Overview Wavetable Sound Cards Comparative Review Overview Comparative reviews of other product groups often highlight improvements made over the last year or so.
Graphics cards get faster, hard disk drives get bigger, processors get more powerful and so on.
That isn't the case with sound cards. If you have a full-duplex wavetable sound card in your system, and you're happy with the sound quality, then there's little point in upgrading to one of the cards tested here. The true measure of a wavetable sound card is whether the listener can detect the difference between an original piece of music played on CD and a carefully encoded MIDI replica played back through the sound card. The instruments, particularly those of the string and woodwind families, still sound false and electronic, and there's very little harmony. Gold is the best of the seven cards reviewed here for MIDI reproduction says little about the quality of these cards in general.