My favourite Creative cards are the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 and the AWE64 GOLD. But you will find that everyone has their own preferences. So ideally just buy a few cards, listen to them and choose your favourite.

There are also many cards from other manufacturers which you might find interesting!

There's a lot of good detail in this thread: SB16 vs DBs (hanging / stuck / wrong notes in MIDI)

But yes everyone seems to have their own opinions.
I personally like the SB16 CT2800 or CT2900 (both functionally identical). They work pretty well, have a real OPL3 and don't have the noise issues that some earlier models have.

I have an SB PRO CT1690 in my 386 that sounds good too but the sound is a bit more filtered than the SB16. May or may not be to your taste. There are some games that were written for an SB Pro and don't function 100% correctly on an SB 16 - I think Wolfenstein 3d is one of them (you miss out on stereo sound with the SB16 IIRC).
If you want to go down the MIDI path, with a wavetable daughterboard or an external unit like an SC55 then you are opening a whole new can of worms as many Creative cards had the hanging note bug. In which case I'd suggest looking at clone cards instead, like ESS based cards.

Thanks for the reply's. I'll most certainlly read the thread that was linked.

Also DonutKing, is the CT2800 the one with a Vibra chip?

Yes it has a Vibra. The Vibra's tend to have better quality output than the earlier cards, however a lot of later vibra's don't have a real OPL chip so their FM synth sounds wrong.

I found this CT2800 (attached image)
Is the one containing the OPL3 supposed to look like this?

There are two versions of it, one doesn't have the IDE connector and a couple of chips to the left. (unlike the attached image)

Yep that's right. Look to the right of the big Vibra 16S chip, just to the lower right of that big rectangular silver thing; that's the Yamaha OPL chip there.

Ah great thanks, a bit of zooming made it clearer to see. 😀

DonutKing wrote:

There are some games that were written for an SB Pro and don't function 100% correctly on an SB 16 - I think Wolfenstein 3d is one of them (you miss out on stereo sound with the SB16 IIRC).

It is true that SB16 and later SB ISA cards don't support SB Pro digital sound effects in stereo - you'll only get mono output instead.
However, Wolf3D is a bad example, because in this game, "stereo" sound effects DO work on SB16 cards. The reason for this is that technically, Wolf3D only plays mono samples, but uses the onboard mixer to pan them into position (left/center/right). The advantage of this method is that it hardly uses any CPU time. The drawback: Only one sound effect can play at a time.

Yeah I wasn't 100% sure on that. What are some games that are affected?

That does sound interesting, I'm guessing Blake Stone is effected by that too?

I got a CT3670, CT1740 and a CT2800. the CT1740 I got because of the thread that listed the different cards with the note hang bug 😀

So I assume the CT2940 has the hanging note bug? SB16 ISA