From: ptran@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca (Phat H Tran)
Subject: Gravis afterglow
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 09:40:08 GMT

My brother came home from work with a really neat surprise last night...
an Ultrasound.  I've heard, read, and speculated so much about the card,
but never expected to experience it so soon.  I was not disappointed in 
the least.

The installation went smoothly up until the Windows drivers.  Those of
you who are experiencing problems with GUS and Win 3.1 may want to
pay attention.  Following the instructions in the manual loosely, I
went into the Control Panel, opened the Drivers dialogue box, removed
my Adlib and Soundblaster 1.0 drivers, added the "Ultra Wave and MIDI 
Synth" driver from my Ultrasnd/Windows directory, and restarted Windows.
However, once Windows rebooted, instead of hearing Bart's familiar
"Hi, man!" on startup, I heard "Hi, man! <screech> <screech> <looong
pause> Hi, man! <screech> <screech> ..."  Apparently, the Ultrasound
was playing back its whole memory bank and looping it.  I tried to break
the cycle with WinMod Pro, but that didn't work.  I then went into the
Control Panel again and turned off Enable System Sounds in the Sounds
dialogue box, and this seemed to do the trick.  I returned to WinMod Pro
to play something, but only the first buffer was heard, followed by
<screech> <screech>.  The noise ceased once I clicked on the stop button.
Again, I went back into the Control Panel, and remembering seeing two
drivers in the Ultrasnd/Windows directory, I decided to add the other 
one as well.  I opened the Drivers dialogue and added the "Ultrasound
MIDI Port" driver to the system.  I attempted to restart Windows, but 
upon the closing of the current session, the shutdown .WAV played,
followed by unending screeching.  I had to reboot the computer.
I then started Windows, but this time, Bart said "Hi, man!" with no
screeches!  I quickly opened WinMod Pro, and it played flawlessly.  
I don't know what, if anything, of what I did fixed the problem,
but I'll take what I'm given and not ask too many questions.

Now, about the audio card itself.  After living for so long with my
SB, the Ultrasound just blew my socks off.  Clean sounding, realistic
instruments, and stereo.  The MIDI files that came with the card 
sounded great.  I especially liked hidnseek and pnoheavn.  I also
used playmidi to play the songs in falcon3's music directory.  Since
I only have 256k of AudioRAM, not all of the sound patches could be
loaded for many of the songs.  A, B, and C, all failed on me, but song D 
and several others played wonderfully.  The music quality and fidelity
of the instruments far surpassed what I had heard when these songs were 
played through the SB's FM synthesis.  Even MODs don't sound half as 
good as what the Ultrasound was generating from these MIDI files.  

In Windows, I tried using the Media Player to play MIDI files through 
the Ultrasound, but found that the DOS playmidi matched the instruments
better and seemed to sound better overall.  But what was good about the
Media Player was that I can use it to provide background music as I do
other things in Windows.  To provide the same quality of audio with
a SoundBlaster/SBPro or PAS-16 would require compute-intensive mixing
that would be too draining to be practical for background music.  The
hardware mixing and resampling on the Ultrasound is a big plus in a
multitasking environment, as well as in games where cpu time must be
rationed.

As far as SB compatibility goes, I've only tried the emulator with
Falcon 3.0, and I was quite amused.  For one thing, the music was in
stereo!  It didn't sound bad, either... just a little strange.  Also,
there was no slowdown that I can notice on my 386-33.  I can rejoice
now as my greatest fear in getting the Ultrasound was that I would have
to give up Falcon's great audio.

In summary, I'm extrememly pleased with the Ultrasound.  It has lived up
to everything I expected of it, and it even sounds better that I thought
it would.  It is inarguably much better-sounding than any FM-based
board out there for the PC, and the hardware mixing of 32 digital
channels propels it even farther ahead of the pack.  

Phat.

 
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard