MediaVision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 - myth or legend?

[Music] hello and welcome in this year's september special on my channel i showed you the pro audio spectrum 16 zone card which i installed in my 10d 1000 rsx computer this sound card is quite exciting and deserves an own video so today i would like to take a closer look at this card talk about the advantages and disadvantages over the competition and explore if some disadvantages can be worked around somehow but first of all let's talk about the history why was the prodio spectrum such an interesting card today every pc has an integrated sound chip on board and most of us don't care and sometimes don't even know which chip it is they all implement the same api and for the usual consumer there is no difference a dedicated sound card just became a niche product it is hard to believe but in the end of 80s and the beginning of 90s soundcards market was as hard fought as the gpu market today let's jump right into 1987 where ed leap introduced their music synthesizer card which was very successful and after two years already hundreds of pc games supported it it became the standard it was built around yamaha ym3812 sound chip also known under the name opl2 adlib didn't protect the idea somehow and already in the year 1989 creative labs have taken the opl2 fm solution added a dsp for digital sound effects and released their first sound blaster they begun a very aggressive business and wiped ad-lib from the market now sound blaster became virtually as standard for all the pc games and almost every dos game release ever since had a built-in sun blaster support after landing such a success creative relaxed a little bit and overlooked a serious competitor joining the market mediavision introduced their pro audio spectrum in the year 1991 this card was not sound blaster compatible however adopted the idea of the opl2 usage as well which was a quasi standard from the ad leap times however mediavision didn't just have stolen the idea from ed leap as creative did they developed this solution further and introduced not one opl fm chips as some blaster and headlift did but two of them paired with stereo decks this card was the first one which officially could play back and record stereo sound and that with up to 44 kilohertz where the sound blaster could play back with up to 22 kilohertz and record with only 12 kilohertz of course both only in mono by that points on blaster pro didn't exist yet and all the dos games supported only mono sound blaster to fight that mediavision started to support game developers and many games introduced exclusive pro audio spectrum support the audio quality of the media vision cards was outstanding compared to the notoriously noisy and cheaply made creative products the media vision engineers came from the industry for professional audio equipment and they designed a product which should be the out of the sound blaster as if that was not enough pro audio spectrum was introduced for the same price of 249 dollars as you would pay for the sunblaster back then that put a lot of pressure on creative and they desperately tried to keep up the first step was to reduce the sunblaster price drastically in a shortest period of time creative engineers analyzed the pro audio spectrum and released the first sound blaster pro which was basically the sound blaster 2 but with 2 opl2 and 2 dsp chips for stereo fm and digital sound the support for creative's music system was dropped on the other hand to cut the costs since almost no developers were interested in it anymore however all these struggles of creative were not really successful and the sound leicester pro turned out to be very rashly made product creative made a lot of mistakes which they tried to fix desperately in probably a dozen of revisions but despite of all the struggles soundblaster was technologically not a threat for the pro audio spectrum doesn't matter if the monoversion or the pro but there was something where creative had a distinct advantage over the media vision they existed a long time before long enough to convince many game developers to implement exclusive sound blaster support in their games but the pro audio spectrum was not sound blaster compatible and so all the older games had to be updated to fight that issue media vision introduced another sound card named thunderboard which was basically sound lester clone without the creative music system feature that card could be used standalone but was meant to be an kind of add-on card to give the customers they need it sound blaster compatibility as you can think it was economically not reasonable for medivision and also not for the customers but this added even more technological pressure on creative and put a very important brick into the foundation of the mediavision's next generation sound card regardless of the economical aspects the game developers adopted creatives first on blaster pro very slowly and for some time the pro audio spectrum was the only really useful sound card if you wanted to use the pc with stereo sound this changed first 1992 when creative introduced their soundblaster pro 2.0 with the stereo yamaha ymf 262 fm synthesizer also known as opl3 this time creative landed again a very successful product which was more integrated than the first pro version and so was cheaper in production and even if the quality was not as good as from mediavision due to the significantly lower price the soundcard was quickly adopted by the market suddenly most of the games started to support primarily soundblaster pro 2.0 the creative celebration party didn't last too long and 