MediaVision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 - myth or legend? 

This channel must be one of the best kept secrets on RU-vid.

I had one of those cards. Very awesome. They really went to town on the analog audio quality. One thing I noticed about my card was the analog Cd audio plug. They had used a guard ground for the braided shield in the audio cable, and used separate ground for the left and right channel. The guard ground was only connected to the case ground, the left and right grounds went to their own pre amplifier. They would use any signal accidentally generated on the guard ground to subtract it from the audio, and the separate grounds were "mixed" back into their respective channel. This would really reduce the digital noise that would leak into the cable and cause noise to appear and was really good in preventing the channels from "leaking" into each other.

In addition to the quality problems, Creative were surprisingly shady with their business practices too. LGR has a good video on how they screwed the competition with artificial chip shortages by contracting out Yamaha

Seeing that A3D logo taking shape actually gave me goosbumps! I had NO IDEA that the Aureal Vortex was actually born from the ashes of the Pro Audio Spectrum!! :-O

In the 90s, I bought a bundle with PAS16 and a SCSI CD-ROM for $100. I didn’t appreciate this card enough as a kid. I remember being annoyed by the driver requirement and compatibility issues. I quickly sold it for the same price I paid and went back to SB cards and IDE CD-ROMs. I wish I kept it.

The tidbit at the end about Aureal delighted me. My Diamond Monster MX300 is my favorite Win98 era sound card. I'm proud that it has such great heritage.

I had a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 in a hand-me-down 486 system that was the family computer as a kid. That card got lost somewhere in the shuffle of upgrades and parts trades with friends, because I didn't appreciate its features and quality back then, but retrospectively, it was a great card with a great sound. I never should have let it go. I just bought another one on Ebay to put into the retro gaming build I'm getting together to replay those old DOS and early Windows games. It was absolutely my first choice, over anything from Creative, given how well I remember it being a superior standout.

As a techie with a huge passion for the tech *just* before my time, I must thank you for uploading such insights into history. Very surprised you don't have more subscribers, it's only a matter of time!

19:00 Oh that's cool! And that sounds *great*

I had this card. Best home PC audio card at the time unless you wanted the (expensive) professional-level Roland cards.

Thank you for this wonderful documentary and configuration tutorial for the PAS 16. I grew up with this card in my 486 and Pentium but didn't have as many fond memories with it as presented. I blame my own inexperience as a kid, not the hardware though. Many of the games I wanted to play had little PAS support and I spent a lot of time in Soundblaster Compatible "mono" mode. Occasionally I'd hear something like SimCity 2000 with that glorious OPL3 FM sound and I remember just how much better that sounded than every other game in Soundblaster mode. I didn't know enough at the time what was going on with the card and my experience (surrounded by friends with Sound Blasters) was that my card emulating a Sound Blaster sounded worse than theirs through computer speakers of the day. I'm ashamed I misplaced my PAS 16... I would love to apply what I know now to really exercise what I missed as a kid. I, too, graduated from the PAS 16 to an Aureal Vortex, then eventually and Aureal Vortex 2. After Creative stifled them, I swore off Creative for good. Absolutely excellent video. I've enjoyed watching it several times now... usually when a listing for a PAS 16 pops up on eBay.

Just found your channel and love it. All these retro parts bring back so much memories. Back in the day compatibility was a battle not as easy as today

ESS ES1868Fs are also pretty good ISA sound cards, near perfect OPL3 replication with the ESFM, and no hanging note bug or dma click bug.

the sheer number of physical parts on those sound cards is impressive

I have been binge watching all your videos. Man alive, best trip down memory lane I've had in a long long time!

Thank You for great presentation great MediaVision cards.

Got one of these for Christmas one year. Loved that card & miss the 90s.

