Sound Blaster AWE32

The Sound Blaster AWE32 is an ISA sound card from Creative Technology. It is an expansion board for PCs and is part of the Sound Blaster family of products. The Sound Blaster AWE32, introduced in March 1994, was a near full-length ISA sound card, measuring 14 inches (356 mm) in length, due to the number of features included.

The AWE32's digital audio section was basically an entire Sound Blaster 16, and as such, was compatible with Creative's earlier Sound Blaster 2.0 (minus the C/MS audio chips.) Its specifications included 16-bit 44.1 kHz AD/DA conversion with real-time on-board compression / decompression and the Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesizer chip. However, compatibility was not always perfect and there were situations where various bugs could arise in games. Many of the Sound Blaster AWE32 cards had codecs which supported bass, treble, and gain adjustments through Creative's included mixer software. There were many variants and revisions of the AWE32, however, with numerous variations in audio chipset, amplifier selection and design, and supported features. For example, the Sound Blaster AWE32 boards that utilize the VIBRA chip do not have bass and treble adjustments.

The Sound Blaster AWE32 included two distinct audio sections; one being the Creative digital audio section with their audio codec and optional CSP/ASP chip socket, and the second being the E-mu MIDI synthesizer section. The synthesizer section consisted of the EMU8000 synthesizer and effects processor chip, 1 MiB EMU8011 sample ROM, and a variable amount of RAM (none on the SB32, 512 KiB on the AWE32; RAM was expandable to 28 MiB on both cards). These chips comprised a powerful and flexible sample-based synthesis system, based on E-mu's high-end sampler systems such as the E-mu Emulator III and E-mu Proteus. The effects processor generated various effects (i.e. reverb and chorus) and environments on MIDI output, similar to the later EAX standard on Live! and newer cards. It can also add effects to the output from the Yamaha OPL-3's FM synthesis. The AWE32 was the first sampler to support E-Mu's SoundFont standard, which allowed users to build custom sound sets using their own samples, the samples included in ROM, or both. The card included software for building custom SoundFonts. All of Creative's subsequent cards, other than the Sound Blaster PCI64/128 series, support SoundFonts.

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