Released in 1994 at a suggested retail price of $399, the Sound Blaster AWE32 (CT2760) used the same EMU8000 chip found in E-Mu's rackmount synth modules of the late 1990's. It is a full-length 16-bit ISA card measuring 356mm in length.
It included connectors for Panasonic, Sony, and Mitsumi CD-ROM drives and for CD audio input. It was the first card to support the E-Mu Soundfont standard, which allows loading sample sets into memory and using them for sound playback. It shipped with 512kB of sample RAM and also contained 2 30-pin SIMM slots for installing up to 28MB of RAM.
The onboard General MIDI synthesizer included 1MB of waveform ROM with 32 notes of polyphony.In addition to GM, it also supported Roland GS and included an MT-32 emulation mode.
The AWE32 has an OPL3 4-operator FM synthesizer chip with 20 voices of polyphony for backward compatibility and has a daughterboard connector that can be used with the Waveblaster, Waveblaster II, DB50XG, DB60XG, SCB-7, or SCB-55 add-on cards.
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