1992 media vision presented their 16-bit stereo sound card the pro audio spectrum 16 or short pass 16 and again media vision's main goal was outstanding audio quality which they reached easily creative lost this fight again hands down pro audio spectrum 16 made the switch to opl3 as well just as creative did on the soundblaster pro 2. and this time mediavision didn't make the same mistake again and integrated the soundblaster compatibility by reusing the thunderchip from the previously developed thunderboard unfortunately mediavision didn't have enough time to go one step ahead to implement the soundblaster pro 2 compatibility as well maybe they were too confident with their own stereo capabilities from pro audio spectrum and thought that the game developers will continue to support their products in the games who knows if you wanted to use the pro audio spectrum 16 in stereo this software had to support it explicitly for a long time that didn't look too bad and a lot of very well known games like everything from sierra league suit larry simcity 2000 star wars rebels all and also later titles like decent doom and duke nukem 3d they all implemented this support for media vision sound cards and again the quality of the pro audio spectrum 16 was far superior to whatever creative had at that time at least until 1993 where creative made a second move and introduced the soundblaster 16. this time they invested a lot more into the audio quality and released a sound card with decent output but boy oh boy they also introduced so many bugs one of the funniest was that they messed up the compatibility to their own soundblaster pro 2. yes this song card could be used in stereo only if the game supported it as a soundblaster 16 explicitly all the games with sound blaster pro 2 support detected the card as such but ran only in mono that was quite awkward from creative since they basically destroyed one of the most important advantages over the past 16 the compatibility to their own previous products and games but thanks to pro audio spectrum many games already had support for 16 bit stereo sound by that time so the adaptation to the soundblaster 16 didn't take too long but there was so much more things like dma clicking which they tried to solve and introduce the hanging node back in later revisions and so on and so on this sound blaster 16 was a disaster in point of quality however creative called out a price war at mediavision and sold by far a lot more sound cards than anyone else at that time media vision with their quality standard couldn't play that game and started to lose the market share despite that it was actually a company with a better product i welcome back to the history of media vision a bit later i told so much about the superior quality of their sound cards let's finally take a closer look at it i have this past 16 cards which will be their reference today first thing i would like to mention is the pcb quality how can you distinguish an expensive high quality product from a cheaper one well one of the most important ways to improve the quality is a proper shielding you reach that by increasing the size of the copper ground areas over the pcb the cheaper the sound card the less ground plane you will see on it since more copper means more money if you hold the card against the light you will see it shining through the pcb everywhere except where the copper areas are the more expensive card like adlib gold or this pro audio spectrum 16 have multi-layer pcbs where a ground plane is even placed inside of the pcb as you see almost no light is shining through this one and this is basically one of the biggest reasons why this sound card have such a high audio quality compared to let's say creative products by the way this sound card belongs to the group of hardware which needs -5 volts power supply i mentioned it in the video about the voltage blaster project which i made with phil's computer lab a year ago so if you also want to play around with such a pro audio spectrum pay attention that your pcu provides that voltage or get a voltage blaster for example if it doesn't now let's talk about the drivers they are just as high quality as the hardware itself remember in 1993 plug-and-play was not yet a thing and most of the hardware drivers left it up to the user to set up resources like irq and dma unfortunately that led to conflicts quite fast and the users could spend a lot of time trying to find out what the problem is most of the hardware around that time still used jumpers for the settings but this was not the case for the mediavision products the company was very future oriented from the beginning and made the product software configurable they introduced a configuration tool which tried to detect free resources automatically and allowed to select only the irqs and dmas etc which were really free such an auto detection was quite tricky back in the days and in some corner cases it could end up in a system freeze i didn't encounter any and i tested this card on multiple systems but i can imagine that for some users this could be quite frustrating if that happened anyway in the configuration tool you can set up the resources where the sound blaster should be emulated as well as mpu401 port and rq and enable or disable the joystick port every change in the setting starts an automatic test routine to check if particular dma or irq is free or not performing dma test performing irq test if the playback of an audio sample completes successfully the configuration tool allows to use the selected resource if that doesn't work the tool asks to try another value when everything is configured the