If you are using a picogus with it, I'd go for whichever has the best analogue audio quality, low or no hiss, no clicking, amplification if you need it, mic input with parasitic power if you need it.

I mean of course out of the ones you personally own, there will be all sorts of theories on which one OUGHT to have the best physical audio quality, but aging effects, lucky day for component match etc can mean you own a card that is better or worse than average, so pick which one sounds better to you.

The ct3670 is as near to silent as I've ever heard a creative isa card, the audician is quiet but I've had more trouble with its mpu than I would ever have expected, massive hanging notes on various games using an Roland ra-30 and with an external Yamaha unit so I use it mostly for adlib and sound blaster. Haven't played with the opus much but I want to. No need for a microphone as of yet and no amplification since I have nice vintage amplified and mostly shielded sony speakers.

I own pretty much all these cards... If you're a purist, these two Sound Blaster 32s won't cut it for FM ad lib music. They both use the CQM FM chip from Creative. It might do the job most of the time, but will sound very wrong on others...
So, in the one system that has the SB32 with CQM, I use MIDITO reroute FM sound from the SB32 to a PicoGUS in ADLIB mode using a batch file. Then, I switch it back to GUS mode to prevent any conflict with the SB32

So both my systems with SB32s have a PicoGus since this is the perfect combo!

As of right now the Yamaha is in the voodoo3 system because I am a purist. That system is used mostly for Windows games so I have no reason not to pull it and install a pci card since I have a choice for those as well including a ymf744, ess solo-1, or a blaster live/audigy 2 though the last two would better suit my athlon xp system.

I have a PicoGUS, SB16 CT1770 and Live! Value CT4830 in my system, it's got good coverage for DOS/9x and genuine OPL. The Live card mixes everything in win98 and DOS.

sydres wrote on 2026-01-19, 17:06:

Audician 32 -leaning towards this but with the picogus sound blaster and adlib emulation may be unnecessary

Picogus only emulates Sound Blaster 2.0, which is mono. That would be a deal breaker for me in anything faster than a 486.

Mono doesn't bother me but given the choice I would choose stereo.
NeoG, Given the choice I won't use a pci card for DOS so the pci cards would be for Windows games only and only.
Right now this is all about shuffling cards and matching capabilities/features to systems

I was in that situation before, low noise creative card, but with CQM, in my case it was a AWE64 Gold.

My solution was to use a cheap CMI8738 PCI just for it's perfect OPL3 capability, using it in conjunction to the AWE64 for everything else.

You can initialize the CMI with a .bat file, without anything resident in memory using this commands:
C:\drivers\CMI\SETAUDIO.COM /G0 /M0 /IO260 /MPU300
SET BLASTER=A260 I3 D6 T4
c:\drivers\cmi\C3DMIX /MEE000 /FCC000 /WCC000 /LFF0FF /E00100 /A00100 /C00100 /P00000 /400000 /R0f0ff /D040ff /Q0

And them initialize the Creative card with Unisound, disabling the FM, using this commands:
set blaster=a220 i5 d1 h5 p330 t6 f0
c:\drivers\unisound /c2

Pino wrote on 2026-01-20, 14:47:

a cheap CMI8738 PCI just for it's perfect OPL3 capability,

Just a FYI on cards with those, these Startech ones https://www.startech.com/en-ca/cards-adapters/pcisound5ch? were relatively recent, discontinued, but there's still new old stock turning up at surplus and discount. If you know an older computer store with a large Startech range, they may still have one. There's "marketplace" sellers with them on BestBuy for $40 but you can maybe do better.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-20, 15:11:

Pino wrote on 2026-01-20, 14:47:

a cheap CMI8738 PCI just for it's perfect OPL3 capability,

Just a FYI on cards with those, these Startech ones https://www.startech.com/en-ca/cards-adapters/pcisound5ch? were relatively recent, discontinued, but there's still new old stock turning up at surplus and discount. If you know an older computer store with a large Startech range, they may still have one. There's "marketplace" sellers with them on BestBuy for $40 but you can maybe do better.

I wouldn't pay more than $10-15 for one of these, there are plenty for this price range on ebay.

