It depends a lot on what is going on in the particular machine and exact opamp itself as far as the floating opamps go. The high impedance inputs are going to react to whatever can disturb them (in this case seems mostly internal to opamp) and since the loop is open, maximal gain of the opamp is going to get used for these reactions and this is going to have effect other parts of the card through the power rails and capacitive effects. When some signal is ran through the card you'll get more revealing results, most likely in form of increased THD. Some cards will perform better than others with the fixes applied, it is good to see some quantification of it ~

I don't have any sort of working retrocomputing setup to do anything on for a while longer, much of my stuff is still packed away until there's space to deal with them (I moved to another country more than half a year ago)...

It's entirely possible too that my other modifications are getting in the way of the results, too. I did replace a bunch of MC3403s with TL074/TL084 and some MC33079. The MC33079s actually made things slightly worse in terms of >1kHz noise - which was a result I wasn't expecting. (I do recall that many bipolar amps with low voltage noise tend to have much higher current noise, whereas the bifet amps like the TL07x are the other way around.)

You're right Tiido, I should have made recordings of an actual game being played. Maybe with the next Creative card. (Kind of sick of mussing with this thing, I basically reverted and then re-implemented the fixes.)

I actually had similar experience with one other card, I used a MC33079 and things suddenly got a lot more noisy, in addition the output current seemed to be too low and I got excess distortion from there... buuuuut those were ebay chips from china and they may very well have been relabeled LM324 or something such, which will be as bad as my results were 🤣

I actually meant a sinewave sweep rather than games, as it is easy to tell any additional components generated by the electronics on the graphs or spectrograms one can do. I generated a clean logarithmic sine sweep from 10Hz to 20kHz, in 16bit 44100Hz mono which should be possible to play on a variety of hardware. You can simply do a recording of it and then in your favorite audio editor do a spectrogram of it and see if there are any lines above the main fundamental and judge distortion performance on just that (although effects of your recording hardware can also get in the way).

Thanks for the sound clip, I'll use that for the next comparison.
Though for the next comparison I'll leave the stock op-amps on there, to eliminate the rolling amps as a cause of additional noise.
I'll just need to secure another SB16 (shouldn't be too difficult, almost every single one has floating amps).

Though even with the dead-silence results I got, I noticed an average 3-8dB overall improvement after fixing the amps. I can only imagine that the overall noise result with a signal playing is considerably better still.

Der Kuenringer wrote on 2020-09-13, 19:42:

Anyone ever seen AWE32 models CT3940 (Value, PnP) or CT3960 (PnP) in the wild?

There's a picture of the CT3960 here:
Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP (CT3960)

Maybe someone has a CT3991?

Great list. Can´t imagine someone went thru the trouble of putting it together.

But I have one honest question (not trolling): the list is called "Sound Blaster: From best to worst" but I can´t find a way to reorder it so it actually shows the rows in that order, from the most desirable one to the least. The list seems to be in release dater order. Do you have any tips on where do I need to press to rearrange it like the title suggest?

holaplaneta wrote on 2026-01-30, 07:56:

Great list. Can´t imagine someone went thru the trouble of putting it together.

But I have one honest question (not trolling): the list is called "Sound Blaster: From best to worst" but I can´t find a way to reorder it so it actually shows the rows in that order, from the most desirable one to the least. The list seems to be in release dater order. Do you have any tips on where do I need to press to rearrange it like the title suggest?

Hi there and thank you!

The title is clickbait/a joke as explained in the first post. 😀
There is no easy way to tell as there isn't a single answer.

But if i would suggest to get one with a real Yamaha OPL chip and an extra MIDI card like this one: https://pcmidi.eu/pcmidi.html

Burrito78 wrote on 2026-01-30, 12:51:

Hi there and thank you! […]
Show full quote

holaplaneta wrote on 2026-01-30, 07:56:

Great list. Can´t imagine someone went thru the trouble of putting it together.

But I have one honest question (not trolling): the list is called "Sound Blaster: From best to worst" but I can´t find a way to reorder it so it actually shows the rows in that order, from the most desirable one to the least. The list seems to be in release dater order. Do you have any tips on where do I need to press to rearrange it like the title suggest?

Hi there and thank you!

The title is clickbait/a joke as explained in the first post. 😀
There is no easy way to tell as there isn't a single answer.

But if i would suggest to get one with a real Yamaha OPL chip and an extra MIDI card like this one: https://pcmidi.eu/pcmidi.html

Since PCMIDI is currently sold out, one can get a PicoGUS and put it in MIDI (or GUS) mode and use that as a MPU-401 for external MIDI devices or WaveBlaster-style synth boards too! I use a PicoGUS paired with an AWE64 for late 90s DOS games, and the combination of SB16/AWE digital sound and wavetable MIDI from the X2GS on the PicoGUS is superb.

MadMac_5 wrote on 2026-01-30, 22:20:

Since PCMIDI is currently sold out, one can get a PicoGUS and put it in MIDI (or GUS) mode and use that as a MPU-401 for external MIDI devices or WaveBlaster-style synth boards too! I use a PicoGUS paired with an AWE64 for late 90s DOS games, and the combination of SB16/AWE digital sound and wavetable MIDI from the X2GS on the PicoGUS is superb.

Yep I am using an SB16 and PicoGUS with a WP32 McCake, I am more than happy. Everything sounds great. The PIcoGUS can even fill in for digital FX on single cycle DMA games if you have an affected card.

Thank you folks! Now I got the joke. 🤣