Hiss with a Sound Blaster 16.... can it be fixed?

[Dustin]

I have tried my best to fix this but with no luck.

I am using a Sound Blaster 16 ISA on my 486 and every time I play a game there is a certain amount of hiss that I hear. I am very good with setting up the games to recognize the sound card. But the hiss is really starting to bother me. Now, is this just somthing that a SB16 does? or can I fix it and and improve on sound quality? (When I play the games on my Win XP machine with VDMSound and DOSBox it sounds great and crystal clear. Is it because my "NEWER" sound card has better sound filtering? Is there something I can do with the jumpers on the SB16 to improve on sound quality?


Any advice would be great,

thanks

Dustin

[Firfy]

What are you selecting for the driver on your game?  Is this for everything you try?  Selecting the Soundblaster Pro driver will give you rather interesting results, as the SB16 is not completely compatible.  I haven't had any problems with the regular soundblaster or adlib drivers with a SB16 though.

[Dustin]

I always select Sound Blaster/AdLib (or Compatibles)

this happens to ALL of my games when I try to play them.At this point i think that a little noise is usual with these older cards. Another problem that just came up over last night is when I installed Windows 3.1 and tryed to configure the midi mapper it said this software references a device that is not installed on your computer do you want to continue?

I think I am doing something wrong.

How do you get the MIDI to work on windows 3.1?


any help would be great

Dustin

[Laust]

In my experience, the SB-16 was always a noisy card. There are several factors that can come into play, the card, the machine (noise from the ISA bus is not uncommon), the volume level settings, etc.  I would recommend experimenting with the mixer settings. You may be able to reduce overall noise by lowering the main volume, but raising the Wave and FM synth volumes comparably (so the overall volume level stays the same).

Or get an AWE32/64, they should be pretty cheap to come by nowadays.

[Dustin]

Laust,

 Thank you....You nailed that one right on the head. Problem solved, The mixer settings were all wrong. But I will look into getting an AWE32.

Thanks so much,

[laxdragon]

I recently found a SB Live AWE64 Gold NEW in the box on ebay for 5 buckazoids. I consider that a pretty good deal.

[laxdragon]

DOH. I didn't mean a "Live", just a AWE 64 Gold ISA.

[Dustin]

Really? I will look into that....thanks