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Best ISA soundcard ?

J

JURB6006

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi;

Many of you know my PC isn't that great, but it must function just a little
longer and when I build another, it would be nice to have a backup. Heck the
thing is good enough to get on DSL and burn disks at least.

Anyway I had another soundcard take a crap today. I've checked all cables etc.,
and it's putting out noise in the left and very very low audio. It's the card
itself.

What I need is a high quality ISA soundcard. I have no PCI slots left. I've had
cheap ones and found their S/N ratio unacceptable, you see my entire stereo
runs off the PC. I haven't touched a CD that I didn't burn in months, and the
thing won't skip no matter how loud you turn it. It will skip due to software
issues, like being on a primary connection to P2P, or loading a complex
webpage. Typoing, printing, scanning and usually even online it's OK.

So I've gone through two SB cards so far and I'm getting sick of it. First of
all, with the power it's hooked up to, I need a really good S/N ratio, 110dB
would be nice, but I think 90 will do. Even less but I wouldn't want to go less
than say 75.

Now these things should be cheap with ISA being phased out, what I'm looking
for is a really good (audio) quality card, and, if there is a difference in
processor resources used by the card like a winmodem vs. a hardware modem, I
would like the latter.

Any recommendations ?

Thanks for your time.

JURB
 
L

LASERandDVDfan

Jan 1, 1970
0
What I need is a high quality ISA soundcard. I have no PCI slots left. I've
had
cheap ones and found their S/N ratio unacceptable, you see my entire stereo
runs off the PC.

ISA sound cards are never really acceptable.

I have a Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP, and that's almost the highest end as you can
get for ISA. It's not a stellar performer in comparison to something like the
Sound Blaster PCI-128 in terms of frequency response, dynamic range, S/N, and
THD+N. - Reinhart
 
J

JURB6006

Jan 1, 1970
0
I have a Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP, and that's almost the highest end as you
can
get for ISA.

Then I think I want one. I wonder if 98SE has drivers. . . . . . .

I'll see what I can find.

Thanks.

JURB
 
A

Asimov

Jan 1, 1970
0
"JURB6006" bravely wrote to "All" (03 Nov 04 20:42:19)
--- on the heady topic of "Best ISA soundcard ?"

JU> From: [email protected] (JURB6006)
JU> Many of you know my PC isn't that great, but it must function just a
JU> little longer and when I build another, it would be nice to have a
JU> backup. Heck the thing is good enough to get on DSL and burn disks at
JU> least.
JU> Anyway I had another soundcard take a crap today. I've checked all
JU> cables etc., and it's putting out noise in the left and very very low
JU> audio. It's the card itself.
[,,,]
JU> Any recommendations ?
JU> Thanks for your time.

Your ISA sound cards are crapping out because they are too slow for your
pc's buss speed. Slow down your clocks and put in lots of waits, man!

A*s*i*m*o*v

.... Over a hundred billion electrons were used in crafting this tagline.
 
R

Robert Hancock

Jan 1, 1970
0
JURB6006 said:
Hi;

Many of you know my PC isn't that great, but it must function just a little
longer and when I build another, it would be nice to have a backup. Heck the
thing is good enough to get on DSL and burn disks at least.

Anyway I had another soundcard take a crap today. I've checked all cables etc.,
and it's putting out noise in the left and very very low audio. It's the card
itself.

What I need is a high quality ISA soundcard. I have no PCI slots left. I've had
cheap ones and found their S/N ratio unacceptable, you see my entire stereo
runs off the PC. I haven't touched a CD that I didn't burn in months, and the
thing won't skip no matter how loud you turn it. It will skip due to software
issues, like being on a primary connection to P2P, or loading a complex
webpage. Typoing, printing, scanning and usually even online it's OK.

So I've gone through two SB cards so far and I'm getting sick of it. First of
all, with the power it's hooked up to, I need a really good S/N ratio, 110dB
would be nice, but I think 90 will do. Even less but I wouldn't want to go less
than say 75.

Now these things should be cheap with ISA being phased out, what I'm looking
for is a really good (audio) quality card, and, if there is a difference in
processor resources used by the card like a winmodem vs. a hardware modem, I
would like the latter.

Any recommendations ?

Thanks for your time.

JURB

I don't think there were many ISA sound cards ever made that really have
as good quality as a decent PCI card these days - before MP3s started
becoming popular the SNR of the card just didn't matter all that much,
and PCI sound cards seemed to take over fairly quickly once they came out.