I owned a PAS16 for many years and loved it dearly. My biggest issue I ever had: Adaptec AHA-1542B SCSI HA compatibility issues. Not one, but TWO of them! 1. To boot from the AHA-1542, I had to use the default port of 0330H. Hmmm, something must use this.. . OH YES,. THE MPU-401 USES THAT PORT! 2. The AHA-1540 and AHA-1542 cards are busmastering cards. If you have one of those motherboards where you can adjust/tweak bus speeds/DMA speeds, you WILL have problems when you have both card types in the system, guaranteed, EVEN IF THERE ARE NO CONFLICTS. The moment I went to a Buslogic Bt-445C, those problems went away because transfers happened over VLB, not ISA. I later supplemented this card with a Gravis UltraSound ACE, which was designed to work with an existing sound card. Later, I upgraded the ACE to a full megabyte (came with 512K). Pure bliss. Thanks for showing up to give me some nostalgia~!

Thanks for this video, comes right in time since I got a Pro audio spectrum 16 today that someone gave away. I had no idea what that sound card was all about but now I am better informed

Sick channel and content man. Needs more RU-vid traffic, way underrated.

The Pro Audio had one distinct advantage for me at the time: that SCSI bus at the back. At the time, there were no IDE CD-ROMs as far as I can remember. My first was a 1x speed with a caddy. I don't think the DOS software that came with the card supported any SCSI devices besides CD ROMs, but when I started using Linux in '93, there was general SCSI support off the Pro audio, so I was able to scrounge a couple external drive enclosures and a scanner at the university. I don't even remember the sound capabilities!

I was very excited! Nice review! Thanks. I will try my PAS16

Wow this is an awesome video. 👏 I was a Sound Blaster user but discovered the PAS16 sometime after and I was impressed. I still have good memories that this video helped bring back. I really should have kept one of the PAS cards. Anyway it's great to see someone revisit them and do the comparisons etc.. I love PC industry history. The companies that battled it out with competing products. Great stuff for sure. 😃

More copper doesn't necessarily mean higher costs, because PCBs are made starting with a board completely covered in copper and by removing all the copper the design doesn't need. More layers are more expensive though, as are more vias in some cases. Having the same number of layers, a card with a bigger ground plane can be the one with the more careful design compared to the other one but not the better manufactured one.

Awesome video. I never owned a PAS card in the past, but I'm really interested in checking it out for the better audio quality. Some of the creative cards I've heard have bad noise levels (especially the SB32 I own). Thanks for sharing!

Had a Crystal Semiconductor card (brand owned by Cirrus Logic) which i can not forget all the noises of the poor OPL2 playback of that. Had various on-board soundcards later. C-Media, ESS Allegro and SoundMAX to name some, but they had software wavetable for midi playback.

Wow that was amazing details and history thank you 😊

Very informative, thank you!

This whole video I was trying to remember what sound card I had in my first machine, a 486. Then you mentioned Jazz16 and my mind triggered! NO idea which card I actually had, but it was a Jazz16 based card. Thanks!

I remember having an Creative Labs and a Gravis Ultrasound in my 386 and 486 so that I could have sound in different programs and constantly having to switch the speaker cables.

I also have the same pas16 :-) found it in a random auction lot last year and it is proudly sitting in a dx2/66

I'm looking for the Aureal episode now :)

amazing video, it pleased my heart :-)))))

Wow, Trackblaser Pro! I had that! LOL We had one of these cards for a while, really good. Strangely I recall us having this card, GUS and AWE32. Not sure why we changed sound cards so many times....maybe mom listened to me dream about this and that from magazines? Those were awesome days!

I loved this video, there are very few videos regarding this card in youtube. Back in the 90s (around 92 or 93) My dad bought our first CD/sound kit. Came with many games like civ1, mantis, comptons encyclopedia, battle chess and many others. I was lucky to have that kit, few people back then had one of those and they all played with internal speaker. The kit came with a sony CDrom with a media vision pas16 and labtec speakers. I trully love the sound of it on DOS gaming, and years after i was able to compare against all the bugs that SB16 had, like hanging not bug and i just go back to my PAS16. Im currently building a k6-3 retro pc, i has AT + ATX connector, maybe i will not need a voltage blaster at all.

