The more time passes, the more people realise that Stéphane Picq wrote one of the greatest DOS soundtracks ever for Dune, whether you use SB or Adlib cards. Great comparison!
@@DOSStorm There's only one proper way to listen to the Dune soundtrack and that is either by owning a working Adlib Gold or using Dosbox Staging which has a proper Adlib Gold OPL3 with the surround module. Picq wrote the music for the ADG. So neither Adlib cards could beat Dosbox Staging in this case.
I had a 486 DX 66 with the SCSI version PAS 16 and a 4x CD-ROM and Diamond Viper video card. I chose the PAS 16 on the recommendation of a friend who had first tried the SB 16 which he felt was too noisy and had swapped it for the PAS 16. Good times.
@@DOSStorm Awesome, I wish could see them live. By the way I also play guitar and I made some short riff covers of SX with a custom distortion pedal that I built myself :) You can listen to them in my YT channel, cheers!
I assume this is referring to the "nuked" core, which is apparently based on hardware analysis of the chip and is supposed to be super accurate. It's also available in DOSBox ECE and probably DOSBox-X.
I agree that the PAS16 sounds cleanest of the examples tested, but has some sort of soft/hard high pass filter taking the oomph out of the low end.. could be a software/mixer setting or old capacitors that would benefit from replacing. Unless it was just an anomaly in that moment in the soundtrack, I believe the PAS is also the only example playing FM music in stereo (example around 6:33)?
Yeah it is kind of odd as far as I can tell nothing in Windows 98 is causing it. Maybe a pure DOS system would yield better results? The caps are probably 30 years old at this point as well but I think they are all playing in stereo at least for Descent. I believe Tyrian and Dune have mono music.
Actually, iirc it's the reverse -- the SB series had low-pass filtering to reduce noise in lieu of decent shielding and smart trace runs. They were generally produced in a rush, because the PAS cards came out first and consistently led the market in performance and feature set (and reviews from the time reflect that). Creative would then rush a card to market that matched its feature set; this is the cause of the noisy response of the SB16 (which the LPF was put in place for) and the audio bugs of the early SBPro line. edit: that said, I don't think you're hearing a high-pass filter on the PAS16; doesn't sound like an HPF to my ear at all, I think. You may be onto something with the old caps, though.
The MediaVision setup looked the most enjoyable to me not just because of the clear sound with boomy lows but also due to the fact the rig seems to pump out much better performance on Descent.
Good comparison. One note: If you are going to compare waveforms, please do also include spectrograms as well, they give a much better information on frequency response, noise etc. Or better yet, share the uncompressed recordings with us.
some kind of weird filtering happening on the media vision card. replacing capacitors on the output stage with different values could alter and probably improve the filter's color.
as a heads up, not all variants of the PAS16 need the -5v, mine does not. the -5v finger on it just terminates at the solder mask. as i thought about it; for those curious why; there's an lm7905ct on the top edge above the bracket screw providing the -5v, isolated from the motherboard. ffc id: ixw-mvipasm while the technical name is 'media vision pro audio spectrum multi-media' it only registers as a PAS16 in everything i've thrown at it for probing.
Something is up with the PAS16. I had one new and my brother had a SB16. We put them side by side by side the FM synth performance was basically the same with a better noise floor on the PAS16. Digital playback was better on the PAS16 than the SB16 though. Much cleaner. That being said the PAS16 was always juuuussssttt compatible with anything. It would emulate SB most of the time but sometimes not. It was iffy sometimes even if the game had PAS support if it would 100 percent work, and I think they just gave the option and used the SB emulation. Basically for music, MIDI/MOD/Et cetera the PAS16 won out. For just playing games and having them work and sound great too, SB16. If you wanted to hate every moment of your existence, SB Pro. I had that one before I got the SB16
I agree some others were saying the same thing. Might need to do some repairs on the PAS16. The weird thing with the PAS16 is that it uses different IRQ settings depending on game support. The SB compatibility MUST be set to IRQ 5 to work properly. If the game has support for the PAS16 it uses whatever other IRQ(7 I think in my case)settings you specify. The PATA controller uses another set of resources of as well.😆 This kind of makes it a nightmare to set up properly.
