Why? Supply and demand. Supply is limited as it wasn't a huge commercial success. Demand is significant as it was one of the few non-Soundblaster standards with any degree of support. Moreover the quality of the cards was excellent, with far better filtering than contemporary Creative designs. The big thing is that Mediavision actually upped the ante on Creative. SB16 was a reaction to PAS16, just as SBPro had been a reaction to the original PAS, and from a purely technical point of view, the Mediavision cards were roundly superior to their initial Creative derivatives.

That said, a PAS16 is basically 'just another' OPL3-based card, so don't expect it to sound as unique as say an Ultrasound or a Covox. When I got mine it was a slight anticlimax. Yes, it sounded sublime, but it didn't sound fundamentally different. It's a solid bit of history, but not that much more than that.

for me it was horrible to see. the card look so good, not that many electrolytic capacitors, nice quality on the pcb.

I had a friend who owned one and he had it for many years kept in its box with manuals and discs. So one day i told him if he could sell it to me. he said fine come to my house and we will try it. He had a pentium1 motherboard so he connected everything and suddenly i hear a BANG!! and smell to smoke.

we looked at the card and one of the yellow capacitors had blown.

So he turns off the pc, comes back with a 486 motherboard, inserted the card. then he turned it back on, and another bang sound, and smoke coming out of the card. until the pc just turned off.

the card was a mess, one of the ICs cracked with smoke, and the media vision chip also bulging in its center. gave it to me as gift or throw.

They where selling for cheap about a year ago. Price has doubled now.
Just get a Sound Blaster 16. or any sound card with OPL support.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

They where selling for cheap about a year ago. Price has doubled now.
Just get a Sound Blaster 16. or any sound card with OPL support.

kind of hard to imagine for me. When i was a kid i bought one of those multimedia kits that came with cdrom and a media vision pas16. I always wanted to know how it felt, the sound of that specific card again. I was unable to experience again, i do have lots of SB16 cards with opl and even bug free. But i think PAS16 would sound different compared to a SB16. some tones must not be the same (thats what i think, maybe im wrong)

nobody ever did a video to compare something like, this is how it sounds with a SB16 and this is how it sounds with a PAS16 ?

These people did.

1) https://youtu.be/5rYFfRnLwIY

2) https://youtu.be/sdphd742Oqs

3) https://youtu.be/4-lWP2fxfGk

Cga.8086 wrote:

I always wanted to know how it felt, the sound of that specific card again. I was unable to experience again [..]

The OPL3 did sound the same as on a SB16, however..
- The PAS16 had a surround/3D effect that could be enabled via mixer utility (SB16 ASP also had one, but not on plain DOS afaik).
- The amplifiers / frequency response of PAS16/SB16 were not the same. The SB16 CT17xx did sound deeper, whereas the PAS16 had a crystal clear sound.
- By default, the MediaVision cards used Voyetra OPL-3 or Voyetra SuperSAPI synth driver on Windows 3.1 (Creative used its own at some point; "Creative Music Synthesizer" ?).
You can use both on either card, though. A bit more information here: http://cd.textfiles.com/audio11000/MSDOS/SNDB … 13/MIDI-DRV.TXT

SETBLASTER wrote:

What games released for DOS contained an option in its menu for media vision pro audio spectrum?

This would be a hard list to compile - PAS support doesn't mean PAS16 support and I've noticed that some games provide a PAS16 option but just use the PAS16's Thunderboard part (i.e. just the mono SB emulation).

In saying all that, I wouldn't be surprised if @Cloudshatze has this all documented somewhere already.

Cga.8086 wrote:

[...]

But i think PAS16 would sound different compared to a SB16. some tones must not be the same (thats what i think, maybe im wrong)

Afraid you're wrong. It's just a difference in filtering and potentially (but rarely actually) effects such as the surround3d.

nobody ever did a video to compare something like, this is how it sounds with a SB16 and this is how it sounds with a PAS16 ?

Course they did:
https://youtu.be/sdphd742Oqs
This is from a reviewer who clearly prefers the PAS16, yet even he says it's a matter of clarity of sound and bugs (or lack thereof on the PAS16), not anything qualitatively different in the sound.

badmojo wrote:

SETBLASTER wrote:

What games released for DOS contained an option in its menu for media vision pro audio spectrum?