setup tool adds a driver mvsound.cs to the confixes the arguments are the same as what was selected in the setup tool you can change the settings manually without the need to run the tool every time for example in this configuration d stands for dma and is set to 1 q is rq s is for sound blaster emulation settings one means enable 220 is the base io address one is dma and five is the irq to emulate by the way don't be surprised if you suddenly see changing settings in this video i captured the output onto different computers my twenty one thousand rs6 from the september video on one hand and with a pentium three machine on the other i just wanted to check if the card will make any problems on a faster systems i will come back a little bit later back to these settings but after a reboot the pro audio spectrum 16 should be initialized and can be used one of my favorite tools to test a sound card is the setup utility for decent it supports many sound cards and works usually quite reliably let's try the auto detection and as you see it detects already the pro audio spectrum 16. seven seven seven [Laughter] [Music] and as you hear it works completely in stereo i also can select sound blaster as an option but sound blaster pro would remain silent since the pro audio spectrum emulates only the first sound blaster version at least for the digital part but the fm is done on this card by the same ymf 262 chip also known as opl3 which can be found on the soundblaster pro this is actually the first disadvantage of the pro audio spectrum it can emulate only mono digital sound of the sound blaster but stereo fm sound of the sound blaster pro if you want to use this card in full stereo for digital and fm then you have to use it as the pro audio spectrum 16 and forget about the sun blaster emulation the good news is that at the time where sunblaster pro hit the market the pro audio spectrum was already widely used and was implemented in the most games natively so you didn't need the soundless pro compatibility but where it is light there is always a shadow i would like to remind you that this card which i have here in my hands is a pro audio spectrum 16 which came out after the sound blaster and the pro audio spectrum as i said before thanks to the thunder chip it is soundblaster compatible but what about the first pro audio spectrum unlike the past 16 with the stereo opl3 chip the first pro audio spectrum use a pair of opl2 fm synthesizers to obtain its stereo capabilities but opl3 is only backwards compatible to one opl2 chip and not a pair of them what does this mean for the past 16 compatibility to its predecessor well in short pro audio spectrum 16 was mostly compatible and could be used as pro audio spectrum in the games which supported it however with one limitation digital sound was completely backwards compatible but fm could be played only in mono since the opl3 could emulate only one opl2 but not two of them take a look at blackthorne this game supports pass and pass 16. hear how it sounds with past 16. [Music] [Music] [Applause] but if i set up pass the fm sound is only mono [Applause] [Music] [Music] continuing the compatibility topic what about the adbc m kodak support one of the most famous games which used that codec was duke nukem 2. as you hear we are getting digital sounds with adp cm codec as well so p16 with its thunderchip is really completely soundblaster compatible i tested many games from the early days of the song blaster but also some newer titles and i didn't notice any issues all games just worked either as soundblaster emulation or explicitly as pro audio spectrum [Music] [Music] if there would be a dma issue you could clearly hear the clicks between the step sound not with the pro audio spectrum 16. the only one serious compatibility issue i heard of is a poor mpu401 implementation as far as i heard it doesn't work properly in many games and also has a hanging node bug unfortunately i currently have no external hardware to validate these issues but you should keep it in mind in case you want to use this card with some external synthesizer the pro audio spectrum 16 line was marketed under a couple of different names the hardware difference was usually only about the cd-rom interface there were cards with scuzzy or proprietary interfaces or with no cd-rom interface at all otherwise the most of the cards were distinguished only by software so let's take a look at what we have i already mentioned the outstanding setup utility there were also couple of players for midi and digital samples for example the track blaster pro audio tracker [Music] as i told unlike sound blaster the pro audio spectrum was a semi-professional hardware which you could also use for gaming but there were a lot of different applications for professional usage composition and recording as well i can't cover all of that today maybe another time but today i will stay at the consumer level and would like to mention the outstanding mixer software the mixer utility is called pass if you call it with all the parameters it will show the detailed help with options and examples the tool works with commands which you simply have to concatenate basically it has two commands get and set to well get and set the settings if you simply write pass get you will get the current volumes overview if you write pass get volume you will see only the master volume if you want to set master volume to 50 you have to write pass set volume to 50. you can also set just the fm volume by using path set fm to 50. you also can control left and right channels separately and set only the left channel to 100 for example the cool thing is