Sound Blaster AWE32 Review 

I owned the very first model, with mitsumi panasonic sony cd interfaces, and not PnP. At the time I still had the 2x mitsumi cdrom drive. It was a great sound card for everything. I made Vinyl to MP3 transfert with it, and the sound capture quality was great with a very low noise and distorsion level. Later, a customer of my computer shop was a musician, and he had problems with his turtle beach. I sold him my old AWE32, with 32 MB of ram (28 usable), his Yamaha percussion daughter board fitted on it, and the AWE64 gold drivers installed. So in one board he had : - original hardware OPL3 - 32 wavetable channels from the Emu8000 with the huge ram - 32 soundwave channels from the AWE64 driver - 32 percussion channel from his yamaha daughterboard.

Finally a sound card rewiev again. I really love those, please review more retro soundcards :)

That is one heck of donation, a boxed AWE32! Wowzers! You lucky ducky Phil! ;)

Final Fantasy 7's original PC release supported the AWE32. It shipped with AWE32-specific MIDI files and included SF2 soundfonts in a few different sizes. It also included a special soundfont with vocals for the final boss fight (One Winged Angel).

Oh man I have not seen one of these for so long! Such an awesome card!

That long sound card, was a mid-1990s masterpiece!

The idea of REMOVABLE memory sticks in a consumer grade (however expensive) audio card feels so crazy today. What a cool view.

Really great in-depth review, Phil - this was my favorite sound card of all that were in my PCs when I was a kid. I was really into MIDI and how games sounded. I went from an LAPC, to a Yamaha CBX-T3 module, to the AWE32. The AWE32 was really the ultimate and pinnacle of 90s PC gaming for me. Thank you for bringing me back to my childhood :-)

Happy to see a more 90s retro-oriented review again. Thanks Phil!

Complete with the box and all the Docs. very nice.A good card for it`s time. Thanks Phil.

That's the card I had in my PC in the mid 90's. I recently found one on a flea market for 2€ (and with a opl3 chip !). This was in my opinion the best DOS windows soundcard back at this time.

Great review, Phil! I have my AWE32 installed in my windows 95 machine with an NEC385 daughterboard. I absolutely love this setup for windows 95 and dos gaming!

And I thought I really knew a thing or tho about retro PC tech. I know nothing. But I understood a lot thanks to you my dear colleague ! Congratulations on another great, exhaustive, fully documented and comprehensive video !

Great review. I've used these cards for a long time and have always enjoyed their sound and high compatibility. I switched to an AWE64 in one of my machines but do plan on installing an AWE32 I have into another, so I appreciate you posting the drivers to your site, that will make life a lot easier for me.

I love these old sound cards with the ability to load soundfonts.

My uncle had that card, we would play games on his 386. I was absolutely impressed with the sound at that time, I had no idea game music could sound so good unless it was CD Audio.

Love it. The AWE32 was the first computer component I bought myself with my allowance. Up until that point, I don't recall even opening up my parents' computer, let alone changing hardware (though I was young, I might have). But soon after I was the token computer repair guy of the family.

Beautiful review Phil, love your videos and your website. Im hooked on the GM emulation in Win98SE. The AWE32/64 is the best DOS soundcard ever😍🤓

I love these retro looks, the more the better if you ask me!

Nice video Phil, strange coincidence, last week I was able to buy a AWE32 complete in box locally, kinda crazy. Well done vid once more.

I used to have the 32 PnP back in the day, it was a fantastic sound card with great compatibility. I deeply regret ever parting with it. Great to see a retro review again Phil!

In case you're wondering the CT3900 is the best of all AWE32 cards out there and the CT 2760 being the next one to get. The CT3990 is probably the worst out of bunch.

Love your soundcard reviews!

This was my fav card for years! Thanks for da vid !

That brings back some memories. I bought one of these to put in my old HP DX4 100 back in the 90"s. Kept it to put in my next build, only to discover that the motherboard had integrated sound. So I sold it on Ebay for a decent price!

Love the old AWE32s i have a CT2760 and CT3990 :)

I watched this several times now after ordering a new 486 with a CT3600 sound card. That's almost an AWE32 so this review is close enough and nice tip on the SPDIF bracket! Thanks!

This is some crispy ass video Phil.... Bright, sharp 4K, contrast and clarity poppin like crazy. Very nice.

