Most likely the Vibra. Bleh..

Not sure what the difference between the SB Live! Emulation and the SB cheapo vibra would be. Live! will win out in terms of audio quality but the Vibra will probably be less frustrating.

go for the vibra for dos games...

Go for the Vibra becase it would be easier to set up under dos than the Sb live card beucase you can find dos sound drivers for the Vibra card easily than you can for the SB live card.

Even better. Most games will work just fine in the Vibra without loading anything in the config.sys autoexec.bat startup files.

...and don't forget that a real ISA card is better for DOS games...

What about the ALS100? According to rumors, this card is SB16 compatible. Did you try it in your rig?

Not all Vibra16 cards are that bad. The common thing with Vibra cards is that they have a different mixer (no bass/treble/in-/output gain sliders) and integrated OPL3 synthesis (no "real" OPL3 chip onboard).
The quality depends on the chipset; I have two very different Vibra cards here:

CT4170 Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects
Based on the Vibra 16XV chipset, this card is a nightmare. It can't take 16Bit DMA channels because it's missing the required traces at the connector. Line-out can be amplified, but it sounds dull either way. There is no wavetable connector or onboard wavetable, the name "WavEffects" is a bad joke. This card seems to come straight out of Creative's marketing hell, stay away from it!

CT2970 Sound Blaster Vibra 16 PnP
This one has the Vibra 16C chipset, and is actually a decent card. The only drawback is the v4.13 DSP, it will suffer from the "hanging notes" problem if you connect a General MIDI daughterboard. The line output is very clean, much better than on older SB16 models. If you are not going to use the MIDI port, this is a recommended card.

I was using a Vibra for a while until I got an awe32
It is a CT2890 Vibra16S PnP IDE DSP 4.13 daughterboard connector

It has a real OPL3 onboard (YMF262-M)