@@DOSStorm I seem to recall sometimes having to REM line my MVSOUND.SYS for some games and it would just run in straight 8 bit adlib mode which was reliable but..Adlib. Yeah SetBlaster was like 5-3-1 or nothing! I remember Zone 66 and Maximum Overkill - Comanche both being nightmares of jockying around settings to get them to work with the PAS16 but they worked just fine with SB16. Actually I am having PTSD from getting Zone 66 to just run cause I seem to recall you couldn't have EMM386 loaded or something and uuuuhhhhh. Dos games of that era were so much fun!
Very nice video. I liked the comparison, nicely done. I wonder however, did you tinker with DOSBox OPL settings at all, or is this just with the out-of-the-box settings? Maybe do a follow-up video comparing different DOSBox settings and even different DOSBox forks?
To my ears, The Sound Blaster sounds the best, followed closely by Dosbox, with the Media Vision card lagging far behind. It's always subjective, of course!
Funny, I thought the PAS sounded the best, then DOS BOX and then SB last. I had a PAS back in the day. I sold it back then to buy an AWE 32 (IIRC) and regretted it.
I don't recall my PAS16 sounding like that. I'm going to have to go and pull it out of storage and try it again and see if it sounds that poorly. I do have quite a few SB16 cards that sound that muted though.
I got my PAS16 out of storage. It does not sound like how yours does. I don't know what's going on with yours, but it is very muffled. I think someone below mentioned some sort of line level filtering. That would be the first place to look.
@@helldog3105 I can also attest to the fact that there is something slightly off with this dude's PAS16. Mine sounds clear as a bell in contrast to this video. Perhaps the different machines used have something to do with the difference in clarity here.
Great video! It would also be interesting to compare against a Sound Blaster Live or Audigy to see how good the official hardware emulation by Creative is.
I loved my PAS16 during the short time I owned it, but the software compatibility issues were the deal-breaker. The SB16 I replaced it with never sounded as good, but it at least worked with damn near everything I threw at it.
If I remember right you can setup DOSBOX to emulate different sound cards. Did you try Roland, or PAS16 emulation? I tried with Clouds of Xeen, and each one makes the game sound completely different.
You're correct, and I would like to do a better video on this sometime in the future! Some of the other settings in DOSbox seem to sound quite a bit better than it does here.
You said you recorded everything with the Focusrite 8i6. Does that also include DOSBox? If so, how is it connected? If you're hooking up the analog output of the on-board sound card of your motherboard to the audio interface, then that's not a fair comparison at all since the on-board sound card will degrade the quality more than anything else (they're terrible).
Yes I recorded even the DOSbox portion with the 8i6 interface just to keep things consistent. I used a 3.5mm to 1/4 breakout cable to capture in stereo. Do you think I'm better off just capturing directly(with software) in Windows?
7:00 it is noticably slower, might be a CPU thing. This might be a dumb question but does the sound blaster have it's own clock sync or microprocessor like a GPU is it dependent on the CPU to "drive" it.
I’m really not sure. I think old cards like the SB16 do all the sound processing onboard? Pretty much all sound devices now use the CPU to process sound(unless you buy a dedicated sound card), but I think CPUs back then were too weak to do that efficiently without a major performance drop. Descent was the only one that did it but then again it’s also the most demanding on the CPU. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in.
Descent definitely has some weird issues on underpowered hardware. I remember it felt like it was running slower and not just choppier on my 386DX-33 versus 486DX4-120.
This sounded like an interesting idea to me too, but in my experience all these old cards are getting more fuzzy as the components in their op-amps and other analog circuits degrade over time. An SB16 sounded best in 1992 not 2022. Emulation ftw
It’s pretty amazing how well it works most of the time. Honestly it’s easier than using real hardware with some difficult games. The SB16 emulation lacks some detail sometimes but to most I think they will find it pretty accurate.
