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Other points.Other points.Posted Mar 31, 2008 17:29 UTC (Mon) by leoc (subscriber, #39773)In reply to: Other points. by pizza Parent article: A creative example of the value of free drivers That said, Creative has always had decent hardware (for its time) Not really. When I picked up a Gravis Ultrasound Classic in 1992, I was amazed to discover that PC sound cards could actually make good sound. Creative's "state of the art" hardware at the time was still doing FM synthesis, and it took them a few years to release the AWE32 to match it.
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"Quality" is so meaningless... Posted Mar 31, 2008 19:03 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] Again, the hardware was decent, *for its time*. It's not really fair to compare FM synthesis to wavetable synthesis, but Creative did have a wavetable synth available when the GUS was released; it just cost more. The GUS had both good and bad points, but the original model's audio "quality" made the SB16 sound pro-grade, and that's not even considering the GUS's lack of 16-bit recording capabilities. True, the SB16 was FM-only, but it had a little expansion port that let one tack on a wavetable synth daughtercard. Creative called theirs the WaveBlaster. The AWE32 came later, integrating a new wavetable synth that was vastly superior to the GUS's, but shared the same basic problem of being non-MIDI compatible -- which meant zero game support. (The Emu8K was also re-used for a GM-compatible daughtercard that Creative sold as the WaveBlaster2) However, the AWE32 still retained the FM synth, which meant that you still got music in games that didn't support the GUS (which was most of 'em) The rise of CD-ROMs ended up killing the synths on sound cards, as it was jut simpler (and sounded better for 99% of their customers) to just record a high-quality audio track and be done with it. And yes, I still have an AWE32 (+8M), a GUS (1M), a Roland MT-32, and a Roland SCB-15 daughtercard. Only the latter two are still in (occasional) use, as they have a standard MIDI interfaces.
"Quality" is so meaningless... Posted Apr 1, 2008 2:09 UTC (Tue) by walken (subscriber, #7089) [Link] > The GUS had both good and bad points, but the original model's audio "quality" made the SB16 sound pro-grade Hmmm - I have the exact opposite memory. For me, the GUS was the first card I had where I could not tell what my CPU and disk were doing by listening to audio parasites on the line out. Whatever - this is 15 years ago, not really relevant now.
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