Intro Welcome to Awedomain...the site for comprehensive information, hints and tips on the Sound Blaster AWE32. The objective of this page is to help AWE32 users get the best performance out of their equipment. It comprises a collection of hints and tips that have been collected and developed from using the AWE32 over recent years. So why bother maintaining a page, for a sound card that has been superseded, and is now over five years old? When I first got my AWE32, I believed it to have some serious shortcomings that prevented it from producing professional quality music. However, having learned to fix and work around these shortcomings, I now believe it can be on par with many professional samplers, and it comes at a fraction of the cost. I have seen second hand AWE32's on internet auction sites for as little as $10us. Given that they only require a high end 486 machine to run properly, they represent excellent value for money for the musician that requires a sampler, but doesn't want to fork out $1000's. Awedomain News 30/1/06 - * NEW * - Added an article on Creating Synthesiser Pad Sounds. 4/4/05 - * NEW * - Added The Awedomain Guide To Building A Quiet PC - an article based on my experiences with attempting to reduce the noise produced by an audio PC. 11/11/04 - * NEW * - In the later part of 2003, I decided it was finally time to upgrade from the AWE32. The new software package I bought included Steinberg's Cubase SL, but the difficulties I had with getting basic product support from Steinberg were shameful. Read about the saga here. 22/1/03 - Added notes on setting reverb and chorus levels to 255 (instead of the usual maximum of 127) to the MIDI section. 13/1/03 - * NEW * - Added a review of the Roland / Edirol UA-1D USB audio interface. 23/7/02 - Added an addendum on Parametric Equalistion to the Mastering Guide. 17/7/02 - A very interesting piece of news... Mike Guzewicz, once an engineer at EMU and co-founder of the soundfont format, states in an interview that the EMU-8000 chip is actually still in production today! Read the full interview at www.soundfont.com. 13/7/02 - Added a description of some of the anomalies of looping and envlopes in Vienna 1 to the Hints/Tips section. 11/7/02 - Added notes on expanding the 'size' of .wav samples to the Audio section. 5/7/02 - * NEW * - A little off topic, but I have added The Awedomain Guide To Audio Mastering, which is a simple tutorial covering some of the basics of mastering audio (not AWE32 specific). 19/6/02 - Added notes on the EMU8000's frequency response, and sample attenuation to the Hints/Tips section. 18/6/02 - Added notes on using MIDI velocity and timing effectively, and creating MIDI delay effects to the MIDI section. 22/4/02 - Added a new AWE32 track example to the Miscellaneous section. 30/12/01 - Added notes on how to simulate a high-pass filter on the AWE32 to the Hints/Tips section. 14/12/01 - Added information about Analogic - an excellent DOS based software synthesiser. See the Audio section for more details. 14/12/01 - Did a tidy up of the entire site, fixing a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. 20/10/01 - Awedomain reaches 200 unique hits, which I consider to be pretty commendable, considering it's not 'correctly' listed on any search engines. Thanks to all the Awedomain visitors for your support. 14/10/01 - Added another example of the music the AWE32 can produce to the Miscellaneous section. 28/6/01 - Added notes on using different sample rates, and avoiding OPL3 noise to the Hints/Tips section. 17/4/01 - Added an Outstanding Issues section to the Hints/Tips section. 20/3/01 - Added photos of the AWE32 S/PDIF output, and SIMM slots to the Hardware section. 12/1/01 - Added extra info to The AWE32 Attack Problem including diagramatic example, in the Hints/Tips section. 11/1/01 - By chance I discovered a way to stop annoying phasing errors that occur when using the AWE32 under Windows 3.x. See the Hints/Tips section for more details. History The Sound Blaster AWE32 was released by Creative Labs in 1994. It was introduced into the product range as their top-of-the-line audio card, which not only allowed playback and recording of CD quality digital audio, but included "E-mu's Advanced WavEffects Synthesis" which it was claimed, produced virtually perfect musical instrument sound. Structure of the AWE32 In essence, the awe consists of... a 16bit 44.1khz digital audio section, used for playback/recording of .wav files. an "advanced signal processor", used for real-time compression/decompression of .wav files, speech synthesis, voice recognition, and qsound, which positions sounds in a 180 degree field. A Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesiser. A wavetable synthesis and sampling sub-system which uses the EMU-8000 chipset. The majority of this page centres around the EMU-8000 and the sampling sub-system. Included with this chip, are two features that make the card worthy of the "professional" labelling on the package: two 30-pin SIMM slots for sampler RAM upgrades; and an S/PDIF digital output connector. The digital audio section of the card is quite noisy, and the sound quality is poor by today's standards, so there's not really a lot covered on it here. Most of the features provided by the advanced signal processor are somewhat "gimmicky". Compression of .wav files was useful in the days where a computer's hard drive was only 100Mb, but are of little use today. The OPL3 chip was probably only included to facilitate backwards compatibility with the Sound Blaster 16, and the sounds produced by it are pretty horrendous (in my opinion anyway), so again it doesn't really get much coverage in these pages. More on the EMU-8000 The EMU-8000 has 32 individual oscillators, each playing back at 44.1 kHz. Each oscillator consists of a resonant low pass filter, two LFOs (low frequency oscillators), and two envelope generators. What the hell does all this mean? Well, basically the EMU-8000 is capable of playing back 32* channels of 16bit, 44.1khz, mono audio simultaneously. The low-pass filter allows you to remove high frequencies from the audio, and can be adjusted in real-time to apply a sweeping effect to the sounds. LFOs allow you to vary the volume, or pitch of the sounds in real-time. Finally the envelope generators allow you to predefine changes in the volume, or filters over the time the sound plays. Coupled with the EMU-8000 is a digital effects engine, which can be used to apply reverb and chorus effects (8 variations of each) individually to each of the 32* audio channels. A digital mixer on the EMU-8000 allows you to adjust the overall bass and treble levels of all 32 channels. Most importantly, the sounds, and parameters of the EMU-8000 can be triggered by MIDI notes and events. This means that (as with a real sampler...EMU, AKAI, or similar) the EMU-8000 can be used to accurately simulate the sound of any instrument (or group of instruments). *actually, limit is 30 channels as 2 channels are reserved for sounds from the OPL3 FM synth.