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/ Sound : Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live ! Digital Entertainment
5.1
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live ! Digital Entertainment
5.1
Performance
Sound
Quality
The
difference in sound quality in all the second-generation cards when used
with typical multimedia speakers is in most cases negligible.In case of the Live sound
card line we have found high frequency roll-off to be a bit behind the Sonic
Fury/Santa Cruz but on par or better than most other PCI cards. The difference
compared to the Santa Cruz is small enough that it shouldn’t be noticeable
on your typical multimedia speaker system where signal to noise ratio and
high-end will be more limited than what the Live delivers.Even if you have a speaker system
with good high frequency response (e.g. Klipsch’ ProMedia, VideoLogic’s
Sirocco Crossfire) we don't think you will notice the slight difference in high
frequency roll off as it does not come until after 18 kHz. While the
sonic range of human hearing is 20 Hz to 20 kHz, many people can’t hear
high frequency sounds very well. According to some experts, a more reasonable
hearing range for most adults is 30 Hz to 16 kHz. Even younger people with
good high frequency hearing won’t always pick up frequencies beyond 18 kHz.
On higher end equipment it's possible that some may notice the difference
in s/n ratio but again, it's not a night and day difference between the
different cards.
As
a bonus you can apply DSP effects or EAX to any audio source including CD
audio, MP3, wave and MIDI files. Another thing worth noting here are all
the EAX preset for older direct sound games. These levels won’t change within
the game but it’s nice to have the option to use it if you want. While several
other soundcards also offer this feature the Live is the only where you
can customize the reverb effects beyond just the strength of it. You can
also use the AutoEA feature described in the software bundle section. The
Live just like most but not all other soundcards supports multiple wave
files can be played so you can play a MP3 file in the background while you
play a game. You can choose to have up to 32 wave files played at once in
the device manager, default is 4. When using the WDM drivers this setting
will not be available as Windows will automatically allow you to play several
wave streams regardless of what soundcard you use.
When
we are on subject of sound quality we should point out that some users,
especially those using the old MVP3 chipset (some AMD K6 system use this)
have experienced crackling using a Live soundcard. It’s hard to tell how
common this is but it appears to be a small minority but as you will see
later in this review I experienced this in some EAX game on my system that
features the KT133 chipset (used in many Athlon/Duron systems). Creative
Labs have not been able to reproduce the problem with any consistency indicating
it’s not something that will happen to everyone with a certain chipset,
graphics card, driver or motherboard but rather a combination of several
factors including system configuration and bios settings.
MIDI
MIDI
is not a big thing for gaming these days but with Microsoft pushing Direct
Music that may change. Regardless, if midi is your thing the Sound Blaster
Live line is in our view the top of the class of multipurpose cards with
a wide range of feature. The key feature is of course support for SoundFonts,
a SoundFont bank or a SoundFont-compatible bank, (a SoundFont in simple
terms) is a customized sound that you can load into your computer to be
used in your music. To help conceptualize it Creative suggest thinking of
it as something like a text-font used in word processors. A SoundFont is
designed to contain information in such a way that wavetable synthesizers
can reproduce the exact same sound as it was intended. Musicians and songwriters
use SoundFonts to give them lots of extra sounds to write music with. With
SoundFonts, musicians are no longer limited to the instruments found in
General MIDI (GM) banks. A musician can incorporate his voice in his compositions,
or add custom instrument sounds and special effects to his music to dramatically
improve the way it sounds. There are several SoundFonts available on the
internet both as a free download and for purchase in addition to the ones
that was included with the Live!Player 5.1.
DVD
The
Live Player 5.1 can just like the older Live cards be used with PowerDVD
and the multichannel version of WinDVD 4-speaker output mode. The decoding
and positioning of the streams are then done by the software DVD player.
