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Logitech Soundman Wave

There are already a couple of good writeups about the Soundman Wave. I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, other than to say I think that people are a bit too hard on this card.

It does have a couple of quirks:

• The instruction manual and advertising claim full SoundBlaster Pro compatibility. They must have decided at the last minute that it is buggy, because the README file only claims SoundBlaster 2.0 compatibility.
• The synth (MIDI and FM) volume is way lower than the wave volume. You will need to set the MIDI volume to full and the wave volume to around half in SOUNDMAN.INI to balance it out.

It does several things right however:

• I had no problems getting anything to work, even using SoundBlaster Pro. You can always fall back to regular SB 1.x if you need to.
• I've heard much better MIDI patch sets, but I don't think this is bad at all. I like the percussion.
• The card is configured entirely in software through the SOUNDMAN.INI file. The card needs to be initialized using a driver called SMWSET.SYS, but it doesn't stay loaded in memory. There is also a small volume control utility called SMWVOL.EXE. You will need this to initialize the volume settings from your .INI file, but it can be unloaded immediately afterwards by running "SMWVOL U" if you like.
• I tried out the SCSI CD-ROM interface and had no issues with this. It uses the Trantor Z5380.SYS driver.
• FM playback is good. I can't tell the difference between the OPL4 and the OPL3.
• The sound quality and noise level are pretty good. I got some background hiss on the Leisure Suit Larry 6 track, but that seems to be a common problem. Maybe I am doing something wrong.

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