First post, by ubertrout
So, after getting into this hobby over the pandemic, I think my retro desk is approaching completion, and I wanted advice on routing/switching sound. I have 3 CPUs: a 486 DX2/50 (with the all-important turbo button) for DOS, a P2/350 for Win98, and a Core 2 Duo E8400 for WinXP, all of which (except mouse on the 486) use Ps/2 and VGA. I'm going to use a KVM for these machines, and since my understanding was that most KVMs either don't route sound at all or do a terrible job and add noise, I was going to use a separate splitter for audio. I was thinking of something like the Nobsound Little Bear MC104, although it occurs to me that might not be much of an upgrade from what's integrated to some KVMs. Are there other suggestions?
That would be simple enough, but I recently lucked out and got a Roland MT-100 for $10 at an estate sale. As I understand it this is in pertinent part a MT-32 under the hood, so I'm excited to try it out with all those late 80s and early 90s games on the 486. So I'm wondering if maybe I should really be looking at an active mixer so I can input the Roland and Adlib/Soundblaster sound separately and mix them in, or if I should just route the Roland to the 486's line in? Of course, with an active mixer I could also use it for the other machines. That's also much more expensive, of course.
