Your equipment and environment, and yourself can alter the level of acceptable noise - What one person considers good (in the context of retro hardware) may be another person's unacceptable. People using speakers will have much less of an issue.

It would be interesting to get a sample of playback so I can compare the noise level to my own card - Of something common so the levels can be matched.

NeoG_ wrote on Today, 01:09:

Your equipment and environment, and yourself can alter the level of acceptable noise - What one person considers good (in the context of retro hardware) may be another person's unacceptable. People using speakers will have much less of an issue.

It would be interesting to get a sample of playback so I can compare the noise level to my own card - Of something common so the levels can be matched.

I will try to make a recording - unless it's more sophisticated than just running a cable from SB16's speaker out into line in on my modern PC

In the same system I briefly had an Opti card which had just as much noise or maybe even more, SB Live which was better but still way worse than I expected and Audigy ZS 2 which is perfectly quiet