Live!Player 5.1 also, again just like the previous Live cards, supports
SPDIF pass-thru (AC3 and DTS) with several software DVD players including
WinDVD and PowerDVD 2.55/3. The Windows2000 drivers only supports SPDIF
pass-thru when using PowerDVD 3.0. PowerDVD 3.0 is also the only player
that offers 4-speaker output in Windows2000 when using the Live Plyaer
5.1
What’s
new is the support for 5.1 output and Dolby Digital Decoding as part of
the drivers, the latter an unique feature of the Live 5.1 cards. The Dolby
Digital Decoding feature of the drivers should work with any DVD player
that support AC3 pass-thru for the Live cards. We have only tried it with
WinDVD 2.2, PowerDVD 2.55, PowerDVD 3.0 and Creative’s Dxr3 and all except
the Dxr3 worked fine. That it fails with Creative’s Dxr3 is a known issue
and should hopefully be fixed in the next driver release. If you still want
an external decoder to take care of the AC3 decoding you just have to go
into speaker applet select advanced and disable the AC3 decoding. This is
also required if you want to play a movie with a DTS soundtrack, something
the Live’s drivers can’t decode.
The
Dolby Digital Decoding done by the Live drivers is done in software using
the CPU and takes actually requires slightly higher CPU usage (3-4% on a
Celeron 416) than when it’s done by WinDVD player, or about 12% more than
to pass it on to an external decoder.We have also found the quality of
the Live drivers decoding to be on par with the one offered by PowerDVD
3.0 and WinDVD 2.2 both in 4-speaker mode and 6-speaker mode (the latter
not supported by PowerDVD 3.0 yet). It also means it’s significantly better
than earlier versions of WinDVD and especially PowerDVD. This may make it
sound like a useless feature.However,
it actually gives you a lot more DVD players to choose from and perhaps
also save you some cash if you already own a software DVD player or want
one that’s significantly cheaper than PowerDVD 3.0 and the multichannel
version of WinDVD. Another advantage is that it’s the only way to get 5.1
output when using PowerDVD 3.0 at the moment.
We
found the positioning and transitions to very good in Dolby Digital 5.1
movies both in 4 and 6-speaker mode. As mentioned it’s on par with PowerDVD
3.0 and WinDVD 2.0, which means it’s no major difference compared to using
other soundcards. We also compared it to MidiLand’s ADS-2000 and found quality
and positioning to be close but with a slight edge for the ADS-2000, especially
when using a more expensive speaker system ($400+).
3D
AUDIO
The
Live 3D sound engine offers support for headphones, 2, 4, 6 and Dolby Prologic-speaker
systems.
To
our ears the two speaker 3D audio is not as quite as effective as the cards
like the Santa Cruz or SonicFury using Sensaura’s technology but ahead of
soundcards using QSound. It’s worth nothing that testing of both of these
modes is quite a bit more subjective than the 4 or 6 channel modes. These
modes can also be heavily impacted by head and ear size/shape so your own
results may vary. When it comes to the 4-speaker mode we found it to be
excellent or about the same as soundcards using QSound. The 6-speaker mode
also provides excellent positioning of 3D sources.However, unless you enable
movie mode there will be no reverb applied to sound effects positioned in
3D when they are in the center channel and sounds not positioned in 3D space
(i.e. any normal stereo source) will not use the center.For a more detailed analysis of
the six-channel output .
The
Dolby Prologic mode named Live!Surround is basically just converting the
4-speaker output to Dolby Prologic which means frequency limited (100-7kHz)
mono rear channels but you do get a center channel. The only reason to use
this mode instead of 4 or 5.1 output is if you have a DD 5.1 or Dolby Prologic
system that doesn’t let you connect the rear output of the Live directly
to the rear speakers. The Live cards are the only product that offers this
unique mode.
Reverb
The
reverb engine can in addition to being used in games that support EAX 1.0
and 2.0 be applied to any audio source in all speaker modes. When it comes
to EAX supporting games we think it offers the best quality, flexibility
and especially consistency. With flexibility we refer to the fact that it’s
the only one where you can change the strength of the reverb levels for
EAX games.
When
we talk about consistency we refer to the fact that we haven’t played any
EAX game where EAX works poorly on the Live but great on other EAX supporting
cards, in fact, the reverse is true for several games. The reason to this
is probably more due to Live being the card that the sound designer tweak
and test with first rather than the Live having the best drivers. You can
find a lot more details on how well the reverb works in different games
in our gaming impressions section.
When
it comes to using reverb on music or non EAX supporting games you again
have better flexibility and in our opinion quality than other card offers.