I'll be honest, I typically do not enjoy sound card reviews in general, but I did enjoy this one. Thanks!

At least something old!! You didn't forget us! Yaaaay!

I had an AWE32 back in the day - the new-at-time wave table synthesis sounds were just mind blowing and a huge step up from the Soundblaster 16. I loved the string section which by itself was just amazing. I also had a Sound Galaxy wave table daughter board mounted on to the AWE32 header and was able to enjoy picking the best instruments from the two cards. I got some slight 'clicking' sounds using the daughter board on some instruments, but never had the hanging notes issue myself.

I really enjoy my AWE32 CT3980 PnP, and use it all the time for legacy gaming on my MS-DOS 6.22 system, I believe it was the last one by Creative Labs to feature a Yamaha OPL3 chip.

I loved my Awe 32 back in the day. Best sound card I ever owned. After that, the differences started to be less dramatic.

Use to own this back in the day! What a card!!!

Great video. Looking forward to using the packages you've created for DOS mode.

I had an AWE 32 way back when. Mine did have the Yamaha OPL chip. I used it until I updated to a motherboard without ISA slots then switched to a SB Live PCI card. I also had an AWE64 bit I preferred the AWE32.

Nice pickup and good video! Still hoping to score one when I pick up old 90’s boxes at the thrift shop... the well has become drier.

wow super mint :O I am really impressed how good some other people treat packaging etc. (like I do... maybe OCD haha). Thanks man. Very interesting to watch!

always loved sound cards with up gradable ram

Iconic piece of hardware.

I remember the old "hanging notes" issue. Still a great card. Bought one around the launch time, I think, and it was still in use by 2003. Some of the midi tunes that came with it really showcased its capability.

This brings back memories. Had this one with 2mb ram and a Yamaha DB50XG daughterboard. Games like Tyrian sounded phenomenal.

I also have the 2670 Rev1. I've upgraded its memory to 32 mb but only 28 mb are usable. Unlike the late revisions of the card it has real Yamaha OPL3 sound and no hanging-note bug. Very nice card.

I believe I had one of these when I was young but had no idea how to load sound fonts for MT-32 emulation in games or that Sierra had patches to use special functions on it. What I particularly remember was opening the box and seeing that flimsy foam sheet you pulled off at the beginning. It was a nice trip down memory lane. I feel awful that I gave all of this hardware away when I was upgrading over the years without much regard to "one day this will be worth something". But I guess not many of us knew, and I had limited space to store such things anyway. Those were golden years.

I couldn't help but whistle along with the SQ5 demonstration.

"No sound available due to an invalid or conflicting irq" today's kids wouldn't understand.

The number of sci fi ships in that space quest demo you showed was unreal! xD

I'm in AWE at the absolute size of this unit!

I used to access the digital interface on my AWE32 card through the S/PDIF pins and then I soldered an RCA connector onto the other end of that line. I connected the RCA to my digital interface card (GINA by ECHO circa:1996) which had an RCA S/PDIF input port. It sounded great. I used the Vienna Soundfont Studio software to create dozens of soundfonts from live drums, bass and other acoustic instruments. I also sampled quite a few analog synthesizer patches from the Roland JX-3P and the Juno 106. It was a pretty good representation of those instruments long before VST/AU plugin synths became available.

Uh.. Thats a loooong time ago that i had the same AWE32 Soundcard in my selfmade 386 or 486 Computer - i loved the long card form factor, the chips and the sound of it!

Ay vintage soundblaster soundcards my favorites!

I had one of those Sound Blaster AWE32 with the SIMM ram and everything else :)

Still got mine. $300 in 1994 just for a sound card was really expensive but it was awesome.

Oh goodness, my old beloved card! Best one i ever had.. still regret losing it somehow. Made music with it, sold on tapes. One day i'm gonna get either AWE32 or 64 again.

I owned this during the good old Dos/Win95 days. Ahh the DOS games setup screen i used to max out the audio settings

You do get the OPL3 Yamaha chip if you have an earlier model! The CT2760, CT3900, CT3980, CT3780, CT3910 all have it. I love my AWE32 for that chip and the SPDIF! Perfect FLAC encoded rips of old school gaming music.

Had one of those back in the day.

