The Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI soundcard
May 23 , 1998
Addendum of May 29 , 1998
Addendum of Saturday, December 26, 1998

Being a happy owner of an Ensoniq Soundscape sound card it is with some understanding that I approached this new sound card !

Costing almost 6 times less than the Ensoniq Soundscape the Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI sound card really surprised me on the first listening. Using my collection of midi files I lost no time and I immediately turned on my super Java Jukebox and began to listen to some of my favorites tunes. Honestly I must admit that I have been really amazed ! Being a humble melomaniac I am not less than a real music fanatic doubled of an advised audiophile mercy less for poor quality products. So, as I was saying, since the very first listening of this sound card I have been literally enchanted of the musical quality of this sound card.

Considering that this sound card can hardly compare to a Soundscape, especially to the hardware point of view, the Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI displays great qualities none the less. As a fact, even if this card doesn't include its wave tables on the hardware it sounds as good (and even better!) as a card using hardwired wave tables because this card use to install its wave sets directly on the hard disk drive and load them when needed. With this feature the user has the choice to use a 2mb or a 4mb wave table directly form the HDD. Of course the available physical memory is reduced accordingly so it would be wise not to forget about this fact ! However, this gives to the user the possibility to use many different wave table sets. As a matter of fact there is an 8mb wave set available as It has been reported to me by Chris Severance and according to what Chris told me this wave set is supposed to sound much better than the standard 2mb or 4mb wave set included on th CD.

So, to make my own mind about the quality of this 8mb wave set I downloaded it and installed it.

Now to tell you the whole truth I re-wrote this paragraph to describe how's the sound quality of this new waviest. I must now admit that this sound card despite its much lower price than the Ensoniq Soundscape has noting to envy to the Soundscape wave sets. As a fact I think I am beginning to prefer the Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI wave sets than the Ensoniq Soundscape hardwired wave sets. It is really amazing how such an inexpensive card can sound with the appropriate wave set. I am really impressed and I only can strongly encourage everyone who own this card to get the 8mb wave set as soon as possible because this wave set does a tremendous enhancement in sound quality compared to the 2 and the 4mb wave set. A great thank to Chris Severance for having taken of his time to report it to me.

There are also some other things Chris told me that I forgot to tell you about this card and one of them is a feature called "Lock Midi Wave sets". Here is what the CD user manual is saying about this feature:

"If Lock MIDI Waveset" is checked the entire wave set is locked into physical memory each time the driver is initialized on boot up or the MIDI Device is in use. When the MIDI Device is closed the wave set is unlocked, so the memory is available to other applications when the MIDI device is not in use.

"If Lock MIDI Waveset" is unchecked only the wave table sounds in use are locked into memory. If a sound is not being played it will not be locked into memory. This means that as a complicated MIDI sequence is played there may be a delay as each instrument is locked to and paged out of memory. The only time this should be necessary is when another memory-heavy application has a greater need for RAM than the MIDI device."

I would like to add a final comment about this 8mb wave set and it has been taken from the .txt file included in the .zip file of this 8mb wave set and I quote "Note that the 8MB wave set is recommended in systems with at least 64MB of RAM!". However, my own system is equipped with only 32mb of RAM memory and I found no problem using this wave set, but, this might not be the case for everybody!

Now, to talk about this card usability and features I think that the best way to describe it is by showing the actual picture of its mixer which is displayed right here. Note that it is not all the functions that have been enabled.

Essentially similar to those we can find on many other alike sound cards, these functions are accompanied by some very interesting features. Among them, there are the 'Spatial", the "reverb" and the "chorus" functions. As a fact, I found very interesting the widened stereo effect obtained by using the "Spatial" function of this card. It gives a very pleasant sensation not normally possible with the restricted physical space that most of the people have between their speakers. However this "Spatial" feature a bit less pleasant when you us to listen to the music using headphones.

