Nyquist frequency. This should be good enough to play back 11kHz samples without that sharp sound caused by aliasing. Getting a ESS688 card is likely a lot cheaper than an original SB Pro 2.0. Do we have experience here on VOGONs whether the ESS cards with their programmable low-pass filter lived up to that promise?

I am aware that some games have bad/muffled sound in ESS native 16-bit mode, which is likely to a driver bug misconfiguring the lowpass filtering. My question is not about ESS native mode, but about the sample-rate tracking feature for SBPro compatible sound playback.

mkarcher wrote on 2023-03-19, 10:29:

Getting a ESS688 card is likely a lot cheaper than an original SB Pro 2.0. Do we have experience here on VOGONs whether the ESS cards with their programmable low-pass filter lived up to that promise?

I have an ESS AudioDrive 1868F as well as an OPTi 82C930, and they both use a low-pass filter while running in SBPro mode. I haven't done a detailed waveform comparison with a real SBPro card, since I don't own one myself, but I did cross-check their output against the recordings in this thread.

To my ears, the ESS card sounds very close to a real SBPro, and the OPTi card is not far behind either, with only a minuscule difference. In older games, both of these cards produce much more pleasing results than my AWE64.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-03-19, 11:05:

mkarcher wrote on 2023-03-19, 10:29:

Getting a ESS688 card is likely a lot cheaper than an original SB Pro 2.0. Do we have experience here on VOGONs whether the ESS cards with their programmable low-pass filter lived up to that promise?

I have an ESS AudioDrive 1868F as well as an OPTi 82C930, and they both use a low-pass filter while running in SBPro mode. I haven't done a detailed waveform comparison with a real SBPro card, since I don't own one myself, but I did cross-check their output against the recordings in this thread.

To my ears, the ESS card sounds very close to a real SBPro, and the OPTi card is not far behind either, with only a minuscule difference. In older games, both of these cards produce much more pleasing results than my AWE64.

I have tried both, and they were both OK but not 100%. I had the same ESS, im not sure if the issues I had were with the the actual chip abilities or the model of card. I had this generic one: http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/images/E5X1853L.jpg. When set to line out mode the output was very weak, and when set to speaker mode it was super over amped and noisy. I could never find a middle ground with that card (I found the closest to be amp on, volume level 40 in unisound, still some noise but the right volume level). The amp in the SB Pro 2 seems to be much higher quality, and with the volume wheel I can set the output level to be just right for whatever speakers im using. The other issue I had was higher bitrate games, like The Dig, or Discworld, always had background hiss when playing in 8 bit mode, sounded like a cassette tape. No hiss with the Pro2. Of course, something like the AWE is still the best way to play these 16bit games. But I feel like im loosing alot less then with the other 8 bit cards, it's good enough I don't feel like I need to run a second card for 16 bit. ESFM, while not totally accurate to OPL, sounded good to me, much better than CQM.

I also had an OEM card that came with my NEC that had an OPTi 82C929 paired with a real Yamaha OPL. This sounded quite a bit better to me than my particular ESS, at least when the bloody thing was working correctly. In most cases I could have been fooled into thinking it was a real 8 bit SB. The real OPL of course sounded right, and the digital sound was good, volume levels were fine. Still had that hiss in the 16 bit games tho. My issues with it were more card related. The drivers were a complete nightmare as it was pnp and had a million other things on it like a modem and ide controllers and whatnot. Unisound didn't support it, so had to find and run the real dos driver which took me awhile to find. Finally the card started to fail and no one wanted it so I just scrapped it.

This led me to wanting to try the real deal, and it's been the best overall. It's just such and issue free experience. Here's an example of the opening to POP, sorry about the PC fan noise I should get a Noctua in there 🤣. https://youtu.be/Uvc6EZfX2vA

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-03-19, 06:48:

I've recently come to appreciate the low-pass filter of the SBPro (and some of its clones) for DOS games from the early '90s. Especially for those "talkie" adventure games, where the voice samples seemingly use a very low bitrate. On SB16/AWE cards, those sound quite harsh, while the low-pass filter on the SBPro (and compatibles) smooths them out just enough to be pleasant for listening.

This is something I've noticed as well. While I do prefer sound cards with clean, hi-fidelity output, it does make the lower sample rates of older audio samples stand out.

Of course this could be addressed by running the output through an external low-pass filter.

This particular card is superior to the normal offerings, it has an actual multilayer board which is going to help with many of the analog deficiences that the regular versions exhibit ("thinking" noises etc.)

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-03-19, 12:57:

I had the same ESS, im not sure if the issues I had were with the the actual chip abilities or the model of card.

Sadly, the quality of ESS 1868F cards does seem to vary between different models. I have this triangular one, and with the jumper set to the Line Out position, it's completely noise-free.

But I get what you mean, and the SBPro is of course the preferred choice, albeit not nearly as affordable.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-03-19, 13:05:

This is something I've noticed as well. While I do prefer sound cards with clean, hi-fidelity output, it does make the lower sample rates of older audio samples stand out.

Of course this could be addressed by running the output through an external low-pass filter.

My current solution is to have two cards in my DOS system. One for the SBPro compatibility + bugfree MPU-401, and another one for 16-bit sound in later games.

As long as both cards are configured to use different resources, this generally seems to work ok.

I have SB PRO 2 too but I don't use it because the sound quality is just sooo baaad... (I'm a big fan of Gravis Ultrasound and the sound quality difference is just night and day)

Yamaha OPL3-SA does the same thing as SB PRO and much better. 😀