appiah4 wrote:That is not true, SB Live!'s FM sounds nothing like OPL3.
canthearu wrote:The SB Live's FM sound is more like CQM emulation. Still much better then trying to play FM sound through a wavetable, and generally a better result than the strange results I get from vortex based cards.
edit: insert missing word
Not sure about CQM (as AWE64 Gold also appeared to be using one)... at least from games that I've played I could hardly pick up any apparent differences between it and a real OPL3. Maybe there are some places where one can actually tell them apart. Besides, I don't remember seeing Creative PCI cards featuring physical FM synth/CQM of any kind, does SBLive! (or EMU10K) really have such integrated in the IC?
As for Vortex series... not sure whether it really contains OPL2/OPL3 logic but it's definitely not accurate. At least on my Vortex sound card, the pitch seemed off (such as a C sounded like a B/C-flat, though this might not be accurate and could differ between cards), but the tone itself is mostly correct. Maybe it's just wrong frequency being put in the FM logic...
On the other hand, the post-Solo ESS audio cards (Maestro, Allegro etc.) seem to also play FM through a wavetable (sounded in a similar way to the ES137x series), as they no longer feature the ESFM synthesizer.