ES1868 is basically a more integrated evolution of ES1688; the IDE controller and PnP functionality have been integrated to the chip, and it also supports spatializing 3D technology that may or may not be on your card. You will find resources on the internet (appearing to have originated from our own gerwin 😀 ) that clain ES1688 is half duplex but it is not, at least not according to its spec sheet (ES688 certainly is half duplex though). They both have the same implementation of ESFM so sound the same. The drivers for ES1688 and ES1868 are not the same though, the mixer etc. for one won't configure the other.

Feel free to compare the product sheets yourself:

ES688: ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/manuals/ess/688.pdf

ES1688: ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/manuals/ess/PB1688B.PDF

ES1868: ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/manuals/ess/pb1868c.pdf

As for which one is more silent - that depends wholly on the card. Quality made ancient ES688/1688 cards are cleaner and much more pleasant to the ear than late 90s OEM junk ES18xx cards in my experience even though the more integrated card should have much less noise..

Remember to move the jumpers from speaker output to line output.

Quality will normally jump quite noticeably as long as you use an external amplifier.

thanks. Do all cards support adpcm compression? In Phil's ES1868 review, he mentions games that require it.
Not sure how to see if the card is quality made, but here is a picture of my card.

Not sure if there is a jumper to disable the amplifier.

Lools like yours has no jumper to disable the amplifier but the potentiometer volume dial can manually help you there, just dial it down as low as you can use it comforrably and amplify on your sound setup. Should help with dynamic range and noise. It loola like an OK cars.

There are 3 jumpers on the card that are not explained.
JP1 in top left corner of the card
JP5 at bottom left of the card
JP6 at center of the card.

Any idea what those could be for? I asume none of them has to do with the amplifier?

Baoran wrote:

thanks. Do all cards support adpcm compression? In Phil's ES1868 review, he mentions games that require it. Not sure how to see […]
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thanks. Do all cards support adpcm compression? In Phil's ES1868 review, he mentions games that require it.
Not sure how to see if the card is quality made, but here is a picture of my card.

es1688f.jpg

Not sure if there is a jumper to disable the amplifier.

The most notable cards that don't support ADPCM are the Yamaha YMF-7xx ISA and PCI based models. It's not that big a deal as ADPCM is fairly infrequently used, most notably in a few older Apogee side scrolling titles like Duke Nukem 2 and Major Stryker.

As for which one is more silent - that depends wholly on the card. Quality made ancient ES688/1688 cards are cleaner and much more pleasant to the ear than late 90s OEM junk ES18xx cards in my experience even though the more integrated card should have much less noise..

ES18xx cards are mostly super cheap production, with bare minimum of capacitors and SMD elements. On ES1869 cards they even removed oscillator.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

As for which one is more silent - that depends wholly on the card. Quality made ancient ES688/1688 cards are cleaner and much more pleasant to the ear than late 90s OEM junk ES18xx cards in my experience even though the more integrated card should have much less noise..

ES18xx cards are mostly super cheap production, with bare minimum of capacitors and SMD elements. On ES1869 cards they even removed oscillator.

To be fair they were made for use at a time motherboards were much better about voltage and current regulation but yeah they are often pretty barebones. I have this card for example:

Almost no filtering despite having an FM receiver? Needless to say I never used it. The plain 1868 version is hardly better.

But go back in time a bit and better 1868 cards do show up..

I use this last one in my P133 and it is very very clean.

For whatever reason 1898 seems to have replaced 1869 as a compatible chip and 1898 cards I have (such as the one below with the curious model number MF-1869) are built and sound much better than the crappily built 1869 cards.

I would say ESS sound card output is reasonable, especially after turning off/bypassing the internal amplifiers.

Not fantastic like SB live/audigy, AWE64, aureal vortex cards, or the GUS cards (never seen a GUS card though), but not really all that awful.

I have used much worse soundcards than my random cheap ESS1869. (and paid much more for much worse)

I own a similar card, but from a different manufacturer. The jumper settings are not silk screened onto the PCB. Anyone have any idea where I can find the jumper table?

Well,
It is a Labway card. Not finding any specific info on their archived site though.

Driver archive from the labway site:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981207074406/htt … vers/driver.htm

Pretty sure these are the jumper settings:
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/sound-cards-mult … BSOUND-503.html

Those Labways are the nicest Audiodrives I’ve come across, I have a few of them.

ESS AudioDrive (ES1868) - a surprisingly good ISA sound card

Ahhh, yes, that looks like the jumper sheet for it. I had no idea what brand it was, which made it hard to hunt down. It says J6 is the "pc speaker in" header. Not having the datasheet, I had assumed J2 was to disable the onboard amplifier, so I had jumpered it. Of course it didn't work, but I hope shorting J2 didn't ruin the card's input.

Interesting that there isn't an IDE enable/disable feature with jumpers. I'm guessing this is only set via software then? I have this BTC branded ES1868 card I couldn't get working, but by default Windows 98SE finds the standard IDE port on the BTC card. Windows did not find an IDE port on the Labway ES1688 card. Is this the expected behaviour?

Badmojo, how do you rate the sound quality on the ES1688 compared to the ES1868? From what I understand, the ES1868 is mostly a more integrated chip, which less external components, so possibly would sound cleaner?

Nice card - and very interesting silkscreen - there's place for a YMF262... would that be because the same card was also used for 688 chips without ESFM? Or would it have been / still be possible to actually combine the nice things about the 1688 with a real OPL3? 😮

yeah... if the FCC ID starts with LWHA it is a Labway card.

dionb wrote:

Nice card - and very interesting silkscreen - there's place for a YMF262... would that be because the same card was also used for 688 chips without ESFM? Or would it have been / still be possible to actually combine the nice things about the 1688 with a real OPL3? 😮

Never saw a 1688 with an actual OPL chip..ü

appiah4 wrote:

dionb wrote:

Nice card - and very interesting silkscreen - there's place for a YMF262... would that be because the same card was also used for 688 chips without ESFM? Or would it have been / still be possible to actually combine the nice things about the 1688 with a real OPL3? 😮

Never saw a 1688 with an actual OPL chip..ü

Probably an ES688 based card updated with the newer chip. I'm pretty sure the ES1688 can't address an off-board OPL3.

Yep never seen a 1688 with a real OPL3 but ESFM rocks. RE the sound quality b/w 1688 and 1868 - I’m no audiophile but I can’t make out a difference. I can disable the onboard amp with my 1868 card where the Labway 1688 card only has the volume wheel, but with that set appropriately it sounds clean and quiet to me. The Labway also doesn’t make any obnoxious popping sounds on startup and shutdown where the 1868’s I’ve tried do, it that’s probably just an implantation thing, not a chipset thing.

I use it after looking at Phil's youtube vid about it. I like it a lot, it's so easy to configure and I have no complaints at all concerning the sound.