In addition to the over 100 presets supplied you can fine tune them or even
create your own. The customized presets doesn’t only consists of reverb
but also other effects including Chorus, Frequency Shifter, Vocal Morpher,
Ring Modulator, Auto Wah, Flanger, Distortion, Echo, Pitch Shifter.
Benchmarks
The Live is
generally considered to have the best performance overall with both reverb
and 3D audio algorithms being done by the Emu10k1 when using the VXD drivers.
It’s still some slight CPU hit in synthetic benchmarks of up to 2.6% when
using a Duron 750. In actual game testing the performance hit varies quite
a bit but in most cases it’s below or well below 15%. The WDM drivers are
either very inefficient or most if not all the 3D audio algorithms are done
on the host, that is using the CPU with CPU usage of up to 41% in the synthetic
benchmarks. Actual game benchmarks is almost as bad with Descent 3 35% faster
in Windows98 and Unreal Tournament Demo 31% faster in Windows 98.
Gaming
Impressions
With
32 3D channels for DS3D, A3D 1.X (converting to DS3D) and support EAX for
1.0 and 2.0 the Live cards are set to take full advantage of most of the
games available. With Aureal’s demise A3D as an API will unfortunately now
fade away, making the lack of full A3D 2/3 support a non issue for future
games. Furthermore there is no other card on the market that offers full
A3D 2/3 support so it’s really now impossible to go wrong with a card with
good EAX 2.0 support.
We
found the card to work well in almost every Directsound, DirectSound3D,
A3D 1.0 and A3D 2.0 (not including Quake3) game we tested. I was unable
to get A3D 1.0 support to work in Windows2000 even though it installs the
same A3D.dll file that works just fine in Windows98. The stability was fine
with both the VXD and WDM drivers once I upgraded to 256MB memory. I had
plenty of crashes before doing this upgrade when using the WDM drivers in
Windows2000.
EAX
1.0 and 2.0 also works great in almost every game on Mark’s machine and
as pointed out in the reverb section, the Live cards offer the best EAX
experience available. As I mentioned in the sound quality section my EAX
experience was not as great as Marks due to some crackling occurring in
several games including NFS4, Descent 3, MotoCross Madness 2 and Rogue Spear.
The static/crackling is also present with the older Live cards and there
are no difference between the WDM and VXD drivers on my system. The crackling/static
are not present If I disabled EAX before starting the game, so I was still
able to get 3D sound without any crackling in all cases.I didn’t have this crackle issue when I still used a motherboard
with the Intel BX chipset, so I think it’s related to VIA’s KT133 chipset.However, it’s not just the fault
of the chipset since the KT133 works fine in the same games with the SonicFury/Santa
Cruz and Philips Acoustic Edge.
DOS
The
Sound Blaster Live! Player 5.1 supports dos box under Windows 95/98 and
DOS mode using SBEINIT. We have tried Blood, Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive,
Doom, Descent and Magic Carpet II in a DOS box with no issues. We also tried
Blood and Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive in real-mode DOS with no issues.
When
in real mode DOS you will only hear sound from the front line out. In a
DOS box all the outputs including digital output and effects you can apply
to any other sound source also works with DOS games. In both cases the Live
supports both SB MIDI and General MIDI.
Summary
Overall Score
9.5/10
As
we noted in the Live are soundcards with slightly better sound quality and
better 3D sound for 2-speakers and headphones than what the Live card offers.
There also exist less expensive solutions than the Live if you only want
to use it for DVDs.However,
if you have a broad range of interests including DVD, MIDI, MP3 and especially
games where the excellent EAX support is the killer feature the Live soundcards
are an excellent choice.
If
you already own a Live the reason to buy one the new Live 5.1 cards is if
you will benefit from the new subwoofer/center output, the Dolby Digital
decoding part of the drivers or would buy most of the new software bundle
anyway. Now if you decided you want a Live 5.1 based card the reason to
pick the Live!DE 5.1 simply comes down to the lower price than the Live!Platinum
5.1.
In
the end the excellent EAX performance, great four and six channel 3d audio
support and relatively good software bundle is enough for the Live!Player
5.1 to earn our 3DsoundSurge of Approval and a silver medal of excellence. The
only factor holding it back from the gold medal of excellence is the lack
of top notch 3D sound for 2-speakers and headphones. It’s worth noting that
so far no soundcard managed to get more than a silver award from us.