Great video. I worked for a PC clone company back in the 90s and I built a lot of pc's with Sounblasters but rarely any PAS. I always wanted a PAS 16 but I had to settl for a Soundblaster because of price. lol

18:06 I can confirm the PAS16 (studio XL) which has the waveblaster header has the hanging notes bug, most likely if you plug a an external MIDI synth such as MT-32 through the mpu401 joystick port would be the same. Edit: btw I have never in my life purchased a Creative product, after the PAS16 I got a TurtleBeach and never looked back.

I still miss my PAS16. I swapped it out for an AWE32. The AWE wave table was nice, but the PAS audio was better on the whole. Great to remember this card!

You really took me down memory lane as I had a PAS16. Look at those discrete output transistors! That is something SB hasn't done until recently. I loved the Trakblaster mixer! Also remember setting up EMS / XMS memory like you said! Also having multiple boot sequences for different games! The audio card I bought after PAS had passed, pun intended, was an Xitel A3D card. I still have it to this day... too bad windows destroyed compatibility. By far my favorite devices in the computer to this day! Gimme that sweet sound!

Thank you for this video, Necroware. Any plans in the MediaVision history to show the Thunderboard in the flesh?

Another great video walking me down memory lane. I certainly appreciate the advancements in sound technology for my computers I like to use aftermarket high quality sound cards where applicable on board sound is ok but now with Graphics cards with HDMI audio qualitiy is is high but you do not get the features you may want to produce music for example even though you can but it isn't specific for that. They are good for gaming and everyday computing but if you want the highest quality Audio you do have to pay a premium for the pleasure. However I remember the old days of various Adlib/Sound blaster/Creative cards and generic compatible clones with really poor quality static sounding audio output. Especially when it was the days of analog CD ROM audio to soundcard via the CD ROM to Sound card analog cable that had no shielding the EMI interference was bad but when computers became faster and audio was read digitally in data form it was a game changer then mp3 came out and then the rest.

Another quality video.

Back in the day I had a PAS16 and GUS in my family's computer, and there were only a few times I missed SBpro compatibility. SCSI was also an incredible feature, but the card did not have option ROM to enable booting from SCSI devices. I went through my larval Linux phase in the mid-90s with a PAS16 and surplus SCSI hard drives. It wasn't fast, but it worked.

Finally, some long-awaited recognotion for the PAS cards :) Как всегда информативно и доступно, мой лайк и респекты :) У меня были две карточки PAS, звучание очень нравилось. ДОСовские утилиты у них конечно дичь, даже не знал про половину функций ) А в Win98 дрова на PAS встроены, кстати, и работают там карты безупречно

Wow, where have you been all this time? Subscribed.

Why is your channel so excellent? And why didn't RU-vid recommend it to me?

Das war meine erste Soundkarte. War echt ne schöne Karte. War echt zufrieden damit. Lange her .... *schwelg

I have been looking for the Trak Blaster Pro player that came with the PAS16 for years. My uncle had it and I loved just turning down the lights and vibing to the dozen or so tracks that came with it. I've since discovered most of those tracks, but can't find the program or the install disks it came from anywhere. Could you help me out a bit or point me in a direction? This is the most recent thing I've seen posted that might not have been lost to the sands of time.

I was starting to think that all RU-vid Videos were in Stereo or Mono only until watching this Video, WOW, All 5 Channels sprung to life at times such as at: 18:46 & 26:24 🙂🇬🇧

I had one! Got it at a computer show and wasn't sure if i'd gotten ripped off. It was amazing. I think i saved 20$ over a sb16 or sb16 pro at the time if not more.

Trackblaster I remember spending a whole bunch of time just listening to the mod files it came with. But I remember a issue that we had with our AMD 386DX-40 where if you tried playing in 44kHz mode (Which I think it warned against, memory is fuzzy) it would play for a seemingly random duration then hard lock on a hanging note.

My first non-Atari computer rocked a Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and it is no surprise that, along with the Goldstar 14" monitor that came with it, it is the only part of that original system that I still have, as I made sure to move it to any new MS-DOS system I made over the years. The craziest thing about it, besides that it was just great, was that it was the only sound card of anyone I knew that supported the pure digital soundtrack in Stunt Island, making my game sound objectively cooler than it did on anyone else's system, which was a fairly relevant thing in my weirdly Stunt Island-heavy local computer community in like 1993, haha.

