Personally, I like the Yamaha 724 because it features more compatibility than you really need and offers a decent wavetable. Audio quality is generally good and some versions have SPDIF Out which will literally output all sounds made by the card. The SB-Link header most of them have also let them work well in DOS and the card seems to be optimized for Win9x & Windows DOS Box use.

I made a video about this card once.

Another one to consider is the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. It supports A3D 1.0, EAX 2.0, Sensaura, and has its own built-in MIDI DLS which IMO sounds better than the SBLive! or even the DreamBlaster S1. Only important if you expect to play any games that support MIDI (such as late DOS games from the DOS prompt) or for playing MIDI music. It has very good sound quality (supposedly much better than the SBLive! if you Google some audio message boards) and stable drivers.

I know the Audigy 1 works fine in 9x and it sounds fantastic

Recently discussed
Best pci audio card for Win 9x/Me

YMF-724 cards are my favorite when it comes to the era of between MS-Dos and Win9X.
They have MIDI for Emm386 games, when played from within Win9X.
They are SB-Pro compatible, and they have a real OPL3 core build into the chip.
Then they have 3D sound technology of one or more types.
The card is a stereo card. If you want surround and no dos games, then perhaps a Live?
Or you can look into Vortex cards of different kind.

Now it strikes me... I have not seen a review on wich a YMF-724 goes head to head
with some kind of Vortex card. Why has none made such or does a link to an article
exist? Hmmmm.... Review... Head to head.... Might be an idea for Phil. 😁

It all depends
Compatibility, with windows games? DS3D? EAX? A3D? Sensaura?
Either the mentioned Santa Cruz or Yamaha are Sensaura based and cover those pretty well, and are jack of all trade cards thanks to Sensauras API.

Dos OPL3 is emulated on the Santa Cruz and is really horrible, but some of those Yamaha cards have real OPL3 on them as mentioned and solve the DOS issues. It also has really good DSP for 3D audio supports running Sensaura on the hardware.

But if you're after real EAX, then creatives live or audigy are the only ways to get 1:1 support for those EAX titles.

A3D 2.0 Requires an Aureal Vortex2 card, but has lackluster EAX support and a few nasty stereo swapping bugs in the drivers that give the EAX support. But are otherwise exceptional cards for positional 3D audio and excellent sound quality.

How does the Terratec DMX Xfire 1024 rank up in this aspect?

elianda wrote:

How does the Terratec DMX Xfire 1024 rank up in this aspect?

Just fine, it's using the CS4624 which came out before the Santa Cruz's CS4630 and is still a good DSP, but the CS4630 gives full Sensaura acceleration for gaming.
Otherwise I would be hard pressed to notice a difference.

I vote Yamaha YMF 724 as well. The YMF-744 and 754 have work the same and have extra features. Also, wavetable syntheses on these cards is amazing.

The Creative SB128 PCI is also a good choice (creative or Ensoniq chipsets).

If you want your Win9x machine to be able to handle DOS titles well, the Ensoniq ES1370 has the advantage of not resampling 44.1k or 22.05k PCM audio.

Ensonic's are good too. Not great, just fine. Personally, I much prefer a stereo card above any surround card.
Stereo feels a bit more retro and vintage to me. Yet again. It is 100% a question on personal choice.
And yes. I do have two different SB-Live cards and they are ok. In pure Dos, the Live emulates MT32 really good.
Better than AWE32, better than GUS. Yeah... Some might disagree with me, I just think the emulation is fine.
After all. It is just Emulation and neighter the real deal, nor Munt with a true Roland bios-dump.

gdjacobs wrote:

If you want your Win9x machine to be able to handle DOS titles well, the Ensoniq ES1370 has the advantage of not resampling 44.1k or 22.05k PCM audio.

Good cards, nice SB-Emulation, fine wavetable sucky Adlib.

Unfortunately, the only way to get truly good OPL3 is with an ISA card. I would go so far as to say the only way to get truly good DOS sound is with an ISA card. PCI always seems to have limitations in that arena.

gdjacobs wrote:

Unfortunately, the only way to get truly good OPL3 is with an ISA card.

Are you 100% shure on that?
I think the YMF-724 sounds great, and it has OPL-Core. If I am wrong, then I really want to learn.
And with a SB-Link setup, it should work great with XMS. If I am wrong, then I will quietly eat my words.

Good point. If anyone can deliver a PCI chipset with accurate OPL3, it would be Yamaha. I'd love to hear some comparison clips.

gdjacobs wrote:

Good point. If anyone can deliver a PCI chipset with accurate OPL3, it would be Yamaha. I'd love to hear some comparison clips.

Hightreason's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zueKH6CUVqE (I believe he linked earlier)
Random YMF-724 Youtube vid'z: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ymf724

Vortex 2 also gets my vote. I've used it in many machines and it always has worked great. A lot of cool Windows 9x games use A3D and sound amazing. DOS compatibility is decent, even has a working wavetable header which is cool.

Hierophant thinks the OPL in the YMF-724 chipset is resampling from 49khz to 44.1khz to 48khz. Luckily the resampling is apparently not terrible, but I can't help but think there will be some impact.

Phil, Dave Flater had some issues with DOS support on both the Vortex and Vortex 2. Can you comment on any difficulties you've had or what specifically you've tried that has worked?

I haven't done much DOS testing, for me it worked though, including using a wavetable board. I tried a few newer games like Descent and Doom and they worked fine.

In general I stick with ISA for DOS machines. OP indicated he is not after DOS, so this is maybe for another thread?