DOSBox stock emulation isn't worth talking about beyond the fact that it leaves something to be desired (hence NukedOPL and the Serdashop solutions). Digital sound may have been a more telling test than music, but the difference between the cards is in fidelity (probably difference due to build quality) rather than capability. Some games only output stereo through the original Pro Audio Spectrum but that was moot by the time the 16s came. I hear few retro computer gamers recommend a Sound Blaster 16 but the AWE family is held in higher regard, particularly 64 Gold, suggesting the fidelity issues were alleviated over time.
AWE32/64 lacked an actual FM synth, it used emulated OPL with its CQM chip. The main reason why you hear the AWE series held in high regard is their great General MIDI support along with wavetable headers being able to upgrade the samples being used.
@@SCSNSE Exactly: as a standalone with on-board MIDI the AWEs were remarkable. My point was about hardware build and output quality, not OPL authenticity. By the time AWE ditched OPL for CQM games may have still supported Adlib modes for compatibility's sake but were meant for General MIDI instead. I'm no audiophile and got used to OPL clones early in my gaming life, but I own an AWE64 Gold and find its CQM output quite sufficient, particularly with the added capacity to adjust reverb and chorus. That being said, all the games that support stereo solely through either PAS or SBPro I am either not interested in or play through my Roland LAPC-I instead.
This is pretty confusing, as HighTreason610's video ( th-cam.com/video/sdphd742Oqs/w-d-xo.html ), showed the CT1740's FM as sounding a slight bit more muffled than the PAS'. And also the PAS sounding WAY sharper than it sounds here.. 😐
Some have mentioned there could something wrong with my particular card and that there maybe some weird filtering going on. The output definitely sounds different than the SB16 which is using the same chip.
@@DOSStorm From what I could see later on YT (Necroware also has a very good video on the PAS: th-cam.com/video/_7P8anriPbA/w-d-xo.html ) , the card sounds sharp or muffled depending on what mode it's being used when setting up the game.. i.e. "Sound Blaster" mode vs. "PAS" mode.
Thanks for this detailed comparison. Sad to hear that the sound blaster 16 emulation in dosbox is so poor.. there is just so much lost detail and nuance in dosbox. For example, the low and high ends are less present; the sound blaster thumps them out, and there's a lot of activity in the low hz ranges, but the dosbox emulation just seems to, well, produce them.
Interesting comparison. Soundblaster is way too tinny, thin, croaking and straight unbearable as it always has been. Like you had taken a terrible and too small speaker, smashed it with a hammer three times and then put it into a Pringles can.
The more time passes, the more people realise that Stéphane Picq wrote one of the greatest DOS soundtracks ever for Dune, whether you use SB or Adlib cards. Great comparison!
One of my favorites as well. It's pretty incredible considering the limitations of the Adlib.
@@DOSStorm There's only one proper way to listen to the Dune soundtrack and that is either by owning a working Adlib Gold or using Dosbox Staging which has a proper Adlib Gold OPL3 with the surround module. Picq wrote the music for the ADG. So neither Adlib cards could beat Dosbox Staging in this case.
Agreed!
Oh yes, it's mesmerizing!
the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sounds the best to me, wider soundstage, really really nice!!
I think it's due to the filtering capacitors used. It doesn't smooth out the low frequencies like the SB16 does.
I had a 486 DX 66 with the SCSI version PAS 16 and a 4x CD-ROM and Diamond Viper video card. I chose the PAS 16 on the recommendation of a friend who had first tried the SB 16 which he felt was too noisy and had swapped it for the PAS 16. Good times.
Really interesting comparison! Thanks for putting this together.
Thanks glad you like it Chris!
SB16 was my dream soundcard back then but could not afford it as a kid.
I was so proud when I bought one for myself. Kept it a very very long time, through multiple PCs…
Same, I always had the knock offs like the Crystal or ESS chips. Now I'm living the dream. 😄
Wait until you hear Roland…
Cool to see that Symphony X t-shirt :D That's my favorite band.
Great video as always!
My favorite band as well! I picked up this shirt when I saw them and Haken a few months ago. 🤘
@@DOSStorm Awesome, I wish could see them live. By the way I also play guitar and I made some short riff covers of SX with a custom distortion pedal that I built myself :) You can listen to them in my YT channel, cheers!
