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Oooh! This is a sweet little card! For 200 bucks it does what most higher-end samplers do. The AWE64 comes with 4 meg of RAM onboard, and can be boosted to over 20 meg (if I remember correctly). This makes it quite capable of doing some fantastic things with layered samples!
Of course, the card has some problems. First thing is that it only has 64-voice polyphony if you have a Pentium-BRAND processor. Anybody else's processor will not work with the software-based synthesis, and thus you have only 32 voices.
Second problem: It has no space for a daughterboard. this is just a little thing, really, but the AWE32 and SB32 would let you strap on a daughterboard- Excellent for slapping on some XG synth. I miss that in this model.
The dual gold outputs are a nice touch, and the SPDIF is cool, even if I haven't had a chance to use it. Now if only Emu would cut the price of soundfonts a bit, and Creative Labs would make the memory modules a tad more affordable for us low-budget types, I'd be in heaven!
Software musts for this card include the AWEtoy, a cool effects engine for the AWE64. Don't forget that this baby also comes with Vienna, which is necessary to get what you want out of your patches.
All in all, this is an excellent card at a very reasonable price.
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