No matter what I do I can’t get this card to work with my cd rom drive at the same time. I have the version with the lmsi plug onboard and I’m wondering if that is giving me trouble. As soon as I install the card with the software it works perfect but It stops recognizing my cdrom as drive D and I get a wrong dos version error.

I’d love to see a video just on track blaster pro and the bundled mod files!

That music from Descent brings back memories. Recognized the Ultima VI music from the first note. The entire Ultima series is absolutely fantastic and I am sad that EA don't want to sell the Ultima IP to Richard Garriott :-(

Dang! Fool of me that got into the marketing BS and really tough that I was always getting the best by purchasing the creative products, SB 2.0, AWE32, SB Live... I really should had known better but the press always ended their reviews with the same conclusion, SB compatibility rules! 🙄 Thanks for such an history lesson, you are a wonderful box full of surprises!

Nice, I have a PAS 16, but have never really taken it into action (yet). I should change that... One correction: The SB Pro doesn't have two DSP chips, I'm not sure what the second one (on the left) is doing, but probably not the same - maybe it does the Stereo setup/channel switching handling. It has about the same DSP chip as the SB 2.0. In fact, it STILL outputs mono as first step. The channels are separated by switching L/R for every sample (one of the smaller ICs beneath the amps should do that). That's the reason why it can play 44.1 in Mono, but only 22.05 KHz in Stereo - it's essentially halved. I remember the SB16 "DMA" clicking from my expensive AWE32 "value" edition as well - but from Day of the Tentacle, the intro scene where Purple Tentacle says something. So if this is at hand, it may be an alternative.

I found a very interesting card, a bit different from the ones I can find info on. It's named Pro Audio MTBL, made also by Mediavision, has both a Jazz16 chip and a Spectrum chip on it. Haven't installed it yet, does it mean I have both SB16 and PAS16 compatibility in a single card??

Young PC consumer at the time, I sticked with Creative, first with a soundblaster pro, then a AWE32... I don't remember seeing any pro audio spectrum box in computer shops...

Nice video, man! I’m quite familiar with the PAS but even I learned a few things here. I never thought to try setting the native and TB IRQ and DMA to the same value. Does that actually work? I could imagine it might, so long as you don’t use them both at the same time.

There was an in-between model, the PAS “plus”. I’m assuming it was the same as the PAS 16 but with 8-bit audio. I think it had the Thunderboard chip for backward SB compatibility. Once again, great video.

I would love to see you have a look at the SoundBlaster AWE32, just the sheer size and sound of it was awe-inspiring :)

I dont know where I left my Pro Audio Sprectrum 😞

I love this untold story against evil, and lucky to keep one PAS16 in my collections. One of my favorite war game supported PAS16 natively is Panzer General from SSI, try it ^&^

I did throw away a GUS in my madness, now i miss it. good info though, thanks.

I had one of those because I could afford it, and my local WalMart sold the ProAudio Spectrum 16s.. I loved it, as I just had a system with a PC speaker at the time :-)

You're right: "good enough" always wins.

My only experience with media vision was with our first pc. It came with the media vision Memphis system. There is almost no info out there about it, but it to me at least seemed like a really great product. The sound was quite good with there own audio amp and speaker system, and it came with a cdrom built into the external speaker enclosure. It worked with all the games I ever played or tried to play even into the windows 9x days. Eventually the cdrom was too slow, so we had to upgrade when I tried to play riven. Would like to build a retro system and find one of these systems again.

What about OpTi sound cards? They are also only emulating Soundblaster pro?

