SB Live! Value, and they don't lie
Written: Dec 23 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Incredibly low price, super sound
Cons: no expansion for digital i/o, live drive, etc. from creative
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| chorizo's Full Review: IBM Creative SoundBlaster Live! |
I have to say that I was looking forward to this piece of hardware for a while now. It has been about 5 years since my last sound card purchase (a Soundblaster AWE32) and I was very curious to see where the audio industry has gone while the video industry has stolen all the press. I purchased the device as an OEM version, so I received a nice bubblewrap case to greet me, but inside I found a nice black mainboard with shiny PCI connectors. Off the bat I was happy because this was the last upgrade I needed to break my dependance on ISA slots... no more old slow bus (even though PCI has been around longer than the touchtone phone).
Installation was simple. Insert into the slot, Windows 95 (osr 2.1) autodetected new hardware, I pointed it to the included CD-ROM, and rebooted. Then I ran the install on the CD for all the cool gizmos to install. About 5 minutes later I was introduced to my new computer with a nice crack of thunder (courtesy of the Soundblaster replacing my Windows 95 startup sound). Most impressive. No glitches, and it only uses 1 IRQ and 1 I/O address, so you're not likely to have conflicts.
The features of the card really blew me away. I knew I was getting a really nice sound card, one that would make my old one sound like pc speaker buzz, but I had no idea that there would be so many nifty angles to this card. First, the biggest feature for any gamer, is the 3D audio. While my main computer setup doesn't have a 4 speaker set, I added a few for my tests. The card has a variety of jacks in the back, including TWO speaker outs for 2 sets of left/right pairs. It's in this 4 speaker setup that the SB Live sounds amazing. 3D positional audio has pinpoint accuracy and creates sounds at any point in space. Even 2 speaker 3D sound is incredibly realistic.
Three letters. EAX. Environmental Audio provides sound reflection, reverberation, absorption and anything else the environment would add to a sound entering your ear. As a demonstration, you can play any .WAV file in each of 40 preset environments ranging from "sewer tunnel" to "padded room" to "church" to "hallway", and every one sounds perfectly match with the area. Support for EAX will add a new dimension to the realism of games in an area that has definitely been lacking. Creative Labs provides presets for MANY games to be used with the card, and more are being made available on their Soundblaster Live website.
If the three letters of EAX wasn't your thing, I've got four more for you. MIDI. The best I've seen on a card that ran me less than 90 dollars. In fact, it was so good, I'm hoping that games give up digital audio and it's huge file sizes and go back to MIDI for ambient music. Theres a lot there, and with professional sounding cards like this, there's no reason not to. It has 64 hardware voices and up to, get this, 512 voices with software. Support for SoundFont banks and many included fonts (the three main ones - 2, 4, 8 meg - and custom ones on the cd) as well as DynaRAM technology (no RAM on the board, as it accesses system RAM) allows you to manage your samples and RAM usage directly. I'm most impressed with the EMU10K1 processor.
The software package, although no games are included, is pretty fun to fool around with. You've got your AudioHQ - the guy that gives you SoundFont control, Speaker setup, Environmental Audio controls, and a wave output graph. There's Keytar a MIDI guitar chord player with 8 different styles of guitars to choose. Rhythmania is a MIDI creation lab, and PlayCenter is your stereo interface that plays MIDI, WAV, audio CD's and DVD's.
The card's physical connectors are as follows (take a deep breath): AUX connector, CD Audio connector, Telephone Answering Device connector, PC speaker connector, CD SPDIF connector, SPDIF External connector, Modem connector (all internal wire connectors), and a Line in jack, Microphone in jack, line out jack, rear out jack, and a joystick/MIDI connector (all external jacks). If you opt for the non value edition, you'll get a SECOND board of adapter types for RCA's, SVideo, and other digital in/out jacks.
All together, I'm very pleased with the card. It's a nice DirectX accelerated card that does tons of positional audio sounds simultaneously, plays amazing midi files, operates complex digital signal processing and provides a very open architecture for unlimited expansion. I can't find a flaw with it except that I didn't have one sooner.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
chorizo
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Location: San Francisco, CA
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 10 members
About Me:
Web Applications Developer
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