S O U N D C A R D R E V I E W by the ever famous sound freak Tony DiNitto This text file includes 3 review of sound cards based mainly on the Gravis UltraSound. Here somes abbreviations I'll be using Sound Blaster 16 Pro Audio Spectrum 16 GUS SB16 To start off I'd like to talk a little about the Sound Blaster 16. The sound blaster 16 is a great card and I found its installation was a snap mearly running a little program and putting in the card itself. Its sound performed nicely in most all areas and it was also compatable with the regular Sound Blaster in case older games didn't support the SB 16. Unforunately the mixer was not the easiest to understand and also if you ever wanted to use it you had to have 20k of DOS drivers in conventional memory to get it to run. Therefore, if you were in a game and had headphones without a volume control there was no way to control the sound at all unless you exited out of the game and went through the mixer program and you had to hope that you loaded the drivers otherwise it didn't work. The SB16 will probably be around for quite a longer period of time I think considering that most everything that comes out supports it or its little brother SB. The SB16 uses the FM tech- nology used in most other popular sound cards. It provided Creative Labs CD-ROM interface and was a good card considering that I paid $110 for it. PAS 16 With the PAS 16 installation was quicker than ever. Its great emulation of the SB was very nice and I could tell almost no difference at all. It could also emulate the Adlib and the ThunderBoard sound card. With this card there were no drivers that ever needed to be installed to do something. I belive it had a mixer but I never tested it considering that it had the capability of turning the volume up and down by hitting CTRL-ALT-D, U, or M . Those controls worked in most games except say DOOM and maybe a couple others that used the ctrl and alt key. This sound card sounded exactly like the SB 16 if not a LITTLE better. It provided volume control with the keyboard also while sound blaster did not. It didn't require DOS drivers whlie SB16 did in spots. I suggest unless you want to do Creative Labs Inc. a favor you stick with this card over the SB16 and save yourself a few bucks. I'm pretty sure it had CD-ROM interfaces but I can't say for sure. This card cost around $90 at the present time. It also uses FM tech- nology. GUS Ah here we are. The TRUE sound card to talk about where everyone I've met has a different opinion on this sound card. This sound card, unlike the others, uses wavetable synthesis. What that means is, instead of using fake instruments this one uses very true and realistic instruments. This card sounds great when playing MIDI files and such. But wait...everyone knows that such a great thing has its drawbacks and that it does. First off, its patches require 15 or so megs of harddrive space. So you say "Ah...I've got 15 megs of drive space." But wait theres more. If you run a program that uses the GUS it uses its patches so it goes off and looks for them and tries to load them making the game sound like its scratchy or like a skipping record. If you have a HD thats slower than 20ms then forget ever buying this card until you get a faster one. After reading the small trouble shooting section, I went to DOS to defrag my hard drive and that helped a little just to play one game. Thus, this made the GUS installation not very fun nor easy. The fact of hearing junky sound and thinking thats what it'll sound like forever will almost make you have a heart attack after paying $175 for the card. After I went through a day or so of installing and fine tuning the GUS sounded great. In its midi files instead of coming out as a plink plink it sounded like a big band playing with all their might delivering great rich and full music. If you like the full and rich sound you'll like the GUS. If you like the plain, easy to listen to sound that gets to the point without the other instruments go with a PAS16 or SB16. The GUS puts in every single instrument it can think of without it ruining the sound. At times it sounded like a marching band it put so many instruments in one selection of music. Many programs that come out are now supporting the GUS and many companies have distributed "sound patches" that you run and it will make most of their games support the GUS. I tried one of them and couldn't get it to work at all...but I didn't take too long on that either. It seems that GUS is not for the impatient people. If some- thing still doesn't support the GUS you're gonna have problems. I don't care what the little ad says "emulates SB, MT-32, General Midi" I say you're going to have problems. Instead of the SB 16 or PAS 16 emulation this board requires you to use a driver that will support different cards. You type SBOS for sound blaster emulation and it takes up about 20k of DOS memory and it then pretends that a GUS doesn't exist. So you can't use a GUS for music and a SB for sound. Its one or the other. Unlike the flawless SB16 or PAS16 emulation the GUS uses the crazy little drivers . Well, I tried to use the MT-32 emulation in a few games and it sounded pretty darn good about 80% of the time and in other parts it would sound like it was getting instruments confused. For example instead of the normal bong in a grand father clock it used a bunch of off tuned horns. Its sound blaster and adlib emulation is hardly the best either. The SB emulation will almost definitly not run in any game thats programmed in protected mode giving you a lock up if you try it. It also locks up in other games also. If it does work it usually comes out pretty lousy compared to the real thing . Emulation with this card is terrible. You should not buy this card relying on it to make great emulations of other cards. The GUS as itself sounds great but again I say don't let the emulation be a major factor in your decision. At times it doesn't work, locks up the game, games say they can't even find a SB on your machine, or it'll not sound to great if it does work MOST of the time. It also appears with this card I can't give it a true rating. I'll hear one emulation thats STUPENDIOS and the next three attempts at other games don't work or sound TERRIBLE. Its ratings are 10 for the first thing, 1 for the second, 10 for the third, and so on. While the SB16 and PAS16 deliver decent sound through most everything they do. If you're still undecided I've put in a piece of a magazine next. Advanced Gravis's $199 UltraSound takes these concepts even further. This board, which has an astonishing 32 digital channels (14 at the full 44 kHz, 16-bit sampling tables on your hard drisk, and you can swap them out. If oyu don't like the sound of an acoustic guitar, for example, you can replace it with a third-party audio wavetable sample. And the board, which is MIDI-compatible as well sounds great. Unlike the RAP-10, the Ultra Sound has a Sound Blaster emulation mode so good that it sounds better than the sound blaster itself. That last sentence is the only crap in this article. But maybe it is in other things...that is IF you can get the program to recognize that you have a SB. The Gravis UltraSound is a good card. Rely on it and NOT its emulation. I have made a 45+++ minute demo tape for $12 if you want to hear the actual sound on a high quality tape. On the tape it has the GUS, the GUS emulating a few MT-32 games and the SB. Also on the tape I have the same songs that are played on a SB played on a GUS and its emulation. Its really an all around demo tape of what it can do and what its SUPPOSED to do. So just send a check, money order, or cash to: GUS DEMO TAPE Rt.1 Box 413-A Draper, VA 24324 and just say I want a demo tape and heres the money and my address. You can't truely describe sound in words and I wouldn't recommend getting the tape from Advanced Gravis either because they sort through games to find the very best and use what works, their own programs, etc. This tape will be much more helpful in finding out whats behind all the glory of this card. DISCLAIMER Maybe I'm all wrong about this. Maybe there will be a new version of the emulating driver that will fix all problems. Maybe I didn't have the card itself all the way in the bus slot . Maybe if you bought a GUS and a SB you'd be in sound heaven. Who knows.......