what was your hypothesis, I never owned a SB 2.0 but I read a lot opinions about them mostly negative, so I went ESS audiodrive for Sb 2.0 and never looked back. 😀

What's negative about sb2.0 ?

Deksor wrote:

What's negative about sb2.0 ?

Background noise?
That's probably the most common complaint, and I can confirm - stuff like hard disk activity is clearly heard thru this card...

Warlord wrote:

what was your hypothesis, I never owned a SB 2.0 but I read a lot opinions about them mostly negative, so I went ESS audiodrive for Sb 2.0 and never looked back. 😀

There was no hypothesis other than that later revision may be a bit less noisy (and now I know it's not true unfortunatelly).
I owned the damn thing back in the 90s and got rid of if without regret replacing it with OPTi 931 card. And only recently I discovered I want it back badly. ;D Next thing I knew was I had 4 of these card laying around and needed to choose the best of the batch.

Only thing good about CT1350B (and SB1.0 or 1.5 for that matter) or even SBPro, SBPro2 and early SB16s is nostalgia factor - you may want one if you had one back in the day or you try to build period-correct system. Sound quality-wise these cards are crap. You can clearly hear the noise coming from the motherboard and other devices - disk operations, even simple browsing through the directory tree or changing the image on the monitor is heard on these cards as hisses/ticking/whine/clicks. Amount of this noise may depend on how well the motherboard is designed (how well ISA bus is filtered) but it will be there even on a very good motherboard.

I have some SB2.0 8-bit clones (Anchor MF-002 and Aztech Sound Galaxy BX II) so I will add them to this comparison when I will find some time to see how much noise these have...

Well there is one thing that's interesting : it's the last card to be able to support CMS chips

do you know which revision(s) had the surface mount OPL? because I have one with that one and one with socket (that was empty when I saved it from the scrap bin unfortunately) ^^

Thanks for this test. While we're at it, have you tested the CT1350B in a faster system than 16Mhz? Reason I'm asking is I have one in a 386DX40 - I get noticeable audio artifacts and wrong tones in some games when the system is running at full speed. If I de-turbo it or disable cache, the sound goes back to normal.

A good game to test this is Stunts / 4D sports driving. You should notice immediately if the music sounds off. I'm wondering if it plays ok in a 16Mhz system - I've also tried a CT1320A in a 286-20Mhz and get the same audio errors - they disappear when the system runs at 10Mhz. It looks like the system speed ceiling for this series of cards is quite low...

Huh I should test this because my 386SX25 has one and it used to work but now the DSP just makes some noise instead of playing sounds 🙁 I hope it's not broken

MMaximus wrote:

Thanks for this test. While we're at it, have you tested the CT1350B in a faster system than 16Mhz? Reason I'm asking is I have one in a 386DX40 - I get noticeable audio artifacts and wrong tones in some games when the system is running at full speed. If I de-turbo it or disable cache, the sound goes back to normal.

A good game to test this is Stunts / 4D sports driving. You should notice immediately if the music sounds off. I'm wondering if it plays ok in a 16Mhz system - I've also tried a CT1320A in a 286-20Mhz and get the same audio errors - they disappear when the system runs at 10Mhz. It looks like the system speed ceiling for this series of cards is quite low...

I tested a CT1350B that I sold in a 486DX4-100 system and it worked fine from what I could tell.

Could it be that the games you are testing are speed sensitive? I know The DOS Wing Commander games play the music at the wrong speed if running above about a 386-33.

What version is your CT1350B / what serial number?

MMaximus wrote:

Thanks for this test. While we're at it, have you tested the CT1350B in a faster system than 16Mhz? Reason I'm asking is I have one in a 386DX40 - I get noticeable audio artifacts and wrong tones in some games when the system is running at full speed. If I de-turbo it or disable cache, the sound goes back to normal.

A good game to test this is Stunts / 4D sports driving. You should notice immediately if the music sounds off. I'm wondering if it plays ok in a 16Mhz system - I've also tried a CT1320A in a 286-20Mhz and get the same audio errors - they disappear when the system runs at 10Mhz. It looks like the system speed ceiling for this series of cards is quite low...

Like stated in the first post - my 286 has 20MHz Harris CPU and I couldn't hear any usunal artifacts (well you can check the recordings for yourself).
I see no point in testing it in 386DX40 though - CT1350B is for XT and 286s. 386DX40 is SBPro2 and SB16 era. But I will mess with one of my 486s tomorrow, so I can do that...

Hello everyone! 😀
This is a cool thread and I'd like to say "thank you" to HanJammer for going trough all the arduous tests and making recordings for us! 😎
- Testing the SB 1.5/SB2.0 family is always welcome and interesting, IMHO, since it was the basis for so many clones of the day.
In addition, it also was like a fallback for many games and sound cards, since it almost always worked.
Another important thing about the pre-SB16 Sound Blaster cards was the PCM/FM balance, I think,
which James-F described in one of his older threads. It's important for games that use simultanously FM, PSG and the DAC..