While listening to complex WAV files directly extracted from audio CDs, this card, appeared to be not bad at all. As a fact, the Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI doesn't bring any specific coloration when reproducing the music and does its job without being noticeable. This card does really make a good job and it reproduce the music softly without any aggressively.

Concerning the use of this card under DOS I must admit that it has been totally impossible for me to make it work even after more than 6 hours of frustrating tries. So, I contacted Ensoniq enquiring about what could be causing this problem and here is what they told me, "On any PC, each memory reference in the memory subsystem is monitored continuously for errors. Parity errors in memory trigger the NMI (non maskable interrupt) pin of the CPU. An error message, complete with memory register settings, is displayed or printed and then the CPU is halted. If NMI is disabled or not available on a particular motherboard, if the parity check feature in BIOS is turned off, or no parity checking occurs, the computer system isn't implementing NMI. In order to use the Ensoniq DOS utilities, NMI must be available and turned on.". So, knowing that my BIOS doesn't have the parity check feature as it is the case with most of the motherboards not supporting ECC memory I can only conclude that this is the cause that is refraining me to use this card under the DOS environment.

According to this, there is a new driver update wizard available on Ensoniq Web site. Included in this wizard there is a file named "APLEGACY.exe". This program is used to test your system to make sure that the NMI feature is perfectly working. So, I strongly recommend that you download this wizard and run it if you encounter any problems with this card and if the results obtained from this program are not giving a perfect match then chances are that your system will not be able to make this card work under the DOS mode. Of course you should make sure to turn on the parity check option of your BIOS before to turn this application otherwise the results would be false !

Finally, on the property control panel of this sound card there is a tab labeled "3D Audio". When you click on this tab you are offered the choice to choose from Quad Speakers to Stereo Speakers to Headphones. When you use to choose the Quad Speakers the Auxiliary In jack doubles as a Line Out so you can use this jack to connect an additional set of speakers to take advantage of the 3D sound environment capability of this card.

As promised, this morning I have been doing additional tests on the Creative Labs Ensoniq PCI sound card in order to make this card work under DOS. Unfortunately, I lost my time because It has been absolutely impossible to use this card under the DOS mode again ! In conclusion, Ensoniq, who is the author of this card drivers should really redo his homework because they really missed the boat on this one ! They can always continue to pretend that these problems are caused by the motherboards but I doubt very much about it. As a fact, the Aztech SC128 3D PCI sound card is working flawlessly under DOS so I really cant see why any other PCI sound card with correctly designed drivers couldn't do it as well. It is now clear in my mind that the Ensoniq drivers (or hardware) were not properly designed and they can only blame themself for this and not the motherboards manufacturers ! However, I repeat agin that the fact that this card doesn't work under the DOS mode on my actual system doesn'T mean that it doesn'T work on all system so the only way the know for sure for yourself is to try it ! I also suspect that there probably are less or no problems with motherboards with the "Blaster Link" feature installed !

However, the fact that this card doesn't work under the DOS mode on my actual system doesn't mean that it doesn't work on all system so the only way to know for sure is to try it by yourself on your own system ! I also suspect that there probably are less or no problems with motherboards with the "Blaster Link" feature installed !

Addemdum 2

An information sent by Michel Champagne is apparently allowing to add tone controls (bass and treble) to this soundcard.

According to Michel, the following modifications to Windows registry should enable tone controls on the Creative Labs Ensomiq PCI;

Open Windows registry by typing run regedit.exe and the choose Hkey_Local_machine/ System/ Current Control Set/ Services/ Class/ Media/ 0001/ config , then change (AllowToneControl) & (EnableToneControl) from 00 to 01 , save & re-boot.

Note that the media number on your system may be different from 001, so, you will have to make sure that you use the one corresponding to your setup. It might also be possible that the (allow tone control) & (enable tone control) keys are missing and if this is the case you will have to create them.

In any case, always make a backup copy of your registry before attempting any modification to it. So, if you run into troubles you will always be able to come back to your original setup.

A big thank to Michel for these highly appreciated information :-)