Really nice and high quality card! And that made by one very enthusiast person, not an entire company. Awesome! Maybe creative could have done better back in the days, but as we were used to pc speaker they might have thought: "Well, let's better make some more profit and choose the cheap pcb design - audience wouldn't bother"😄 Regarding CMS I really can recommend listen to the Monkey Island Intro with headphones. It's fantastic with the true stereo and its square wave sound. Really nice!
Interesting.. I wonder how this compares to TexElec's SAAYM card (which also has the CMS chips and includes a Yamaha YM2151 OPM chip vs the SB 1.5's YM3812 OPL2 chip). Regarding music playback, are there some VGM files that this can handle that the SAAYM cannot? I'm thinking more along the lines of music rather than game compatibility.
First, this card only has a mono digital sound. Second I would believe that the SB16 has overall better digital sound (broader frequencies), but on older games I guess you would not notice much. I would choose the most time periode correct card.