As well, the CPU utilization of an ISA card is likely going to be higher
than a PCI card.

The easiest solution if at all possible would likely be to try and free
up a PCI slot for a PCI sound card. Other than that, there are some
higher-end or pro-type sound cards you could look for, like the AWE32
that somebody mentioned..
 
L

LASERandDVDfan

Jan 1, 1970
0
Then I think I want one. I wonder if 98SE has drivers. . . . . . .
I'll see what I can find.

I believe drivers for this sound card are still available for download at the
Sound Blaster website.

www.soundblaster.com

- Reinhart
 
D

D MARSHALL

Jan 1, 1970
0
i use sb16 or awe32 - awe64 i like
all creative soundblaster's.
thay all seem to work under win95 - win98-se.
 
W

William R. Walsh

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi!

There's gotta be something up with your system...you shouldn't be having so
many of those Soundblasters deciding to up and die like that. I have used
both a regular SB-16 (that came new in a Dell Dimension 433si I bought years
ago and has seen at least 5 systems since then) and an SB-16 with SCSI in a
300MHz Pentium II box. Neither card ever gave me a problem. The worst
complaint I had was the noise that came off of the built in stereo amp, but
that was easily solved by just disabling it and feeding the audio into a
better amplifier.

I'd recommend another Sound Blaster ISA. They're probably the best thing you
can find without actually testing one out at the time of purchase. I've
found a few nice cards based on the Crystal CS4231A IC, but all too often
such cards are simply junk in terms of a proper hardware implementation of
the IC or sound quality.

If your current card is making sound you might want to have a look at
replacing the stereo miniplug connection on the back. I've had more than one
go bad. It seems that Creative had a lot of trouble with this--and the
symptoms are just like you mentioned. Audio in one or both channels gets
weak or the stereo separation is totally wrong. If you have the skills and
equipment give replacing that miniplug a try. I've had to to do that on both
the SB-16 and SB-16 SCSI.

Right now I have a full length (!) ISA sound card that was made by Ensoniq.
The thing certainly looks impressive with an onboard wavetable synth,
interfaces for four different kinds of CD-ROM drives, a stereo amplifier and
lots of different auxiliary connectors onboard for things like TV tuners and
such. Trouble is that I simply cannot find any drivers for the card...and it
doesn't return enough of a PnP ID string for me to find anything out about
it. That's really too bad, as I'm sure it is a world class sound card.

William
 
J

JURB6006

Jan 1, 1970
0
Asimov:
Your ISA sound cards are crapping out >because they are too slow for your
pc's buss speed. Slow down your clocks >and put in lots of waits, man!

This one is specifically out on the left channel, and putting out some noise.
However I give weight to your statement that it may be my system. When it
screwed up it started giving me the battery failure message at bootup. This
happened when the original card failed, started putting out noise but no audio
on either channel, and wouldn't even pass the
analog CD feedthough.

However there have been devlopments, read on.

That card did that and I had to, for some reason, change the vidcard too to get
the system running "right". Now one channel goes and what did I do ? I looked
at the original soundcard and found out it actually is an AWE32 !.

I put it back in today and it seems to work !

The only change I made was I had a Hercules vidcard, based on Tseng ET6000
chipset. It was a nice vidcard. Has some kind of specially fdast DAC that
pretty muvh make a 2MB card run like an 8MB. What's more it's back in too, why
does it work now ?

I'll continue to use the AWE32 and see if the problem recurs. Also, in the past
this mobo didn't like the Hercules. I believe that it wouldn't shut down. From
what I've read that basically means it has trouble getting back to real mode
drivers. When this happened it did not result in scandisk on reboot, I think it
was ready to shutdown, but that was simply not displayed.

After a few system changes, the thing worked fine, but now the mobo gives a
battery failure warning on bootup, and this started happening right when the
AWE32 supposedly failed.

Note that the system was running with that for over two years, and now I
decided to put the same AWE32 back in and it's fine.

WR Walsh:
Right now I have a full length (!) ISA sound card that was made by Ensoniq.

I'll see what I can find. If driverguide has it I can email you a user and
password for it if you don't have your own. Other than that I bought a CD a few
years ago called the ultimate driver collection, and it has saved me some
trouble. I'll see if I can locate it and see if it has Ensoniq drivers. Can you
scan the thing so I can see the chip numbers or are there none ?