that you can use these commands in a batch file but i know that a console looks clumsy for many people that's why you can use path star to get into a graphical user interface where you can set up all the levels using your arrow keys in the keyboard using shift f5 shift f6 and etc you can save the profile and load it again by just pressing f5 or f6 and so on back on the console you can use for example pass f5 to load the profile you can add this line to the autoexecpad to restore the volume level during the boot to be able to use all the media vision software you need the mvsound.css driver to be loaded in memory and this is another disadvantage of this sound card take a look at the memory usage mv sound takes more than 11 kilobyte of conventional memory that is quite a lot especially compared to the sound blaster which doesn't need any drivers at all one way to work around this is to enable ems memory and move the driver from the conventional memory using device high command instead of device in the config series however this could be a problem in some cases since there was a lot of older software which was allergic against ems so what can be done well i rebooted the system now without the driver as you can see mem doesn't report it and we have amazing 627 kilobytes of free conventional memory as you see wolfenstein 3d doesn't detect in its own blaster in the system without the driver the past 16 software also contains a utility which activates only the thunder chip for the sound blaster emulation without activating the full pro audio spectrum features this utility is called pro proas.exe and can be used with the same arguments as were used in the config series to load the mv sound.cs i put the command with the argument into a batch file as a shortcut so i don't need to write all the arguments every time as you see the utility reports that we should have the sound blaster emulation now active the good thing is that the utility doesn't take up any memory it just activates the hardware and exits without a footprint we still have free 627k of conventional memory and now wolfenstein 3d detects on blaster and we definitely hear some sound as i said the proas.exe command can be placed into a batch file to simplify the execution so the good thing is it will give you the sunblaster compatibility at no memory costs but on the other hand it would also mean that the most midi vision software will not run complaining that the driver is missing this includes not only the tracker software but unfortunately also the mixer furthermore the games will not detect the sound card as the pro audio spectrum 16 anymore but only as a sound blaster here is decent as an example eventually you have to decide if you need the full pro audio spectrum features but less memory or you use ems with the driver loaded into the higher memory or the sound blaster compatibility only with no additional memory usage at all maybe it is useful to make a boot menu where you can prepare different configurations dependent on the requirements [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] during the making of this video i played quite a lot of games and i have to admit that the sound quality amazed me sometimes really even if the opl3 chip is the same on both creative and midi vision products on the past 16 it sounds more substantial i guess this has something to do with a better preamp circuit but it is just a guess i hope i could explain why the sound card was the best you could get on the market back then creative couldn't compete with media vision quality wise so they made their products good enough and established the real competition around the price media vision was not ready to sacrifice the quality and started to lose positions they also made a very successful jazz 16 chip which was integrated on various high quality sound cards by another manufacturers these cards were usually just as good in quality as their pro audio spectrum predecessors but they were not backwards compatible to pass anymore it was more or less a high quality sound blaster 16 replacement unfortunately after a while medivision got into bigger economical problems and was pulled into a financial scandal that didn't end well for the company eventually it was split and sold creative won that battle in the end but we shouldn't forget the legacy of the pro audio spectrum the sound card learned creative to fear and push the technological progress in pc audio dramatically the sound blaster was never the better product the pro audio spectrum was far superior but just as always it is the price which decides over life and death of a company and in the end we got not the best but something what is good enough and thanks to pro audio spectrum this good enough ended up eventually even far better than it could have been one question remains what happened to the rest of media vision well all the names trademarks and product lines were sold but the company and the people around it joined again under another name yes the oriole which stands behind the a3d audio technology and some really great pci audio sound cards and again media vision now aren't in the name orioles stood face to face with creative a3d versus eax a fight for the better 3d audio standard but this is a story for another day and i hope you enjoyed this brief review about the soundcards history i would be glad to see you on my channel again please leave your feedback below subscribe share my channel and so far thank you and goodbye

Channel: Necroware

Views: 20,726

Keywords: retro, hardware, soldering, repair, review, nerd

Id: _7P8anriPbA

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021