The Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live!, announced back at Fall Comdex 97 in Las Vegas, exploits better than any previous Creative Labs product the audio hardware expertise the company bought when it acquired E-mu Systems Inc., back in February 1993 and, more recently, Ensoniq Corp., in Jan. 1998. Both E-mu and Ensoniq are brand names well known to professional musicians and, in fact, both brands still hold important positions in the pro music marketplace with their dedicated synthesizers and sampler modules and keyboards.
SB Live! finally does away with the "8-bit playback/16-bit record" limitations of the AWE64’s "full duplex" operation that has kept it from effectively addressing the home and "prosumer" musician markets, when used with popular music titles like Steinberg’s Cubase VST. As well, the company says the waveforms generated by the system’s EMU10K1 digital signal processor are ideally suited for speech recognition. At this writing, a rumored bundling deal that would see the card – PCI, by the way -- bundled with continuous-speech recognition software is still unfulfilled. It's also worth noting that professional musicians still have a legitimate complaint that the card lacks both ASIO drivers (for Cubase VST, etc.) and, more seriously, the ability to vary its sample rates from the default 48KHz rate. Fortunately, a workaround for the first problem exists and the second issue is not a problem for most people (and a bonus for those who might want to record at this high rate or record from DAT or ADAT sources.)
But who are we kidding? It is gamers that are destined to buy the lion’s share of this card’s prodigious production run, fueled by the company’s dominant market share (the company’s multimedia/sound boards are found in an estimated 60 percent of systems sold to date) and the allure of what the company calls "Environmental Audio." Unlike some competing 3-D audio specifications that operate on the principle known as HRTF (head-related transfer function) – in essence, an audio model of a dummy’s head with microphones in its ears -- Creative’s system exploits yet another of its recent acquisitions: the high-quality speakers from Cambridge Soundworks. In other words, the company is hoping that a system with more than two speakers (up to five plus a subwoofer in the case of Dolby Digital 5.1, the standard for DVD) will soon become the norm.
Even if it doesn’t, support in games is likely to catch on as games developers take advantage of the company’s Environmental Audio Extensions application programming interface ("EAX") to develop games that exploit the system’s acoustic modeling extensions to Microsoft’s DirectX/DirectSound. The results sound as if they originate from different sources, complete with the acoustics – such as reverberation – associated with a specific room, chamber, cave, tunnel, pit of doom (!), etc.
Customers may or may not care that the DSP cranks out 1,000 MIPS of raw processing power, but it certainly demos well (combine it with a GeForce256, Voodoo 5 or similar graphics subsystem, a few good games and watch out!) and wholly deserves our technical excellence plaudits. And who knows? The real-time reverb, echo, acoustic properties and pitch-shifting Doppler effects might pull in more than a few PC-using musicians (and, soon, Mac users) as well.
Creative Labs, in late Oct. '99, released Live!Ware 3.0, the latest downloadable upgrade of the software suite for the Live! family of soundcards. See www.soundblaster.com for a description of the technology behind EAX and other details.
Sound Blaster for Mac
At Macworld Expo in New York City, in July, 2000, Creative Labs demonstrated a SBLive! running games on a Mac at its booth; this Mac version of the SBLive! card became available at retail sometime in the 4th quarter. Unfortunately, sales were not strong, and a Mac version of Creative's next-generation Audigy soundcard has not yet been announced.Audigy shipped for Windows PCs in Sept. The company has, however, shipped a Mac version of its Nomad MP3 Jukebox product.
Improved MIDI Soundfont
The 8 Megabyte General MIDI Soundfont for the SB Live is good, but you can make your MIDI files even better. Utopia Sound Division has made a commercial SB Live! GM soundfont which seriously improves the SB Live!'s playback quality of standard MIDI files.
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