I have a thin client with a cmi 8738 on board but because it had a pci slot I stuffed an ess solo-1 into it.
I have a weird obsession with thin clients and own five or six of them. To get back on topic, I've decided to stick the audician 32 in along with the picogus, one of these will get a little dreamer wavetable daughter board. Now to decide between the opus and the sb32 since the sound blaster is limited under dos (no sound fonts) I'm leaning towards the opus. Are there reasons not to use the ensoniq?

sydres wrote on 2026-01-21, 05:35:

I have a thin client with a cmi 8738 on board but because it had a pci slot I stuffed an ess solo-1 into it.
I have a weird obsession with thin clients and own five or six of them. To get back on topic, I've decided to stick the audician 32 in along with the picogus, one of these will get a little dreamer wavetable daughter board. Now to decide between the opus and the sb32 since the sound blaster is limited under dos (no sound fonts) I'm leaning towards the opus. Are there reasons not to use the ensoniq?

The SB32 retains full SB16 compatibility while adding the AWE32 wavetable and General MIDI emulation (aweutil or DOS32AWE). In contrast, the Ensoniq card appears limited to basic SB 1.0 compatibility. Given that difference, the SB32 clearly comes out ahead in both DOS and Win95 (even if it has CQM).

Second that. These Ensoniq ISA cards are interesting for their own MIDI, but are less than ideal as a general purpose sound card.

I'm having trouble following whether you have 3 ISA slots or only one. If only one, I'd go for the CT3670 if I'm interested more in later DOS stuff (less OPL, more SB16 and MIDI), or the Audician for older DOS stuff (more OPL, no SB16 only MPU-401 interface for MIDI)

If you have three slots, it gets more interesting. The PicoGUS already supplies OPL2 mono FM and bug-free MPU-401. The Audician doesn't really bring a lot to the table here - just SBPro2 (which the CT36xx also offer), stereo OPL3 FM and WSS (which few games use and pretty much all of those also do SB16). I'd far sooner go for the CT3670, as that gives you the EMU8k AWE synth and SB16 digital audio (plus stereo CQM). If you combine that with the CT3670, the only things you are missing are stereo OPL3 and WSS. There's almost nothing out there that uses WSS that doesn't also support SB16, so really stereo FM is the only thing you don't have. If you can live with mono FM - or CQM if you really want stereo - you can stick the Opus in that third slot.

That would give you four sample-based MIDI options to play with (RA-50, GUS, AWE and Opus). It also gives you three different FM options (great mono OPL2, competent stereo CQM and hilariously awful sample-based Ensoniq mess)

Only challenge is the limitation of the PicoGUS to low IRQ/DMA, which will make resource allocations to all of this a bit interesting...

I appreciate everyone's input. The board has three isa slots which is why Im going to run the picogus and two other isa sound cards. For sure the resource allocation will be interesting and possibly limiting but I like options which is why I have two Roland and two Yamaha sound modules. I'm pretty sure I want the audician for it's real opl3, it's the third card that I'm debating either one of the sb32s for sound blaster 16 compatibility or the ensoniq for more midi options. The system will be mostly for DOS since I have other, faster win98 systems so soundfonts are out on the creative cards unless I throw win 3.1 on it but that's not really relevant for most gaming that I do. And while cqm doesn't bother me too much there are games where it sounds a little off to me.

Based on everything you've said, I would recommend pairing the PicoGUS with the Audician 32. This is the exact combo I use the most in my pure DOS system, for maximum flexibility and compatibility.

For gaming, my Audician has been trouble-free for external MIDI devices (3 Roland Sound Canvas + 1 Yamaha) but you can always use the PicoGUS in MPU401 mode instead. Audician as SB-Pro for sound effects, in 8-bit stereo.

My PicoGUS usually stays in GUS mode, and gets used primarily for demoscene and music trackers/players. I do use it with a handful of games with tracker-based music (Epic Pinball, Pinball Fantasies, One Must Fall 2097) where its quality is vastly better than any SB card.

