Hi All!  I haven't contributed in a while but recently I bought myself
an early Christmas present.  I've needed (??) a new MIDI sound card to
replace my Roland MT-32 and bought the SoundBlaster AWE64 "Value"
sound card by Creative Labs.

Well, I'm impressed, to say the least!  Wow!  What I have been missing!
The card installed in Windows 95 smoothly and on first playing I was
thrilled and astonished at the performance of this little beauty!!  The
wavetable sounds are absolutely incredible!

The strings are crisp and clear; the piano(s) are very nicely done and
the horns are the best I've ever heard on a sound card.  I suppose this
is due to the fact they are based on actual instrument samples rather
than synthesized approximations.

I kind of wish I'd gotten the AWE64 "Gold" with an extra 4 Mb of
on-board RAM to hold various sound fonts, but I'll instead buy a
plug-in RAM bank for the card.  I've yet to learn about sound fonts,
though.

If you're looking to upgrade to a newer sound card, I would *highly*
recommend this one, though the documentation included with it is rather
skimpy.  One hint: install the drivers from the floppy disk included
with the card, rather than from the CD.  The floppy disk contains the
latest versions of the Windows 95 drivers.

Carefully check that your computer is fast enough for this card,
however.  The box recommends a Pentium, but I'm running it with an
AMD '586-133 and it works perfectly.  I doubt that it would work on
an older '486??

Have fun!! :)

Ron Yost, Paso Robles, California