"De-noising" Sound Blaster cards \ VOGONS

"De-noising" Sound Blaster cards

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First post, by mattrock1988

Posted on 2019-05-06, 19:48

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I'm wondering if there is a way to fix the noise floor and and general noisiness of pre DSP 4.05 Sound Blaster 16 boards. Can certain components be desoldered off the board and then replaced with higher quality ones to enhance output? I'm not terrible experienced here but was wondering if this was a possibility.

~~Retro PC: Intel Pentium III @ 1 GHz, Intel SE440BX-2, 32 GB IDE DOM, 384 MB SDRAM, DVD-ROM, 1.44 MB floppy, Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 AGP, Creative SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold, Aureal Vortex 2~~
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Reply 1 of 4, by Cloudschatze

Posted on 2019-05-06, 20:43

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mattrock1988 wrote:
I'm wondering if there is a way to fix the noise floor and and general noisiness of pre DSP 4.05 Sound Blaster 16 boards.

What have you tried? Disabling the internal amplifier and configuring the mixer appropriately should mitigate much of that noise.

Reply 2 of 4, by Jo22

Posted on 2019-05-07, 09:49

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I wonder if there are comparison types of the SB16 DAC. So far, I haven't found much information in this regard.
When searching for the AK4501-VS, for example, basically all that showed up was a PDF file for an old (but top of the line) radio transceiver (see p.148).
https://www.qsl.net/ok1mkq/technika/rig_manua … -supplement.pdf

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Reply 3 of 4, by jesolo

Posted on 2019-05-07, 10:47

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Cloudschatze wrote:
Disabling the internal amplifier and configuring the mixer appropriately should mitigate much of that noise.

Just to refresh my memory (it's been a while since I've played around with my Creative sound cards), is that done via a jumper on the board or via the mixer utility?

Reply 4 of 4, by Cloudschatze

Posted on 2019-05-08, 03:20

Cloudschatze Offline

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jesolo wrote:
Just to refresh my memory (it's been a while since I've played around with my Creative sound cards), is that done via a jumper on the board or via the mixer utility?

You've probably already found the answer by now, but if not:

OPSL/R pins 2-3 shunted (toward the ISA connector) = amplified output
OPSL/R pins 1-2 shunted = line-level output

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