Also I have a Reveal TV tuner card, the kind that hooks up like a video
accelerator I think. I have drivers for it but it needs an IRQ and can't find
one. I'll see what I can find for you, but you might run into a similar
problem.

Anyway, thank you all for your time and help.

JURB
 
J

James Sweet

Jan 1, 1970
0
JURB6006 said:
Hi;

Many of you know my PC isn't that great, but it must function just a little
longer and when I build another, it would be nice to have a backup. Heck the
thing is good enough to get on DSL and burn disks at least.

Anyway I had another soundcard take a crap today. I've checked all cables etc.,
and it's putting out noise in the left and very very low audio. It's the card
itself.

What I need is a high quality ISA soundcard. I have no PCI slots left. I've had
cheap ones and found their S/N ratio unacceptable, you see my entire stereo
runs off the PC. I haven't touched a CD that I didn't burn in months, and the
thing won't skip no matter how loud you turn it. It will skip due to software
issues, like being on a primary connection to P2P, or loading a complex
webpage. Typoing, printing, scanning and usually even online it's OK.

So I've gone through two SB cards so far and I'm getting sick of it. First of
all, with the power it's hooked up to, I need a really good S/N ratio, 110dB
would be nice, but I think 90 will do. Even less but I wouldn't want to go less
than say 75.

Now these things should be cheap with ISA being phased out, what I'm looking
for is a really good (audio) quality card, and, if there is a difference in
processor resources used by the card like a winmodem vs. a hardware modem, I
would like the latter.

Any recommendations ?

Thanks for your time.

JURB

There were lots of high end ISA sound cards at one point, though finding
drivers for some of them for any reasonably modern OS can be tricky. I had a
Gravis Ultrasound years ago that seemed incredible at the time, it put the
SB-16 to shame in everything except compatibility. Turtle Beach made some
good stuff too. I suspect the really good cards are still pricey, hard to
find and coveted by various people who have a specific need for them.
 
J

James Sweet

Jan 1, 1970
0
William R. Walsh said:
Hi!

There's gotta be something up with your system...you shouldn't be having so
many of those Soundblasters deciding to up and die like that. I have used
both a regular SB-16 (that came new in a Dell Dimension 433si I bought years
ago and has seen at least 5 systems since then) and an SB-16 with SCSI in a
300MHz Pentium II box. Neither card ever gave me a problem. The worst
complaint I had was the noise that came off of the built in stereo amp, but
that was easily solved by just disabling it and feeding the audio into a
better amplifier.

I'd recommend another Sound Blaster ISA. They're probably the best thing you
can find without actually testing one out at the time of purchase. I've
found a few nice cards based on the Crystal CS4231A IC, but all too often
such cards are simply junk in terms of a proper hardware implementation of
the IC or sound quality.


Actually I almost forgot, try the Sound Blaster AWE-64 Gold if you can find
one, they lack the onboard amp entirely to reduce noise and have just RCA
jacks for the output. They were reasonably common so shouldn't be too
terribly hard to find.
 
W

windoze

Jan 1, 1970
0
Any recommendations ?

Thanks for your time.

JURB

There was the pro audio spectrum card or something like that.

Was better than the original SB card.

Might be too old.
 
A

Asimov

Jan 1, 1970
0
"JURB6006" bravely wrote to "All" (05 Nov 04 01:55:49)
--- on the heady topic of "Re: Best ISA soundcard ? (response/update)"

JU> From: [email protected] (JURB6006)

JU> Asimov:
Your ISA sound cards are crapping out >because they are too slow for your
pc's buss speed. Slow down your clocks >and put in lots of waits, man!


JU> This one is specifically out on the left channel, and putting out some
JU> noise. However I give weight to your statement that it may be my
JU> system. When it screwed up it started giving me the battery failure
JU> message at bootup. This happened when the original card failed, started
JU> putting out noise but no audio on either channel, and wouldn't even
JU> pass the analog CD feedthough.

JU> However there have been devlopments, read on.

JU> That card did that and I had to, for some reason, change the vidcard
JU> too to get the system running "right". Now one channel goes and what
JU> did I do ? I looked at the original soundcard and found out it actually
JU> is an AWE32 !.
JU> I put it back in today and it seems to work !

JU> The only change I made was I had a Hercules vidcard, based on Tseng
JU> ET6000 chipset. It was a nice vidcard. Has some kind of specially fdast
JU> DAC that pretty muvh make a 2MB card run like an 8MB. What's more it's
JU> back in too, why does it work now ?
[,,,]

It could be an issue with the PnP controller's registers. Taking out the
cards allowed it to start from scratch in reassigning the IRQ's. Some
cards are tricky especially video as you seem to have experienced. Video
must go closest to the 1st slot, then the hd, modem, and sound last.
Keeping sound away from all other cards minimizes stray audio noise too.
I could never get FS5 to work right with some video/sound/hdctrl vesa
card combinations. Video access causing a choppy sound in digital mode.
Even in win98 it would show cloned drivers which I had to manually
disable. All due to PnP problems no doubt. But hey there are thousands
of via connections all waiting to crap out on us at any time!

A*s*i*m*o*v

.... Is reactance then illusory? No, it just appears that way...
 
P

Pete Cross

Jan 1, 1970
0
If you only listen to CD's, take the audio straight off the cd player to an
external amp and don't fit a sound card..........
 
R

Robert Hancock

Jan 1, 1970
0
Pete said:
If you only listen to CD's, take the audio straight off the cd player to an
external amp and don't fit a sound card..........

Except if you want high quality, this is no good, since the audio output
on CD-ROM drives is usually crap..
 
J

JURB6006

Jan 1, 1970
0
If you only listen to CD's

HA, I haven't touched a CD I didn't burn for quite a while. I tried to play a
CD because I had no left channel and wanted to know if it was software or not.
While not conclusive I included that small piece of info in my post.

Fact of the matter is I got at least 20GB worth of media on the HD. My stereo
hasn't run off anything else in years. I got well over 2200 songs and about 9GB
worth of ripped movies. My TV hasn't been turned on in months.

Suprisingly this old vidcard works with DIVX CODECS and the like, like
Angelpotion, and a few others. While I can't play a DVD without the drive, I
can play a CDR burned DVD copy.Of course most of them are too big now. They
must be ripped, and then you don't get all the languages and the wide mode, oh
well.

Incedentally, I HAVE had soundcards so crappy that a CD actually sounded better
from the CD headphone jack :|

JURB
 
J

James Sweet

Jan 1, 1970
0
There was the pro audio spectrum card or something like that.

Was better than the original SB card.

Might be too old.

I had one of those too, a PAS-16, it was a piece of crap, had all sorts of
software issues, sound quality was comparable.
 
W

windoze

Jan 1, 1970
0
I had one of those too, a PAS-16, it was a piece of crap, had all sorts of
software issues, sound quality was comparable.

LOL. Worked ok for me. Of course I wasn't doing anything fancy with
it, play a wav file, run doom. I guess if you were a midi freak or
something the software would run out of gas pretty fast.

Then again I never had any SoundBlaster drivers on my machine ;)
 
W

William R. Walsh

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi!
I'll see what I can find. If driverguide has it I can email you a user and
password for it if you don't have your own. Other than that I bought a CD a few
years ago called the ultimate driver collection, and it has saved me some
trouble. I'll see if I can locate it and see if it has Ensoniq drivers. Can you
scan the thing so I can see the chip numbers or are there none ?

I've got a scan here. It's of the whole card and not of terribly high
resolution. Some markings you can see. If you want more, let me know. I can
scan up to 1200 DPI IIRC. (Been a while since I used my scanner!)

http://greyghost.dyndns.org/ensoniq.jpg (approx. 272 K)
Also I have a Reveal TV tuner card, the kind that hooks up like a video
accelerator I think. I have drivers for it but it needs an IRQ and can't find
one. I'll see what I can find for you, but you might run into a similar
problem.

That would be cool if you could get it to work. (I've always wanted to see
something that used the VESA feature connector. Does your TV card do that?)
I don't know that an IRQ would be much of a problem. If I could only get the
card to identify itself by more than the FCC ID I might be able to get
somewhere with it.

Thanks!

William
 
W

William R. Walsh

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi!

Well, I figured out what I've got. I took a closer look at that little
white sticker down by the bus connector. It would seem that I have an
Ensoniq SoundScape Elite card...now to find some drivers.

I had a current membership at one point to driverguide, but it has long
since lapsed...so if you've got a user ID that can be used, please feel
free to e-mail me.

William
 
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