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CREATIVE LABS If you're reading this, you're probably someone who is curious and excited about this new audio card from Creative Labs and just want the bottom line on its performance. CoolInfo recently attended the Sound Blaster Live! premiere party in Burlingame, California, and was able to lay our hands on the real thing! We now bring to you an in-depth review on this next generation audio card. If you're opting to purchase one of these, read carefully, for it does come with a $200 price tag, and it would be best if you qualified yourself as one who could appreciate and make full use of this product. More than likely, you've already read our preview on the Live!, so we won't extensively go over the technical aspects; rather provide a look at how well it uses all that technology to create audio so real, it has to be Live! The Goods |
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You'll be looking for packaging similar to the Sound Blaster AWE64; same size box with a snazzy collage on the front of an orchestra conductor in contrast with ocean waves and seagulls. Strewn about the back and side panels are features, specifications and definitions, all announcing what your new toy has to offer. The first thing I noticed on the back was the picture of the Live! and the digital I/O card. This reminded me that I had to have an extra expansion slot for the I/O, which was to be connected via internal ribbon to the main card. Uh-oh I thought. Uh-oh you ask? More on this later. |
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The box comes with everything you need; the two cards, basic microphone, software and the necessary cables. What I thought was especially thoughtful of CL for including were the mini-din to midi keyboard adapter and the 2-wire digital CD audio cable. Since the Live! features so many connectors and ports, the I/O card is necessary if you intend on using S/PDIF-in and -out or midi-in and -out. There is also a digital-din output designed for future use, such as with the Cambridge 7.1 channel sound system. If you don't install the I/O card (say you're out of slots), you can still use the gameport for midi-in, but you lose out on all the cool looking digital I/O ports. The main card has line-out-1 for front and line-out-2 for rear speaker output, as well as analog input and microphone. On the circuit board itself, there are are connectors for a telephone answering device, analog CD audio, PC speaker, auxiliary (I use this for my 2nd analog CD audio), PC-DVD input and digital CD audio. There are also connectors for a modem and condenser microphone. By the way, all connectors on the main card are gold plated, which makes the back of your case look beautiful. Installation Minimum system requirements (as stated on side panel):
System acquired:
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Installation took a while for me. By uh-oh, I was referring to the length of the ribbon cable that interfaces the two cards. Was it long enough to be convenient? No. I attempted to install the I/O below the main card, into an ISA slot, but that didn't fare too well, resulting in awkward twisting of the ribbon cable. In the end, I was forced to move my Voodoo and SCSI/LAN card down a notch so that the I/O could reach the main card, which was two slots down, below the AGP slot. The cable was still looping around my AGP video card, but that didn't seem to be a problem. I wondered why CL didn't supply a longer cable, or possibly place the connectors on the sides of the cards, similar to Voodoo2 SLI configurations. Strange indeed. I also used the supplied digital CD audio cable (instead of the standard 4-wire molex) which was supposed to feed true digital signals for redbook audio to the Live! To my dismay, using this interface rendered my CD-ROM drive inoperable via MSCDEX, and provided a "CDR101" error. I found this to be very peculiar. If anyone has any ideas on this, by all means let me know! I figured I'd only use my CD-ROM in Windows, so I hooked it up anyway, and my system ended up occasionally hanging during Windows Explorer sessions (when refreshing and seeking drive contents). The result was me settling for the analog CD audio cable. Sigh. Windows 98 and Two Speakers I finally load Windows and get to installing disc one of the three CD set. AutoPlay kicks in and after many progress meters and a system restart, four new devices were detected; the Live!, the digital I/O card, SB16 emulation and the gameport. I then hear my Windows start sound and sigh with relief, knowing I would not have to deal with resource conflicts. The software installed includes several MIDI composition titles (see MIDI sidebar below) such as Creative Keytar, Creative Rythmania, Creative Launcher, Creative PlayCenter and Cakewalk Express Gold. You also get the classic Wave Studio and Soundo'LE. Disc two contains the full version of Mixman Studio, Sound Forge XP 4.0 and a special edition of Unreal. The Sound Blaster Live! Tour is located on the third and final disc. AudioHQ AudioHQ is the most important application in configuring and controlling every aspect of the Live! For example, Environmental Audio effects are defined here, from which you can use one of the many included presets or customize your own.