A friend of mine was getting rid of some old crap in his basement, and I asked him to bring over some old PCs to see if there was anything useful in them. One of them had the LMSI version of the PAS16! I had never heard of this sound card, nor the LMSI connection. In the video you mention LMSI as being a proprietary cd-rom connection. Apparently it was an attempted standard that just never caught on (shame as the cable for it is much much smaller than an IDE or SCSI one). The Compaq that my friend gave me has the CD-ROM with it as well, so nice bonus find. 486DX@50 I think is what was inside. Too bad LMSI didn’t catch on at all, the cable is only a bit wider than SATA…

I used the MPU401 support on my PAS16 quite a bit, outputting to an external general MIDI keyboard for music. Never had any issues or game compatibility problems with it. I understand a real MPU401 has some seldom-used features that often aren't supported in compatibles, but that never got in my way. I've always kind of hated OPL/Adlib music, and switched to real MIDI at every opportunity.

Great video! .. how's the quality compared with today's built-in sound cards?

so i pulled out my pas16, recapped it and got to looking at it closely... there's no -5v pin on it. my sb2.0 has it, but not my pas16. in fact, out of the plethora of sound cards i have, the sb2.0 is the only one with a -5v pin that connects to anything. seems some 16 variants didn't bother with the -5v. how odd.

Just bought it. It would be the best option for my 486 DX2/66 build. My card has LMSI interface but I cannot find pinout for it. As I understand, it provides some analog CD ROM output among other pins. And Windows 3.11 mixer definitely has CD input (at least on pictures). Does anybody have LMSI pinout? Is it possible to use connect its pins to the CD ROM analog output?

Very well executed research and video! Do you know if the PAS16 is 8 bit ISA compatible?

So are there games out there that you need to have a pro audio spectrum to get the best quality sound from?

I had a computer with both a PAS16 and a SoundBlaster 16, all configured so that I didn't have to have a boot menu but I still had plenty of low RAM. Each DOS game was setup to use whatever sound features were the best it supported. The PAS16 wasn't actually made by MediaVision, it was a "Reel Magic" combination VGA and sound card, minus all the video and SCSI parts. Apparently the company intended it to be used as a second PAS16 alongside the full video+sound+SCSI Reel Magic card. Simpler to just not populate most of the parts rather than make a different PCB design for the sound only card. Yup, the PAS16 supported having TWO of them in the same PC. I assume there must have been some software that supported four OPL3 channels or may have been able to use the the mono OPL2 support on two cards for stereo, or 4 channel PCM or??? The SCSI controller on PAS16 cards with it was automatically recognized as a Trantor SCSI controller by Windows 95, and a daisy chain of several SCSI devices could be connected, but lacking a BIOS the sound card couldn't be used to boot the computer. Not that you'd want to because it was SLOW. Just fast enough to handle the transfer speed of a 4x CD-ROM. MediaVision may have produced a "holy grail" of sound cards, or it may have been vaporware. I saw an announcement or advertisement for a card named "ProZonic", described as supporting just about every PC sound card standard there was. PAS16, Jazz16, all the SoundBlasters, Covox etc. IIRC the only one it was not claimed to support was Gravis UltraSound. Would have been the ultimate in ISA audio, one card, no configuration hassles, plays well with ALL the games. That was probably right around the time MediaVision went bankrupt, then was reorganized and the new MediaVision insisted several products with their company name, logo etc printed right on the card did not exist. I had one, a Jazz16, said so right on the card. The guy I talked to at MediaVision (at the time I knew nothing about the bankruptcy and reorganization) insisted there was no such soundcard, they'd never made any soundcard named Jazz16. So if there are any ProZonic cards, even prototypes or engineering samples, it would be quite a collector's item.

Ah I remember those days. My first card ever was the 8-bit ATI Stereo FX. It had 8w amplifiers instead of the SB 4watts. I made my own speakers out of a set of Pioneer Car Woofers and the box of some old Sony Boombox Woofers. Duke Nukem 2 was POUNDING!

back then ...their were many sound card scalpers of the day back then...crazy true during 90's ...$600 just for sound cards...its crazy era until the collapse of sound mining then gpu cards start their thing

How about a video on Aztech sound cards? They had some quite good ISA cards, some of which they used their own chip designs on. Some of their products were sold as Reveal, usually with Reveal stickers put onto the Aztech chips. I remember having one "Reveal" sound card I was having problems getting to work. I peeled the Reveal sticker off to find an Aztech sticker. Peeled the Aztech sticker off to *ahem* reveal the actual manufacturer. I found drivers for *that* and was able to make it work. At some point Aztech had a huge clearance sale where they were getting rid of all their old stock of hardware that was out of production. I had an 8 bit Aztech card at the time and bought their special wavetable upgrade for it. I don't recall how much $ but it was super cheap - sounded super good though. I do remember I sold the card a while later with wavetable upgrade to a computer store for $50.

