Originally Posted by
kool kitty89
Ace, TmEE, among others could give some suggestions (or you could check out the vogons PC forums), but real Sound Blaster 16s (or SB Pro 2.0 for some things) are generally the best bet for that. Specific models are better than others in some respects, but iirc, many of the cleaner/better sounding (analog) ones tend to be the later models made just prior to Creative's switch to their clone. (they'd already switched to a licensed ASIC implementation of the Yamaha chip for those cards, but they're genuine OPL and have logos printed on the ASIC package)
The very early AWE32 cards would also be a consideration if you want AWE compatibility and good sounding general midi, later models have the cloned "CQM" creative chips though. (TBH, CQM isn't intolerable either -there are far worse cases, but since pretty much all CQM cards are ISA anyway, and SB-16s are cheap -even on ebay- it's not really a problem)