Hi, I recently got my hands on an old Win95 box (Pentium 200Mhz, 32MB RAM, 6GB HD) and I'm planning on using it as a standalone music player.

It has a 'ESS 1869' based sound card ('ESS ES1869 Plug And Play AudioDrive).
the card is ISA. The card has a problem on the output socket (where you plug the speakers) so right now it has a warbly sound, I'm planning to solder a new socket ASAP.

However I was wondering, in your experience, how good is this sound card?, does it have any big issues? (I don't think it resamples because it's not based on AC'97 (It's older than that, I think), How well does it rank against a SB128, SB16, etc?

Thanks....

It's probably about on par with a SB16, maybe slightly reduced sound quality, maybe slightly better.
I owned an ESS1838 AudioDrive at one time, and it was a very acceptable stereo 16 bit solution with the inexpensive 2.1 multimedia speakers it was attached to. It wasnt particulalry noisy but it wasnt fantastic either.

edit - it occurs to me that the quality of the solution may vary considerably from my experience since I believe ESS did not manufacture the boards themselves, only the chip.

hmmm.. I see. I'd better try to find another card anyway.

I have another question, If I threw a new PCI card to the PC (built in 97, with 2 PCI slots) would it work, or would it have issues??

If it is PCI 2.1 compliant, it should be okay.

I had a card based on this chip. It sounds really bad (background noise problem).

The cheapest PCI card will be really better.