The other card you may want to look at are those from turtle beach.

I have 15 of these and for some reason windows 3.11 on my 486DX2 VLB system refuses to detect the hardware and anything that plays module files soft hangs.

my favorite card is still the creative awe64 gold for win98..

Weird decision from Creative. As far as I understand PCB design. When you already have a two layer PCB it doesn't cost any extra to leave a large ground plane on the rear side for example. Maybe you need more layers to complete routing in combination with such a ground plane though. More layers is more expensive.

SB compatibility in PAS16 was not 'emulated.' It was in the actual hardware, distinct from PAS16; code written properly can in fact run both SB and PAS16 concurrently.

@ 13:28 the sound of descent :-)

Uah, Thunderboard, my friend had that and had more problems with game audio than I had with my Gravis Ultrasound :)

To me the sound makes the vintage computer. The mechanical sounds, the pc speaker, the OPL sound cards

Sound Blaster audio quality wasn't a problem. People used cheap speakers anyway. The real sound blaster issue was lack of hardware mixing like Amiga or SNES had. Gravis Ultrasound tried to fix this, but it's lack of real SB compatibility stopped GUS from becoming new PC Audio standard. Sound Blaster used up to 20% of CPU, especially in games that used amiga modules. GUS on the other hand had barely any performance loss. Playing PCM samples on GUS was as lightweight as FM synth on Adlib/SB. Later Crative cards had similar features. Very popular SB LIVE could mix up to 128 channels. This had impact in windows 9x games. Especially those with MOD music. Unreal games used 12+ channel mods.

still have one.

I loved my Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Vortex 2 card. Under windows 98 it was amazing. But then Windows XP happened and all support for Vortex 2 was gone. There were no official drivers for the Vortex 2 under Windows XP. Only generic Microsoft drivers that came with XP that didn't support any of the Vortex 2's special features. Under XP it essentially became a generic sound card. Wish I still had the card to build an awesome Win98 gamebox but it died on me while using it in my XP gamebox. Now I have a POS Creative SoundBlaster PCI. Which is not a POS because Creative. I like their cards. No it's a POS because it's a post buyout Ensoniq card in disguise. It works though but has no hardware accelerated audio support and XP was the last Microsoft OS to support hardware accelerated sound. Would like to pick up an Audigy2 card to replace it.

If I remember right, didn't some of the PAS cards also Logitech's "SoundMan" line?

Fantastic overview of the card, and very comprehensive tests, great job! About the only thing I can think of to add is that the PAS16 is special in another way: It can reroute the PC speaker audio through the card not using any wires. I touch on this briefly here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wi2tW23qb9c.html

i think the other factor with creative is they marketed more towards gamers and not sound studio designers, together with price this was the more tempting offering to most general household non-business consumers. even the name soundblaster sounds more gamer oriented than media vision.

I am watching this video with sound blaster ct4780 thx for kx driver devs

I had this card for a very short period of time. Every time I turned on my computer, I can hear a pop sound. It was annoying, so I decided to return it.

Make a video about Creative Sound Blaster Extigy and modify it :)

Interesting history not to mention gravis ultrasound.

Well I had no idea the jazz16 chip was made by mediavision, I should have checked this, I do own two of these cards so I'm glad I didn't do anything stupid with them by assuming it was one of these cheap sb pro clones you find everywhere ! I wish I had a pro audio spectrum, but this is better than having a bad creative card I guess

a Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster 16 or ESS Audiodrive doesn't need -5v but a Pro Audio Spectrum and SB 2.0 does need -5v.