The installation of this card is a suite of all very easy steps. The first step is to plug the card in one of the available PCI slots. Next, you turn on the power and when Win95 has almost finished to boot a dialog box will be displayed. In this dialog box you choose the option 2 "Don't install drivers Windows wont ask again" and when Win95 has completely finished to boot you insert the CD, you open it and you choose AZTsetup which will offer many installation options to you. If you want to use this card to play DOS games then choose WIN95/DOS and this will install both Win95 and DOS drivers in the same run. When the installation will be finished you can always go back to the CD and install any other of the numerous audio applications included.

Now, as we are talking about audio applications I must confess that If I was impressed by those included with the Diamond Sonic Impact PCI card, they were noting compared to those of this sound card because the CD included with the Aztech SC128 is dynamite loaded of audio applications !

With the standard installation of this card the user is given a new icon on the tray for the 3D effects. These are the best 3D effects I heard to date. As a fact, contrarily to other sound cards these 3D effects do not deteriorate the sound quality. A software synthesizer is also added to the multimedia properties to enable you to play Midi files and finally another icon is added to the control panel for the wave table management.

These wave table are not bad at all under their original format. We can choose from a 1mb or a 2mb wave table as a standard. Some (grayed) options are giving the feeling that it could also be possible to install a 4mb and or a 8mb wave table but I saw noting about it on Aztech Web site nor in the user manual! However, a wave table manager can be installed from the CD and this manager is allowing to add extensions to these wave table which are also included on the CD but from what I understood these extensions would only be available for as long as the wave table manager is opened or for as long as Win95 is not re booted but I can be mistaking as I didn't played around with this program for a long time !

Now, among the countless audio applications included on the CD there is the Yamaha S-YG50 soft synthesizer. When this applications is installed you can switch to it by control panel/multimedia/midi and select it. This brings a whole new sound quality to this sound card and I really have been amazed by the sound quality of this soft synthesizer. This is by far the best sound I've heard from all the sound cards I've tested to date. This soft synth really gives the taste to buy the Yamaha doughterboard DB50XG with its 676 voices ! Honestly, when the S-YG50 is selected as the Midi interface the sound get's an unmatched sound quality and richness that can't be found on any of the other sound card I've tested ! Furthermore, when you install this application, another one is simultaneously installed in the Yamaha program group and it is a Midi player. This Midi player comes with 20 Midi files and among them there are some which could awake a dead hehehe. These Midi files are really using all the effervescence of the Yamaha soft synth !

A Voyetra Audio Station is also available on this CD and this application includes all the imaginable multimedia players one could wish. There is a WAV file player, a Midi player, a digital audio tape, a CD player and a mixer. If all these applications are not enough then allow me to tell you that when the Audio station is installed there are also 13 other audio applications installed in the Voyetra program group ! I repeat again, this CD is dynamite loaded :-)

The only thing I didn't found in all this is a pair of tone controls to adjust the bass and the treble levels but hey we can't always get everything isn't it ?

On the other hand, the use of this sound card under the DOS mode goes as a snap! As a fact I could play my DOS games without any problems. To do it all you need is to use the same settings as those installed in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files which files are modified by the installation program. So, you note the added lines while you are under Win95 and once you have re booted the computer under DOS 6.22 you add these settings to your real DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat files which are not the same as those used by Win95. However, if you wish to use the Win95 "Restart computer to DOS mode" option then you have noting to do other than use the setup function of your games to select the Sound Blaster or the Sound Blaster Pro for your digital effects and Midi sound card depending of what your games are offering as a choice.

I will not show here all the different control panels from all of the available applications installed for this sound card but I will show you the Audio Station included with this card. By the way this Audio Station is available in 8 different languages !

Below is a picture of the Yamaha soft synth control panel

Finally, I would like to tell you that listening to WAV files extracted from music CDs with this sound card is a real pleasure and I noticed no specific problems when playing this type of music files. As fact we could really qualify this sound card as a Hi-Fi sound card !

The phone jacks and plugs available on the back panel of this card are including: one speakers output jack, one line out jack, one line in jack, one mic in jack and a joystick game port. On the card itself there is an auxiliary input, a modem input and an audio CD input.

The strong points

The strong points of the Aztech SC128 3D PCI sound card are its amazing diversity of audio applications and the quality of these applications combined with its excellent wave table especially when using the Yamaha S-YG50 soft synthesizer which brings a whole new dimension to this card.

The weak points

The only regrets I have about this sound card is its lack of tone controls and its many user manuals which would have gained in usability if they would have been condensed into a single user manual.

As I said sooner, there effectively is a way to upgrade the wave table for the Aztech SC128 3D PCI sound card. So, after I downloaded the new driver file for the S3 vibes audio Chipset of this card, I unzipped it in a new directory. However, when I used to run the setup file to install this new driver a warning message told me that this driver was older than the one already installed so I suspected something wrong and I canceled this installation for this driver update. Then, I used to go in the directory where I unzipped all the compressed files and I looked around to see if I could find a 4mb file which I soon found under the name of s3gm4.bin . Right beside this 4mb file there was 2 other files by the names of s3gm1.bin and s3gm2.bin so I knew that I couldn't be mistaking and that I found what I was looking for ! So, at this moment the question was how should I do to use this file to update the sound card wave sets. So, I opened the Win95 search engine and I typed s3gm2.bin and launched the search process. Bingo ! The Win95 search engine found a file by this name under the system sub-directory of Windows, so, I moved the s3gm4.bin file under this same directory and I re booted Windows. Once Windows was re booted I used to open the control panel and I clicked on the SC128 3D icon to open it and to my great joy the 4mb option box that was grayed before was now available so I checked this box instead of the 2mb box and clicked OK and closed this application. At the moment this application was shutting down I received a warning message saying that Windows needed to be restarted to make these modifications effective, so, I re booted windows again ! Then, when windows has finished to boot up I used to go back in the control panel and this time I opened the multimedia manager and I choosed to click on the Midi tab and I choosed to switch from the Yamaha S-YXG50 soft synth to the SC128 3D soft synth as the midi interface. When this has been accomplished I used to power up a Midi file player and I started to listen to some Midi files. Wow, what a difference ! This new 4mb wave set is really good. It sure doesn't have all the versatility of the S-YXG50 but it sound pretty fine. So, from now on I will let you be the real judge and decide for yourself If you like this wave set and do your own comparisons :-). All you have to do to get this 4mb wave table is to click here and download the 4mb wave table for the S3 Vibes audio Chipset used by the Aztech SC128 3D PCI sound card. don't be too hurry however because this file is almost 7mb ! To correctly install this new wave set all you have to do is to read again the explanations I gave in this addendum. Have fun :-)

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