Some of the more interesting applets within AudioHQ was an electronic KeyBoard and Sound Graph. Also in Device Controls, there is a slider bar which allows you to choose how many audio streams you want to allow. Now this is the feature I've been looking for. It lets you listen to mp3s (or any other audio source) while playing Starcraft (or any other game); and since the Live! has the 10K1 processor, there is no CPU overhead. I'm assuming this is available so you don't have to reserve memory for unused streams. The maximum is 32, default is 4. In comparison, Diamond's new Monster Sound series can handle a maximum of 23 simultaneous audio streams.
Environmental Audio Extensions |
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I played around with EAX for about an hour before I hooked up another pair of speakers, and was blown away by the significant difference. I immediately began installing games I had uninstalled days before, just to see if there was any bit of sound enhancement. Some games which I tested the Live! with were Unreal, Quake II, Jedi Knight, F-15 and FIFA Road to World Cup '98. All proved to be improved by the Live! I especially like the effects the Live! had on Starcraft. With the very recent release of update 1.02, the addition of new voice-overs and sound effects make good use of the EAX technology. In fact, it sounded so well I decided to start the single-player campaign all over again. Believe me, it's a whole new game now. Although there isn't a preset for each and every game, there are generic ones for specific game genres such as "Sports" and "Racing" which work just as well. There are even settings for movies for those who have T.V. or video-in cards. The only flaw found here was the annoyance of having to switch effects after each environment; that is, unless you happen to like your room sounding like a quarry. In short, Creative Labs and E-mu Systems have done an excellent job with delivering 3D audio. However, although EAX is said to work with even just two speakers, I cannot stress the difference you will hear from having four set up.
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In developing their new Sound Blaster Live! audio system, Creative Labs has worked with E-mu® Systems to develop the new EMU10K1™ music synthesis engine. So right off you know that it is not just a tweaked version of the Awe64 Gold with the EMU8000™, which was itself an advanced audio processor found in professional keyboards and samplers. The Live! supports 256 voices (64 voice polyphony with E-mu's technology and up to 192 voice polyphony using its standard PCI wave-table synthesis) as opposed to the 64 voice polyphony of the AWE64 Gold. This time around Creative Labs has added it's own MIDI in/out ports which are separate from the joystick port. This means no more switching Midi cables with joystick cables and no more daisy chaining. Another very cool feature is that this card supports up to 32 MIDI Channels, which any Midi musician will greatly welcome. The Sound Font technology developed by Creative Labs was intended to allow game developers or musicians to customize the sounds that were availble through MIDI. It was possible to actually sample sounds to create custom sound banks. Therefore, it was possible to program MIDI music without being restricted to the sounds already built into the card. This provided the opportunity to develop fuller, richer and more diverse MIDI music with unique sounds and instruments for each individul game. However, Sound Fonts were never fully adopted by the gaming community and presently only a few games actually support the Sound font technology (Final Fantasty VII being the lastest one). I feel this was most likely due to the inconsistent memory configurations that were availaible on previous boards. For Example, the AWE32 came with 512K upgradable to 32MB using standard 30 pin SIMMs. As different types of memory (edo, parity, non, parity, etc...) appeared in the market, Creative Labs decided to use their own memory as the standard for their AWE64 line. The AWE64 Value came with 512K while the Gold game with 4MB. For the Sound Blaster Live!, Creative Labs has devoloped an efficient way to use Sound Fonts from your system memory without sacrificing CPU utilization. This means no more on-board memory, which alleviates the problem of inconsistent memory sizes by providing a much larger and more practical memory source. Now anybody with a Live! card can load up to a 32MB Sound Font, assuming, of course, that you have a sufficient amount of system memory. In any case, it seems much more logical and practical to use system memory (especially with RAM prices being lower than ever) instead of dedicated memory. Remember that with more memory allocated to your Sound Fonts, there will not only be a more diverse range of sounds available, but the quality of the sounds will be better thanks to the higher sampling rates which are possible. Without the memory barrier, it is now easier to customize your own Sound Font sample banks using standard wav files if you are a musician, and it also provides game developers with a tool for creating richer and higher quality MIDI music for their games. Does this apply to me? For gamers in the past, MIDI was genrally used for music while sound effects were digitized. Unless you had a great professional sampler or sound bank, chances are your MIDI music didn't sound too