You should compare against Dosbox-staging. The OPL code in that fork a lot more accurate. I would be curious to see your opinion on that.
I like the idea! I will look into it.
I assume this is referring to the "nuked" core, which is apparently based on hardware analysis of the chip and is supposed to be super accurate. It's also available in DOSBox ECE and probably DOSBox-X.
@@HunterZBNS That's correct.
I agree that the PAS16 sounds cleanest of the examples tested, but has some sort of soft/hard high pass filter taking the oomph out of the low end.. could be a software/mixer setting or old capacitors that would benefit from replacing. Unless it was just an anomaly in that moment in the soundtrack, I believe the PAS is also the only example playing FM music in stereo (example around 6:33)?
Yeah it is kind of odd as far as I can tell nothing in Windows 98 is causing it. Maybe a pure DOS system would yield better results? The caps are probably 30 years old at this point as well but I think they are all playing in stereo at least for Descent. I believe Tyrian and Dune have mono music.
Actually, iirc it's the reverse -- the SB series had low-pass filtering to reduce noise in lieu of decent shielding and smart trace runs. They were generally produced in a rush, because the PAS cards came out first and consistently led the market in performance and feature set (and reviews from the time reflect that). Creative would then rush a card to market that matched its feature set; this is the cause of the noisy response of the SB16 (which the LPF was put in place for) and the audio bugs of the early SBPro line.
edit: that said, I don't think you're hearing a high-pass filter on the PAS16; doesn't sound like an HPF to my ear at all, I think. You may be onto something with the old caps, though.
There is a reason why SB16 dominated the market at that time. Great processing. Loved the video!
Also the PAS16 drivers were a total pain to deal with back in the day. The SB16 just worked. No drivers needed.
Nice comparison. Looking forward to your GUS clone review.
I'm looking forward to trying it too! I just ordered some memory for it yesterday.
The MediaVision setup looked the most enjoyable to me not just because of the clear sound with boomy lows but also due to the fact the rig seems to pump out much better performance on Descent.
Well part of that is because the SB16 was running on a 486. 😅
Good comparison. One note: If you are going to compare waveforms, please do also include spectrograms as well, they give a much better information on frequency response, noise etc. Or better yet, share the uncompressed recordings with us.
some kind of weird filtering happening on the media vision card. replacing capacitors on the output stage with different values could alter and probably improve the filter's color.
Yeah the aging caps could definitely be a problem. It does seem to be missing the low end rumble like the SB16 has
as a heads up, not all variants of the PAS16 need the -5v, mine does not. the -5v finger on it just terminates at the solder mask.
as i thought about it; for those curious why; there's an lm7905ct on the top edge above the bracket screw providing the -5v, isolated from the motherboard.
ffc id: ixw-mvipasm
while the technical name is 'media vision pro audio spectrum multi-media' it only registers as a PAS16 in everything i've thrown at it for probing.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge! I will have to inspect my card more to see.
Something is up with the PAS16. I had one new and my brother had a SB16. We put them side by side by side the FM synth performance was basically the same with a better noise floor on the PAS16. Digital playback was better on the PAS16 than the SB16 though. Much cleaner. That being said the PAS16 was always juuuussssttt compatible with anything. It would emulate SB most of the time but sometimes not. It was iffy sometimes even if the game had PAS support if it would 100 percent work, and I think they just gave the option and used the SB emulation. Basically for music, MIDI/MOD/Et cetera the PAS16 won out. For just playing games and having them work and sound great too, SB16. If you wanted to hate every moment of your existence, SB Pro. I had that one before I got the SB16
I agree some others were saying the same thing. Might need to do some repairs on the PAS16. The weird thing with the PAS16 is that it uses different IRQ settings depending on game support. The SB compatibility MUST be set to IRQ 5 to work properly. If the game has support for the PAS16 it uses whatever other IRQ(7 I think in my case)settings you specify. The PATA controller uses another set of resources of as well.😆 This kind of makes it a nightmare to set up properly.