I have one of these! Great card. I got mine for my 486 DX 2 80 dos/windows 3.1 machine. I had 2, 1 meg simms on it that came from an old Mac installed in it. I really, really liked how .mid files sounded on it and had thousands of them.

I still use Creative sound cards in my PCs and even laptops to this day (USB SoundBlasters for the laptops). Much better sound quality, to my ears, when compared to onboard. Even though modern onboard audio on PCs in the last five years or so sounds good, I can hear a difference in quality.

i've got ibm aptiva 2144 with awe32 + gus max 2.1 -> killer combo!

I have no idea how it's supposed to be pronounced, but I always pronounced "awe" to rhyme with "saw" instead of saying the letters. Even though I know I could be wrong, it really grates on me hearing Phil pronounce it "A-W-E", like hearing someone say "ATM machine" or "PIN number"!

I like the turtle beach sound font

Greetings. Here in Brazil this 1995 version had some very interesting programs. One of them was the Cake Walk Express. It simulated a musical score, allowing 16 instruments out of the 256 cataloged on the Yamaha chip. I don't know where we could open the files generated from musical projects by this program. The fact is that such files end up without their respective support programs and all the art developed is lost. My AWE is still installed in an old 486DX120, but it has been shut down for 25 years. Thanks for the video.

My first PC had no CD drive so I bought a multimedia kit which included a quad speed CD drive and this very card. Oh the memories. :)

Playing Tie Fighter with this card in the 90's - Never forget it! If you used Midi together with the Hall and Chorus Effects it was close to a Orchestra playing! I still use a Soundblaster Card in my PC, even if the Onboard Chip supports any Game Sounds completely. I use a Sennheiser Headset and with the Surround Simulation it sounds as if I have a 7.1 Bose Surround System in almost every Game. They kept the Chorus and Hall Effects in the Z Series, it just doesn't have Midi anymore.

Still have the card with the waveblaster II too, no memory sticks, it is the CT 3900 version. Great memories from this card.

I am SO SAD that I don't have my AWE32 and AWE64 Gold. I think I put them in machines that I gave to friends in years past. I had SO MUCH FUN with those cards. Specifically the MIDI output. I remember loading up the 4MB Sound Fonts that were found on the Ultima Online CD ROM and they made the game come alive. I had added memory to my 32 and even the Wave Blaster daughter board. Yes, I'm such an idiot for not holding on to it. These days I hold on to all of my old equipment. You never know what will become valuable in the future! ;)

I am planning on buying an AWE32 card, like the one you have, Phil. I heard of good things about the cards from watching videos online, including yours. That has convinced me to buy one. I have a pnp sound blaster 16, and it is an awesome card. A few days ago, I bought a Pentium 3 motherboard that came with a Pentium 3 CPU and some memory. I have a pair of 20 gig hard drives and a voodoo 4, for the PC. I plan to just use it for DOS gaming and early windows 95 games on it. I am thinking of getting a voodoo 2 or even a voodoo 1 card for some early 3dfx glide games, but it depends on what the voodoo 4 card can do.

I found a AWE32 CT2760 in a dumpster find pc (an AMD K6 III 450), it’s so cool, it’s right here next to me now! 😊

Sweet memories.

I have a slightly shorter version of this card which I have had for years and years. I actually use the amplified output to a set of Koss M/80 speakers and rout it through the speaker level hookups of a small powered sub, and find it sounds not too bad. I also found 8mb to be enough for what ever have wanted to load. Mine lacks the Wave table header and that extra processor ASP/CSP chip that no game ever used. But I think they are otherwise identical.

In awe at the size of this lad

I had one of those, when I built my retro dos box I used a 64 with memory expansion.

It was my best sound card. I have it in working condition with a good pair os non amplified sound blaster speakers.

brillant video!! Redo the AWE64 Gold :o Love your retro video

I had one of these big boys in the first wintel PC my family purchased, then an awe64 later. I never thought the awe64 sounded as good even just for mp3 playback but maybe that was just in my head.

Finding an AWE32 CT3990 (PnP) is tough...even the CT2760 (non-PnP version) is rare. If the goal is strictly AWE32 MIDI for MS-DOS games, an AWE32 Value or AWE64 both work great.