fantastic. Sound Blaster Live! will obviously enhance the MIDI music in your older games. With the 8MB generic Sound Font installed and with customizable Environmental Audio settings all your old back ground music come to life. Creative Lab's has also added the option to turn on the Wave Blaster emulation. Wave Blaster emulation is for games that do not directly support the AWE devices. So even though it is fun to replay all your old games with this new technology it won't affect most the newer games which don't support MIDI or the Sound Font Technology. It is important to note that many games now use music directly from the CD for obvious reasons: there is generally plenty space and the sound quality is great. However, the music is simply pre-recorded on to tracks and played back by the game. So it is really just background music for the game. With the Sound Font technology, developers will by able to compose dynamic CD-quality MIDI music that is synthesized real-time. This is obviously more flexible than the static pre-recorded sountracks. However, it is really up to the game developers to take full advantage of this tool. Will musicians throw away all their sound modules for this one little PC card? Not likey, but the this card would make a nice addition to their MIDI studio. Amateur musicians who don't have thousands of dollars worth of all the MIDI gear can compose music with professional results. Professional Musicians will love the 32 MIDI channel support and the features which allows you to use the host memory to cusomize their own sound banks. However, the only drawback for the professional musician is that separate MIDI tracks need be completely mixed on the computer before they are outputed, since there is just a single stereo output, as opposed to multiple outputs that can be found on professional sound modules. In other words there is really no way to output each instrument (voice) into separate channels (beyond left and right stereo channels, of course) for external mixing and effects. But in all fairness, you can't compare one single sound card to a roomfull of professional equipment. MIDI Software Bundle |
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Personal Experience and Impressions The first thing I did after installation was to play my MIDI files. At first I wasn't terribly impressed in comparing it to the AWE64 Gold. However, with the 8MB Sound Fonts and the Environmental Audio, together with the 4 speaker setup, I knew this card was a winner. With the 8MB Sound Font the MIDI sounds are richer and of higher quality, compared to the default sounds of standard sound cards and even compared to the AWE64 Gold. Keep in mind all MIDI files are created with specific sound in mind (sounds the author picked to use on his sound card) so this means highly customized MIDI files will not sound correct unless you have loaded the correct Sound Fonts and settings, but MIDI files using standard sound like Jazz pieces and Classical music sound much better with this card. I've already spent quite a bit of time playing games both old and new with this card, and it really does provide quite a different experience. From a technical standpoint, this new card obviously has to be better than it's predecessors. Otherwise, there is really no reason for the manufacturer to bother selling it. With the 3D positional audio and Environmental Audio Extensions, Creative Labs has moved the art of sound to a new level. It has provided developers with the tools to increase the realism of their sound effects. Having this technology available should really get the game developers thinking about how to utilize it to work towards a truly immersive gaming experience.
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Final Ratings |
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The Sound Blaster Live! is without a doubt unique in its own right. It is the only audio card right now that can do what it was designed to do; deliver environmental audio so real it has to be Live! While Aureal currently has A3D and the developing Vortex2, they produce 3D audio by means of the physics and geometrics of a given environment. It does not take into consideration the value of what the gamer wants to hear. While this accuracy may be better for certain situations, I do not think gaming would fit the category. Back to the Live!, If you can see through the hassle of installation and the tedious configuration, the truly awesome performance of the card, then you have no reason to hesitate. Creative Labs really has changed PC audio forever. If you own a Voodoo2 card, you're probably the type who should get a Sound Blaster Live! If you're the proud owner of a 1st generation Voodoo Graphics or perhaps another outdated non-3Dfx accelerator, then you might save yourself some money by going for a Monster Sound or similar PCI audio card. |
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Resources |
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The word on the Sound Blaster Live! has been mum until the actual release. This has been good for CL, as it builds hype and anticipation for their products. If you have any sites or links for the Sound Blaster Live!, do share. New listings will be posted here weekly.
Credits We would like to thank Creative Labs for inviting us to the Sound Blaster Live! premiere and making this review possible. Copyright © 1997, 1998 CoolInfo, TechInfo. |
