PAS16 VS SB16 (Plus lengthy rant)
Channel: HighTreason610
Date: 2018-08-31

Sneaky of Creative to pre-tweak their mixer, including their tone sliders, but no matter, I feel things speak for themselves here somewhat. Media Vision's Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was a competitor to Creative's Sound Blaster 16 card in the early 1990s, it was sold at a comparative price and on paper appears to be very similar, so where do the similarities end and which one is better?

No effort was made at all here to hide the card I prefer, with a lower noise floor, a much better sound (especially if you play with the tone sliders a little) quality and better drivers, it wasn't hard to reach my own conclusions here. I did try my best to make the tests fair though - such as not playing with the mixer or anything beyond enabling the PC Speaker pass-thru.

This video did have a short segment on Windows 95 but it got ripped out, needless to say both cards install pretty seamlessly as they are supported out of the box.

If you want some high quality FLAC recordings from both cards to poke around with in your own time, here;
http://www.mediafire.com/file/muvl7th4qt2m2la/MVSB.zip/file
On of the first things you might notice that the PAS recordings are often louder despite being normalized to the same level.

Places where I can be found outside of YouTube;
http://forum.dxzeff.com/
http://soundcloud.com/high_treason
https://discord.gg/AvgAKnV

Maybe it is just me, but I genuinely feel that sound from the PAS16 seems a little more thick, bright and lively, it's like full fat milk versus skimmed, one of them is watered down and tastes crap but still costs the same and more people buy it... I have no idea what these cards cost now. Oddly there isn't a single CT1740 on eBay right now either. From what I can gather the prices still aren't that far apart, both cost more than they probably should, so whatever.