@@DOSStorm I seem to recall sometimes having to REM line my MVSOUND.SYS for some games and it would just run in straight 8 bit adlib mode which was reliable but..Adlib. Yeah SetBlaster was like 5-3-1 or nothing! I remember Zone 66 and Maximum Overkill - Comanche both being nightmares of jockying around settings to get them to work with the PAS16 but they worked just fine with SB16. Actually I am having PTSD from getting Zone 66 to just run cause I seem to recall you couldn't have EMM386 loaded or something and uuuuhhhhh. Dos games of that era were so much fun!
@@DOSStorm Bit confused, you talking about the SB16 as your PAS16 has a SCSI connector and controller not a PATA.
@@gremfive4246 You're correct I'm off by about 10 pins there. Its definitely a SCSI connector not IDE.
The media vision card has audible lowpass filtering happening. Replace the output capacitors and try again.
I think you’re right. Probably need to replace some caps.
Very nice video. I liked the comparison, nicely done. I wonder however, did you tinker with DOSBox OPL settings at all, or is this just with the out-of-the-box settings? Maybe do a follow-up video comparing different DOSBox settings and even different DOSBox forks?
Yep its just an unmodified version of DOSbox. I'll look into a follow up perhaps.
To my ears, The Sound Blaster sounds the best, followed closely by Dosbox, with the Media Vision card lagging far behind. It's always subjective, of course!
I agree a Sound Blaster 16 is just hard to beat for DOS gaming.
I agree.
Funny, I thought the PAS sounded the best, then DOS BOX and then SB last.
I had a PAS back in the day. I sold it back then to buy an AWE 32 (IIRC) and regretted it.
very nice of pcb way to support smaller creators like this
I don't recall my PAS16 sounding like that. I'm going to have to go and pull it out of storage and try it again and see if it sounds that poorly. I do have quite a few SB16 cards that sound that muted though.
I got my PAS16 out of storage. It does not sound like how yours does. I don't know what's going on with yours, but it is very muffled. I think someone below mentioned some sort of line level filtering. That would be the first place to look.
@@helldog3105 I can also attest to the fact that there is something slightly off with this dude's PAS16. Mine sounds clear as a bell in contrast to this video. Perhaps the different machines used have something to do with the difference in clarity here.
My pas16 was the greatest soundcard ever. When isa dissappeared .... so did most of my childhood soundscapes
Great video! It would also be interesting to compare against a Sound Blaster Live or Audigy to see how good the official hardware emulation by Creative is.
Sounds like a plan! I have a live laying around.
@@DOSStorm Awesome! I look forward to it!
I loved my PAS16 during the short time I owned it, but the software compatibility issues were the deal-breaker. The SB16 I replaced it with never sounded as good, but it at least worked with damn near everything I threw at it.
If I remember right you can setup DOSBOX to emulate different sound cards. Did you try Roland, or PAS16 emulation? I tried with Clouds of Xeen, and each one makes the game sound completely different.
You're correct, and I would like to do a better video on this sometime in the future! Some of the other settings in DOSbox seem to sound quite a bit better than it does here.
Still looking for what Doom2 sounds like on the PAS. It's the mystery card.
The PAS 16 was how I experienced the music of most DOS games of the time, so everything sounds wrong when I revisit them on TH-cam.
You said you recorded everything with the Focusrite 8i6. Does that also include DOSBox? If so, how is it connected? If you're hooking up the analog output of the on-board sound card of your motherboard to the audio interface, then that's not a fair comparison at all since the on-board sound card will degrade the quality more than anything else (they're terrible).
Yes I recorded even the DOSbox portion with the 8i6 interface just to keep things consistent. I used a 3.5mm to 1/4 breakout cable to capture in stereo. Do you think I'm better off just capturing directly(with software) in Windows?
Yes, otherwise you're not just capturing DOSBox emulation but DOSBox + whatever sound card you're using on your gaming PC.
@@ajarovable I think you're right. I'll keep that in mind for next time.
Awesome, thank you!
7:00 it is noticably slower, might be a CPU thing. This might be a dumb question but does the sound blaster have it's own clock sync or microprocessor like a GPU is it dependent on the CPU to "drive" it.
