By Rajan Minhas - April 29, 2001

Infobox

What? SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 Product Page Who? Creative Technology, Ltd. Home Page How much? $199 USD (Est. Street)

People have been complaining about sound cards on computers for many years. "My sound isn't clear", or "I can't get digital output on this dang thing to hook it up to my stereo!" and "where the #$%@ did the optical outs go??" Well, Creative heard ya. Their top of the line sound card, the SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1, is the perfect solution for those of you who can't settle for less than perfect sound. SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 comes from the Live! Series of sound cards from Creative which also includes Live! X-Gamer, Live! MP3+, and Live! Value. Creative put together their brains to make something that will blow people's ears away. The whole point of the card is for people who need good quality sound and all the features. Although the card is pricey, it is justified by the amount of features and software included. Never be frightened by bad sound again (though your bank account after the purchase will probably scare you!)!

Specifications

Synthesizer Chip: EMU 10K1 Synthesizer Type: Wavetable (Scalable PCI) Polyphony: 64 (with 8-point interpolation) ROM size: NA RAM size: Based on system RAM, up to 32MB Sample Sets: 2, 4 and 8MB Synthesizer Effects: Reverb, Chorus, Flanger, Pitch Shifter, Distortion, etc. MIDI Channels: 48 Duplex Type: Full Duplex Max. Recording Depth: 16-bit Max. Recording Rate: 48 KHz Max. Playback Depth: 16-bit Max. Playback Rate: 48 KHz Signal-to-Noise Ratio: >96 dB Soundfont Support: Yes Built-in Amplifier: No Windows 9x/ME/NT4.0/2000: Yes General MIDI: Yes MPC3: Yes Plug & Play: Yes Sound Blaster PCI: Yes

EAX Support: Yes Microsoft DirectSound: Yes Microsoft DirectSound 3D & Derivatives: Yes PCI 2.1: Yes AC97: Yes MPU-401 UART: Yes Microphone In: Yes Line In: Yes Line Out (Front)/Speaker Out: Yes Line Out (Rear): Yes MIDI/Joystick Port: Yes MPC3 CD Audio In: Yes Auxiliary In: Yes S/PDIF In: Yes Telephone Answering Device (TAD) In: Yes Live!Drive: Yes - Bundled with Live!Drive IR 4 Speaker Support: Yes Live!Ware Upgrades: Yes Creative MultiSpeaker Surround: Yes Creative Environments: Yes Dolby® Digital 5.1 decoding: Yes

With a $200 price tag, the SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 is Creative's top of the line sound card; obviously, you can expect it to be fully loaded. There are many features, and they are covered here.

The first feature worth noting is that it comes with built in automatic settings for the amount of speakers you have. These include two, four, or six speaker configurations. These configurations ensure that you get the best sound balance, and the best 3D sound experience possible. The SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 also comes with a pretty new technology called EAX. It basically is a complex 3D API that will control the different environments (for example hall, concert, and rock) for developers of, let's say games, can utilize to enhance their applications.

The processor behind all this is the EMU10K1 Digital Signal Processor. This is what gives Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 it's big kick since, as they claim, it has about the same horsepower as a Pentium 90MHz. Now, I'm sure that's not a fair comparison, since both the EMU10K1 and the P90 are designed for different tasks, it just shows how much power the card has and lets you know that it won't take up much, if any, of your CPU power for its features.

Finally, as Creative is very competitive, they also include support for Microsoft DirectSound® 3D, and DirectSound® gaming. Getting very technical, Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 produces up to 64 hardware-accelerated channels, 32 3D hardware-accelerated channels, or up to 1024 voices!

On to: Noteworthy Features