Had this card. First big gift I got from my wife who I was dating at the time. I used to run a speaker outside my window and into the bushes and used it to producE sfx for trick or treaters during Halloween. A great card. After that I got a deal on a Diamond Monster Sound MX300 but I think around the same time the SB Live card came out and that and kinda killed it. Still, very good 3D sound.

Daniel you're a... Star!

I always wondered what sound fonts did.

I got one of these for my bday back in the late 90s and loved it. Doom sounded amazing. Though, I did break the plastic bit that holds the RAM in last year. I wonder if there’s a way of fixing that

I had one of these and along with the SB16's I had and have, the hanging note bug was a killer for me.

Sounds AWEsome :)

Great !

Awesome video.... only the other day I was talking to a friend about modern graphics cards..... they look like something out of a Si-Fi film.......with large fans and plastic casing etc....back in the day my sound card and graphics cards only had a Heatsink lol

Terminal Velocity, love this game played it tp death over and over again, and still playing it sometimes :) same with Raptor CotS

I got lucky back in the day and got a ct2760 and a ct3780 so I still have the OPL3 chip and every feature awe32 possibly offered. I still need to delve deeper into the soundfont and connecting to midi device side of it but very amazing cards with the best compatibility for a pc doing both Windows95/98 and DOS

I use to play CT3900 today, lost of fun,lots of features

Well, I took the plunge and I bought an AWE32 card, and it is the same model as the one in this video, CT3990. It came in today and the first thing I have to say is, my God this card is LONG! The card is 14 inches in length, thus making this the longest expansion card of any device I have owned. The card is brimming with features and a bit of history, so it's great pleasure to own this sound card. I even got two SIMM memory modules,upgrading the memory to 32 MB of memory, although I can only use 28 MB. The AWE32 does emulate OPL3 chipset really well, but I think if you pay close attention, you can hear only very slight difference with a real OPL3 chip but it is very hard to make out. When I select AWE32 for my music in DOS games, it sounds very instrumental compared to an OPL3 chip. SOme people may not like that and prefer the OPL3 option, which is fine, but the AWE32 synthesis does sound really nice. I also managed to try a few soundfonts and the ones I tried are pretty good, but I recommend the masterpiece.sf2 soundfont as it is very good and I heard is the most favorite soundfont towards the online community. The card may be a bit pricey, but it is a great option and well worth every cent. I am glad I bought this sound card. Now I can experience dosgames on a whole new level.

Oh man I rem this card, I had the speakers and CD drive combo. It was so huge I had problem moving it into my old 486 PC case. I gave up in the end and got the new Pentium series of vertical desktop just to fit this monster in.

I used one of those loved it I would still use it if I could on my modern pc :)

Had the same card like a lot of people here. Was given to me in around 2002-2003 and saw use up until around 2007 when I upgraded that PC from Windows 98SE to Windows XP. I had to swap it for a Generic Sound Blaster PCI Because it had sound dropout problems I couldn't fix in Windows XP. I had kept it but it and the rest of my collection of old computer stuff I ended up getting rid of around 2012 because of 'Life stuff'. If I knew how much some of the stuff I had would eventually go for on eBay I think I probably would have held onto it!

after a delusion with a early and bugged awe32 multicd with mssing pin on memory riser unable to see 2 mega of ram installed , i used a SB16 scsi2 asp real opl3 and wave blaster 2 lately change to roland sc55

Never had an AWE32 but I remember using the AWE32 mode on my AWE64 Gold card. However, as soon as I discovered soundfonts I went straight to those, so the AWE32 mode never really saw much use in the end (well, for MIDI, at least).

still have one of these with 8mb ram stuck to it used to use it back with impulse tracker, although i did go to standard sb16 drivers at some point because the filters on the awe32 are just... weird the ram still had a function as soundfont buffer for midi though :D

A friend had it in '95 i guess. It was a sensation.

I have an earlire version - the one with the ASP socket on it.

Great video. I would also like to see more value models of Creative, if possible. I have a CT4380. Very cheap :)

I miss programming in Turbo Pascal with a module player running in the background on the AWE32 MIDI processor basically and using it's ram as well, not only it barely touched the CPU the same was true for RAM. Multitasking in MS-DOS made possible via hardware acceleration hehe

my new favourite DOS Soundcard is an ESS1869F with an integrated wave table module ES692s ! it's amazing