Sound Blaster AWE32

Its specifications included 16-bit 44.1 kHz AD/DA conversion with real-time on-board compression / decompression and the Yamaha OPL3 FM synthesizer chip.

Many of the Sound Blaster AWE32 cards had codecs that supported bass, treble, and gain adjustments through Creative's included mixer software.

There were many variants and revisions of the AWE32, however, with numerous variations in audio chipset, amplifier selection and design, and supported features.

For example, the Sound Blaster AWE32 boards that utilize the VIBRA chip do not have bass and treble adjustments.

On the initial release, Creative promoted the EMU8000 as a waveguide physical modelling synthesis engine, due to its ability to work with delay lines.

Actual physical modeling instruments were not popular on the AWE, although some support exists in the SoundFont format.

To support older software, the AWE32 featured OPL-3 FM synthesis, and came with the AWEUTIL program which attempted to provide GM/MT-32/GS redirection to the native AWE hardware; however, AWEUTIL wasn't compatible with all programs or motherboards due to its use of the non-maskable interrupt (a feature that was omitted or disabled on many clone boards), and it used a lot of precious DOS conventional memory.

Some Sound Blaster 32 PnP with onboard 512kB RAM was sold as AWE32 OEM in Dell computers.