Product: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
From: Creative Labs www.soundblaster.com
Price: about C$250; a C$69 (or less) "Value Edition" is also available with a reduced feature set. Versions supporting 5.1 audio are also available.
For: Windows 95, 98, Millennium Edition, NT4.0* (See Note 1), Windows 2000, Windows XP. A Mac-specific version shipped in Q1'01 (See Note 2).
Pros: Easy installation; good games and multimedia compatibility. Good software bundle. Great sound, especially with more than two speakers.
Cons: Minor glitches in the WaveBlaster emulation software (confirmed by Creative Labs). Some DOS games, such as Quake 1 and Doom 1.9, may not work as expected. No daughterboard header connector, making it impossible to use Roland or Yamaha daughterboards. No 24-bit audio support. Fixed 48K sample rate.
Summary: The SB Live! is, at this writing, still Creative's most popular Sound Blaster card ever. Now in its fifth, sixth or seventh generation depending on whether you count acquisitions and re-branded products, it is safe to say the Sound Blaster series has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation.
Yet another PCI model based on the Ensoniq hardware was also released. Known as the SB128, it was viewed by some observers as a stopgap to appease the company's shareholders until the developers finished the SB Live!
The SB Live! contains only a small amount of cache memory onboard. It uses up to 32MB of your PC's system RAM for its "SoundFont" memory, and produces the best General MIDI playback we've heard yet from a Creative Labs card. The fact that the company has promised to make its highly regarded EMU instrument collections (Vintage Synth, Proteus, Orchestral, Hip Hop, etc.) available as SoundFonts only adds to our excitement over this flexible architecture.
In addition, we are pumped about the bundled collection of software. (The "Value Edition" card does not contain the same bundle listed here.) You get Unreal, a hot "Quake-style" 1st person action game, Sound Forge XP, one of our favorite audio editors, Mixman studio and CakeWalk Express for making music, and some fun goodies, like Keytar, a program that convincingly simulates a number of acoustic and electric guitars by letting you "strum" with your mouse. Weird, but fun. Home, home on the range....
And, for those who have rightfully derided earlier Sound Blaster cards for their lack of professional I/O features, this card has a full complement of digital inputs and outputs (the digital I/O panel was not included in the original Value Edition. which cannot, by the way, be upgraded to a full edition. However, recent Value edition models include Digital IO connectors on the board). On the full version there is a S/PDIF interface input (which the latest drivers improve the functionality of). In fact, there are no less than three digital inputs provided, including one especially designed to take direct digital audio output from Creative's Encore DVD-ROM drive. The company says there are also 48 channels of MIDI available (maybe -- the manual is a bit sketchy on this point) and a whopping 256 voice polyphony. Note, however, that only 64 of these are done in hardware; the other 192 are produced via a software synth. As well, although the card is capable of processing, mixing and positioning audio streams using up to 131 available hardware channels, upon release it only processed eight 3D sounds at once in hardware. Some "next-generation" competitors, such as the Vortex2 support 16 3D sound hardware streams, which some games already demand (including Unreal, which tends to add a note of irony to its inclusion in the SB Live! software bundle). Creative's developers subsequently addressed this limitation; a Driver Update provides 32 DirectSound3D streams.
We encountered a minor glitch and a few surprises during our tests of the card. Initially, we thought we had stumbled across a bug when we attempted to enable multiple input sources and, as we clicked their check boxes in the volume control panel, other inputs would mysteriously mute themselves. As the manual explains, only one of the following audio sources can be enabled at a time: CD Audio, Line In, Microphone, Auxiliary, TAD (telephone answering device) In. That is, when one source from this group is selected for recording, all other sources become muted.
Another minor problem manifested when we discovered that the Wave Blaster emulation feature that allows sound support for games that do not directly support an "AWE" device was unavailable. As it turns out, the software turns this feature off if your system already has a true Creative SB16-compatible sound card installed and correctly configured. We didn't, but we had pulled such a card out without removing its software in order to test the SB Live!. Apparently, the system thought the card was still installed. Probably as a result of this glitch, some DOS games we tried didn't run correctly. Windows sound, however, worked well. Creative Labs has released an updated driver to address issues in the original version.
A more serious problem happened when we attempted to access our system's SCSI CD Player. Our Win98 system crashed. However, a little investigation revealed that a Hewlett-Packard SureStore CD-Writer we'd recently installed had replaced Windows 98's default Adaptec SCSI driver (APIX.VXD) with an older version. Restoring the file from the backup that Win98 keeps in its IOSUBSYS directory fixed the problem. (Running Win98's System File Checker or downloading an update from Adaptec's FTP site would also fix this problem.) Most users, of course, would not encounter this issue.
Much has been made of the card's "environmental audio" capabilities, and with good reason. The card supports up to 8 speakers (we tested it with -- and highly recommend -- the Cambridge SoundWorks Four-point Surround System) and provides digital signal processing that apply convincing reverb and echo effects to make sounds more immersive than is possible with only two speakers. Now, we'll admit to being a little less pumped about this than we were in the late 80s, when such features started to appear on standalone musical instruments, but the bottom line is, it sounds better.
The SB Live! Value Edition (or 5.1 Value Edition), selling for as little as C$35, is our recommended choice for those who want the best overall bang for the buck in their sound experience on a PC.
Update: Creative Labs in Oct. 2001 began blocking downloads of Liveware 3.0 from its website. Fortunately, at this writing, the software is still available on at least one of the company's FTP sites. Our advice: get the 3.0 upgrade now if you need it, or be prepared to pay Creative Labs for a CD.
Note 1: We've read reports that, for some, NT configuration and setup is problematic. We recommend NT users purchase the card from a dealer with a money-back guarantee, or try before buying. The latest NT drivers are likely to help, of course. The SB Live is Win2000 compatible.
Note 2: Mac Support At Macworld Expo in New York City, in July 2000, Creative Labs announced that a Mac version of the SBLive! card would be available at retail sometime in the 4th quarter. The company demonstrated a SBLive! running games in a Mac at its booth at the show. Unfortunately, it has since let the product languish and has never released OS X-compatible drivers for the device.
Glossary
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