I’m really not sure. I think old cards like the SB16 do all the sound processing onboard? Pretty much all sound devices now use the CPU to process sound(unless you buy a dedicated sound card), but I think CPUs back then were too weak to do that efficiently without a major performance drop. Descent was the only one that did it but then again it’s also the most demanding on the CPU. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in.
DosBox is a wonderful thing!
Descent definitely has some weird issues on underpowered hardware. I remember it felt like it was running slower and not just choppier on my 386DX-33 versus 486DX4-120.
Actually its a pro audio studio. Greetings from Germany and keep up the good work 👍
Thanks man!
Super video.
Thanks!
This sounded like an interesting idea to me too, but in my experience all these old cards are getting more fuzzy as the components in their op-amps and other analog circuits degrade over time. An SB16 sounded best in 1992 not 2022. Emulation ftw
Your not wrong, emulation will always be more consistent and convenient. These old cards are still fun to screw around with though.
DosBox is really great, basically a MAME for retro PC games.
It’s pretty amazing how well it works most of the time. Honestly it’s easier than using real hardware with some difficult games. The SB16 emulation lacks some detail sometimes but to most I think they will find it pretty accurate.
DOSBox stock emulation isn't worth talking about beyond the fact that it leaves something to be desired (hence NukedOPL and the Serdashop solutions). Digital sound may have been a more telling test than music, but the difference between the cards is in fidelity (probably difference due to build quality) rather than capability. Some games only output stereo through the original Pro Audio Spectrum but that was moot by the time the 16s came. I hear few retro computer gamers recommend a Sound Blaster 16 but the AWE family is held in higher regard, particularly 64 Gold, suggesting the fidelity issues were alleviated over time.
AWE32/64 lacked an actual FM synth, it used emulated OPL with its CQM chip.
The main reason why you hear the AWE series held in high regard is their great General MIDI support along with wavetable headers being able to upgrade the samples being used.
@@SCSNSE Exactly: as a standalone with on-board MIDI the AWEs were remarkable. My point was about hardware build and output quality, not OPL authenticity. By the time AWE ditched OPL for CQM games may have still supported Adlib modes for compatibility's sake but were meant for General MIDI instead.
I'm no audiophile and got used to OPL clones early in my gaming life, but I own an AWE64 Gold and find its CQM output quite sufficient, particularly with the added capacity to adjust reverb and chorus. That being said, all the games that support stereo solely through either PAS or SBPro I am either not interested in or play through my Roland LAPC-I instead.
Everybody likes to hate on the SB16, and how it was so bad. But in this video, I'd say the PAS16 sounds extremely tinny compared to the SB16.
Loved my Soundblaster 16 and Creative x2 speed CDROM attached to the soundblaster IDE bus. Pure bliss
PAS16 sounds bandlimited/filtered compared to SB16.
This is pretty confusing, as HighTreason610's video ( th-cam.com/video/sdphd742Oqs/w-d-xo.html ), showed the CT1740's FM as sounding a slight bit more muffled than the PAS'. And also the PAS sounding WAY sharper than it sounds here.. 😐
Some have mentioned there could something wrong with my particular card and that there maybe some weird filtering going on. The output definitely sounds different than the SB16 which is using the same chip.
@@DOSStorm From what I could see later on YT (Necroware also has a very good video on the PAS: th-cam.com/video/_7P8anriPbA/w-d-xo.html ) , the card sounds sharp or muffled depending on what mode it's being used when setting up the game.. i.e. "Sound Blaster" mode vs. "PAS" mode.
Thanks for this detailed comparison. Sad to hear that the sound blaster 16 emulation in dosbox is so poor.. there is just so much lost detail and nuance in dosbox. For example, the low and high ends are less present; the sound blaster thumps them out, and there's a lot of activity in the low hz ranges, but the dosbox emulation just seems to, well, produce them.
Symphony X !!!
🤘😠🤘 Best band ever!
Interesting comparison. Soundblaster is way too tinny, thin, croaking and straight unbearable as it always has been. Like you had taken a terrible and too small speaker, smashed it with a hammer three times and then put it into a Pringles can.
Save us from this masquerade of lies
Kings and fools die in ridicule!
DOS box is like a synthetic version of woman.