Sb16 is not for half-life 2 or listening to your bethovens on 192 kbit mp3 or what ever. I use it for DOS gaming and it always just works.

Actually I have not turned off anything in the mixer, card is just dead quiet anyway. My SB live is horrendous though, put it in and pulled it out as quickly. What a piece of crap.

Joakim wrote on 2021-10-01, 18:28:

My SB live is horrendous though, put it in and pulled it out as quickly. What a piece of crap.

From my (limited) experience, the self-noise of a SBLive might depend on the card model.

My Dell OEM SB0220 is just a tad noisy (barely noticeable) but it crackles and pops while Windows is booting up. On the other hand, my SB0100 is completely noise-free and never produces any crackling or popping. Your mileage may vary.

Warlord wrote on 2021-09-29, 22:51:

😀 not really a waste if you think about it. The features of a 2230 make it a superior card to a awe64 value in a few ways. Real opl3 vs atrocious cqm. Wavetable header. Not pnp. Also it doesn’t have bugs just like the aw64. Plus this make it low noise like the awe and the aw64 was a parts card I didn’t buy it and I only paid 25 + free ship for sb16

The noise comes from the DAC (and/or poorly configured mixer settings and speaker vs line out), the MIDI bugs come from the DSP chip, which was not transplanted in this case. The unicorn SB16 would include a low noise DAC, a DSP chip (version 4.04, 4.05 or 4.16) that doesn't have the MIDI bugs, wavetable header + genuine OPL3 chip, and jumper based configuration including CD-ROM controller that can be fully disabled. It's very rare to find this combination in the wild.

MN_Moody wrote on 2021-10-20, 10:01:

The noise comes from the DAC (and/or poorly configured mixer settings and speaker vs line out), the MIDI bugs come from the DSP chip, which was not transplanted in this case.

The CT1747 chip can mitigate the type 1 MIDI hanging note even if the card has a DSP chip suffering from this. It won't fix the type 2 MIDI hanging note, but that one happens much less frequently and whether it's annoys someone or not depends.

The unicorn SB16 would include a low noise DAC, a DSP chip (version 4.04, 4.05 or 4.16) that doesn't have the MIDI bugs, wavetable header + genuine OPL3 chip, and jumper based configuration including CD-ROM controller that can be fully disabled. It's very rare to find this combination in the wild.

AWE64 Legacy comes very close to that, but that's a custom card using the large AWE chip found on CT4520 cards and have the HardMPU implementation in addition to the one found on SB16 based cards.