This would be a hard list to compile - PAS support doesn't mean PAS16 support and I've noticed that some games provide a PAS16 option but just use the PAS16's Thunderboard part (i.e. just the mono SB emulation).

That reminds me of Knights of Xentar. If memory serves, the PAS16 setting also worked on my SB16, since the menue setting configured the ini/cfg file to
use the SB DAC driver for speech and OPL3 driver for music. For mono samples, this was fine, I suppose. Also helped on systems like OS/2 (PAS16 DAC for OS/2, TB DAC for DOS/WIN31 or vice versa).

Does anyone know where one can download these MV Pocket programs. Supposably they came with the Memphis install diskettes.

^I'm not 100% sure, but I believe these programs are also contained in programs.lzh on the PAS16 setup disks - vogonsdrivers should have them.

seriusly
am I the only person in the world who got an exploded PAS16 and started to burn and smoke all over????

Probably.

They are a little too new to suffer heaps of tantalum capacitor failures. But not exactly impossible for it to occur.

Sorry, I haven't had issues with any PAS16, either. Except for some EMM386 issues or the lack of -5v on some PCs.
That being said, I was a PAS16 user since the ~mid 1990 and also got a few cards second hand.

The used cards behaved just as good as my first PAS16 that I got in the 1990s.
Even on modern Win98SE, they worked just fine as far as I remember.

The only "troublesome" cards were those made by Logitech (Logitech SoundMan-16),
but even here it only was a minor software issue (PAS16 driver refused to work on OEM models, the SoundMan driver worked fine).

Edit: Some typos fixed.

Edit: Maybe the -5v line of that test bed was faulty (did you use the same PSU on both boards ?). 😕
- That's about the only oddity the PAS16 has got, as far I remember.

I had a Jazz16 go up in smoke, but that was no great loss 😀

Jo22 wrote:

Sorry, I haven't had issues with any PAS16, either. Except for some EMM386 issues or the lack of -5v on some PCs. That being sai […]
Show full quote

Sorry, I haven't had issues with any PAS16, either. Except for some EMM386 issues or the lack of -5v on some PCs.
That being said, I was a PAS16 user since the ~mid 1990 and also got a few cards second hand.

The used cards behaved just as good as my first PAS16 that I got in the 1990s.
Even on modern Win98SE, they worked just fine as far as I remember.

The only "troublesome" cards were those made by Logitech (Logitech SoundMan-16),
but even here it only was a minor software issue (PAS16 driver refused to work on OEM models, the SoundMan driver worked fine).

Edit: Some typos fixed.

Edit: Maybe the -5v line of that test bed was faulty (did you use the same PSU on both boards ?). 😕
- That's about the only oddity the PAS16 has got, as far I remember.

hey PAS16 was my first soundcard. I even remember where we bought it in Miami. It came in a kit with a sony 1x cdrom but i was so young that its impossible to remember which of all PAS models i got back in the day. One of the first things i listened was Battle Chess (which the CD came on the kit. Its hard to remember what other games came on the kit, i wish i knew the list), i was unable to find pictures of the kits from that era. I also remember the windows 3.11 software that mediavision included i liked it very much.

anyway i always wondered why there is a media "vision pro audio STUDIO 16", and a "Pro audio SPECTRUM 16". Do those cards sound differently when playing games? or cards are absolutly the same when you play DOS games.? Im asking this because as you know things sound different according to which soundblaster model you got, maybe mediavision did the same and one model sounds great and other model sounds like crap and bugs.

It's the same card. The Studio was bundled with extra software and a microphone, that's all.

dionb wrote:

It's the same card. The Studio was bundled with extra software and a microphone, that's all.

I was under the impression that the Studio had some additional shielding but functionaly they seem exactly the same - I use the same drivers for both of the cards I have.

PAS16 “Preferred over Sound Blaster 16 in customer survey” ( Media Vision quote ).
Best Sound card 100% guaranteed ( Media Vision quote ).