Hello,
after some years I have a collection of around 20 different (and working) ISA Soundblasters.
Is there some detailed overview available, what card has which technical feature?
There are obviously alot of card flavors and even Creatives own CT number list does not mention all cards.
For me it seems that there are certain improvement steps especially in the long lasting SB16 / AWE32 series. (some would say to make the cards cheaper).
early SB16s like the CT1750 feature the classic multi chip solution with CT1746, Yamaha OPL3 and different CD-ROM controller ICs.
Then they replaced the CT1746 with the CT1747 including the OPL part. (like on the CT2230)
CD-ROM control was also replaced by some own microcontroller (I guess some relabeled Intel)
Then different VIBRA versions appear. There is the 16S with CT1705 and CT2504 and real Yamaha OPL3 again.
The 16F with CT2502 and CT1978 (this is also known as CT2502-SDQ).
Later on the seem to have included all in one IC with the VIBRA 16C using the CT2505 and 16XV with CT2511.
Is there some overview available somewhere, sorting this in, maybe even feature wise?
Some detail I noticed on the SB 16 Pro CT2910 is that they used the low voltage version of the OPL3 YMF289B and the Sigma Delta DAC also from Yamaha YAC516-F with 8x oversampling. Also putting this card in a timeline gives a quite strange result. Older SB16s like the CT2770 already used the Creative OPL3 version. Then the SB 16 Pro uses the old layout again and later the same year they introduce the Vibra16S.
Well I got some pics of the card on my site at
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pictures.html#Soundkarten