These cards have very good SNR ratings, and are SB-Pro/WSS/MPU-401 compatible.
The second sound card you link to is too small to fit a full-size midi-daughterboard.
The Crystal chipset does not have a wavetable by itself, maybe a softsynt of somesorts is included with the drivers.
If you ever plan on using a crystal soundcard in windows NT/2K/XP take one of the later Crystal ISA chipsets: CS4236B or 4237B for example.

Thanks for the info!

>> The second sound card you link to is too small to fit a full-size midi-daughterboard.

Ah drat. 🙁 I think the card featured in the second link is the same as the first link. I'll try and find a "full size" Crystal based ISA sound card. Regarding its chipset, would CS4231 or CS4232 provide the same good SNR for wavetable daughterboard sound quality?

retro games 100 wrote:

Regarding its chipset, would CS4231 or CS4232 provide the same good SNR for wavetable daughterboard sound quality?

Potentially; Yes.
But the CS4231 is from an earlier generation: it is a codec only (also a much bigger chip) and thus depends on a seperate 'controller' chip, which is not supplied by Crystal Semiconductor.

I decided to buy a cheap Crystal CS4232-KQ / CS32 - 3DI ISA soundcard. I installed it in a typical 440 slot 1 board, P3@800, Win98. The Win98 installation seemed to work - it asked for the win98 CD, and nothing bad happened. However, all dxdiag sound tests produced a really bad hissy "scratchy" noisy sound. I rebooted win98 to go in to dos7, and initialized the sound card using info found in this Vogons thread -

Perfect ISA soundcard, in theory (topic about Crystal sound cards, etc)

I DL'd the attached Crystal driver cwd_dos.zip file, and ran the cwd.bat file to init the sound card. As with the win98 installation, all seemed to work OK. The cwdiag.exe diagnostic utility said "PASS" for all resources. But as with the win98 tests, all DOS sound tests sounded awful - hissy noisy sound quality.

Any ideas please? 😀

Edit: I've just tried this CS32-3DI CS4232 sound card in a "basic" socket 7 board, and I get the same poor audio quality results. Perhaps it's broken? Perhaps it's just crap? There are various jumpers on the card - I wonder what they do.

Edit 2: I had a browse on ebay, and couldn't find another CS4232 based card. So I just took "pot luck" and bought a very cheap ESS1888F audiodrive sound card instead. My goal with all of this is to see if I can get a good audio sound from a wavetable header in DOS 6 - but not using a typical Creative card.

That is not nice. Is it the particular card in the image below? I notice it has a fake/clone opl-3 chip, and that there is no obvious amplifier chip.

Maybe you can try your Maestro 32/96 (also has a CS4232) in Dos with the same drivers and see wheter the sound quality is good with that card.

Yes! That's the card. Pity. 🤣 I will try and find the Maestro card - unfortunately it's buried somewhere in the attic. I have to use the attic, cos there's just nowhere else to put all this junk! 😉