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Mark Muschett puts Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer and MP3+ to the test. |
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Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer and MP3+ - Mark Muschett- Last updated February 12, 2001
Introduction: Update: Creative Labs has now replaced these two cards with the new Live X-Gamer 5.1 and Live MP3 5.1. We suggest you check out our Live!X-Gamer/MP3 5.1 review or our Live reference review for our latest impressions of the Live. The Live reference review covers all Live cards. Creative Technology Ltd. was founded in 1981 and has grown to become the world’s leading provider of advanced multimedia solutions for personal computers. Its solutions include the latest in advanced 3d digital audio technology, 3d graphics, PC-DVD and desktop internet conferencing products. A pioneer in the industry, Creative defined and set the standard for PC audio with its Sound Blaster Line of cards. For years, the most important thing to see on a sound card was Sound Blaster compatible! That strangle hold on the retail PC audio market has been loosening over the past few years with challenges coming from companies like Turtle Beach and Gravis (remember the Ultrasound?). However, most of these were coming at Creative on Creative’s own turf. That is they were limited to competing with products that had to claim Sound Blaster compatibility but with superior MIDI performance as their claim to fame. That all changed in 1997 when Diamond introduced the original DSP based Monster Sound which was the first retail sound card to use the PCI bus. This cards weak point was Sound Blaster compatibility, but its support of A3D 1.x and DS3D (in hardware via Direct X5) caught the imagination of both the gaming press and the buying public just as the Windows 95 and DirectX had started to become more popular and reduce the importance of DOS SB compatibility. Creative’s state of the art card at the time was the venerable Sound Blaster AWE 64. The Monster Sound retail success in North America and wide support in the gaming press was a big wake up call to Creative. Ensoniq was also in the market with the AudioPCI which at the time had better SB compatibility than the Monster Sound but no A3D support. Creative saw a good thing in Ensoniq’s DOS compatibility mode and bought the company. Aureal moved beyond providing drivers and algorithms to hardware partners and entered the chip and board market with the now widely adopted Vortex 1 chip. It was not until Comdex 97 that Creative started to hit the press with their upcoming 10K1 chip and Sound Blaster Live Product which was eventually launched in August of 1998. Creative has a bit different spin to the sequence of events and point out that with the R&D time needed to develop the 10K1, they were actually ahead of the game. That’s not how my eyes see it but regardless of the chicken and egg discussion by the time the Live was announced they clearly had lost their strangle hold on the retail PC sound market. This meant that it was going to be extremely important to the company that the Live be a big success, especially since Aureal was also coming to market just a couple of months later with their own new Vortex 2 board along with their then new A3D 2.0 API. To help make the Live special, Creative worked to develop a new extension to Direct Sound 3D called Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX). Over a year after the launch of the Live! the 10K1, the Live! and the Live!Value can be considered an unqualified success. Creative has been responsive to the needs of their customers with enhancements to the software through their innovative marketing mechanism called Live!Ware. Enhancements to the gaming aspect of the card included a quick bump of the 3D accelerated streams from 8 to 32, connection options to home theater systems and from our perspective, better 3D audio support. So why release a new product line based on the same 10K1 chip? The cynic would say grabbing our money twice for the same product would really increase profit margins, as the R&D costs are pretty low! However, the truth is that no matter how good a product is, there are always little things that can be done to make it better. Creative has listened to the needs and wants of gamers, musicians, and music lovers alike and reengineered the software bundles and connectivity of a whole new 10K1 based Live!. In this review we will look at two of Creative’s market specific cards that are sold in North America at the $100 price point. Specifically we mean the Sound Blaster Live MP3+ and the Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer. As you can tell from the names, one version is targeted at the digital music fan and the other is targeted at the person who is primarily a gamer. Both versions use the same CT4760 board that is also found in the box for the Americas and European version of the Platinum and the Sound Blaster Live Player 1024 that is found in Europe. In this review we will take a close look at the hardware and also run through the software bundle in order to help you decide if the Live is the card for you and if it is, which one is best suited to your tastes.
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Sound Card Reviews Hurricane Extreme Initial Review SoundBlaster Live! reference review SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 European Edition SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 America's Edition Sound Blaster Live! Player 5.1 Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1 Hoontech SoundTrack Digital-XG Boostaroo Headphone Amplifier / Splitter Sound Blaster Live!Drive I and II Sound Blaster Creative Digital I/O 2 |
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