I have/use several Creative cards, including a SB32 CT3600 that I purchased new in the mid-90's. While I have a soft spot for that card, it (and the other 16/32/AWE32 PNP cards) can be such a pain - PnP issues, AWEUTIL memory usage, DSP w/ MIDI bugs, and SB-Pro digital audio works but in mono. Yes, I'm aware of Unisound and DSP upgrade, but that is too much work, and that's coming from someone who hand-soldered a PicoGUS v1.1.1 board.

sydres wrote on 2026-01-22, 14:31:

... For sure the resource allocation will be interesting and possibly limiting but I like options which is why I have two Roland and two Yamaha sound modules. ...

Indeed - this is why I do not recommend the CT3600 or CT3670 in a multi-card system. Even as a single sound card, that IDE CD-ROM PnP config has been buggy and likes to cause resource conflicts with dual-IDE motherboards, at least for me.

If you prefer real OPL for FM, and also have external MIDI devices (which are better match for most games than native AWE32 EMU8000) the SB 32's don't really offer you much else. The only thing you're technically missing is support for 16-bit digital audio in SB16 mode. The Audician will do 16-bit in WSS mode, which I have confirmed in DOS (Cubicplayer v1.6 - I don't recall if any DOS games support WSS) but honestly that is one of the few quality differences I don't notice in games.

In other words, skip any Creative PnP card, and use that time to enjoy those DOS games.

Thank you fazeshift for your input. For some reason I have had multiple hanging note issues with the audician and am not sure if there is something wrong with it or the drivers. I purchased it sealed in box a couple years ago. I had used it next to the ct3670 for opl3 stuff. The ct3670 almost always ran the Roland GS and Yamaha modules perfectly. But not everything I threw at the RA-50 because of its mt-32 capabilities and I didn't want to run softmpu so I got the picogus rather than paying for an mpu card. You might be right about the 16 bit stuff not being worth the difficulties of the creative pnp stuff.

This is only my opinion, but I have a CT3600 in several of my machines (Ekos 486DX2-66, and Gateway 2000 G6-180) and I have no major complaints about them. The only thing I will say is that it has a bit of background hiss (which honestly could be due to aging components on the cards), and unfortunately the midi interface isn't MPU-401 compatible unless you use AWEUTIL which uses waaaaayy to much conv. memory in my opinion. Other than those two negatives, I like the CT3600. It's not a bad option overall.

J-Tech95 wrote on 2026-01-27, 04:39:

This is only my opinion, but I have a CT3600 in several of my machines (Ekos 486DX2-66, and Gateway 2000 G6-180) and I have no major complaints about them. The only thing I will say is that it has a bit of background hiss (which honestly could be due to aging components on the cards), and unfortunately the midi interface isn't MPU-401 compatible unless you use AWEUTIL which uses waaaaayy to much conv. memory in my opinion. Other than those two negatives, I like the CT3600. It's not a bad option overall.

Would there be any benefit to running the ct3600 over the 3670? Neither have opl3 and both are fully loaded ram wise.I haven't done much with the 3600 I just got it cheap enough I couldn't pass it up same as with a dozen other sound cards I bought that I may never use outside of decorations since some have boxes

sydres wrote on 2026-02-01, 03:14:

J-Tech95 wrote on 2026-01-27, 04:39:

This is only my opinion, but I have a CT3600 in several of my machines (Ekos 486DX2-66, and Gateway 2000 G6-180) and I have no major complaints about them. The only thing I will say is that it has a bit of background hiss (which honestly could be due to aging components on the cards), and unfortunately the midi interface isn't MPU-401 compatible unless you use AWEUTIL which uses waaaaayy to much conv. memory in my opinion. Other than those two negatives, I like the CT3600. It's not a bad option overall.

Would there be any benefit to running the ct3600 over the 3670? Neither have opl3 and both are fully loaded ram wise.I haven't done much with the 3600 I just got it cheap enough I couldn't pass it up same as with a dozen other sound cards I bought that I may never use outside of decorations since some have boxes

The only plus I can think of concerning the 3670 over the 3600 is the fact that the 3670 has the same AWE chip as the AWE64, so it is more like a Value AWE64.
Other than that, I think either one is a good option