If you've read any of my other Creative opinions, you'll know that I'm not too impressed with the quality of their products. The GeForce II MX graphics card I bought from them started to shed parts, and the CD-RW drive I bought decided to stop working after 6 months. However, I needed a sound card and I needed one quickly. So, for a laugh I decided to buy a Soundblaster Live! 5.1. However, after a few minutes using this product I was actually quite impressed. Combined with a 5.1 speaker solution from Cambridge Soundworks, I soon had my PC running with full surround sound and EAX support in games. So, what do you get with this piece of ...  Read the complete review

I've had my SB LIve for about a year now , I ordered it from Jungle.com as a late Xmas pressie for myself to replace the ancient ISA soundcard I had. Installation was a breeze, with the card slotting nicely into the PCI slot. Upon rebooting, the computer noticed it straightaway, and asked for my driver CD which I duly inserted. Drivers installed, I was then requested to re-insert the CD. Why? I wondered to myself, and then the screen came up, and I was amazed. The amount of software that Creative gave away with the card was unreal! Voice recognition, LAVA, CD/mp3 players, even WinDVD for playing DVD's (With a DVD ROM, of course) As a ...  Read the complete review

I've had my SBL! now for around 2 years and bought it along with the Cambridge Soundworks 4 point surround sound speaker system. Two years on, and it's just as great as it was. As more and more software is being written for the EAX environmental sound system, the card seems to get more and more useful. Also, Creative Lab's LiveWare upgrade program ensures (up to a point) that the card can be upgraded easily and with little cost to the end-user. I've upgraded to LiveWare 3 for Windows 98 about 4 months ago without any OS problems - more than I can say for a lot of other upgrades that I've done in the past! Creative Labs, ...  Read the complete review

The Live is a PCI soundcard that features: Full Didital Recording/Playback (Full-duplex unlike previous SoundBlaster cards) 32Mb Sampler (easily hacked to make it bigger) MIDI in/out Good Quality Hardware effects (Reverb, Distortion, Chorus, AutoWah etc...) which are called environmental audio. Digital I/O All this makes the sound blaster very attractive. That is until you realise that it has very bad software support. There are no problems with the basic functions of the card. It will make your games sound fantastic (scares the cr*p out of me in Alien vs Predator). Digital audio recording and playback is very good due to the ...  Read the complete review

SoundBlaster have a long-established and good reputation in the world of sound cards. Time and time again they bring the latest technology, but in the form of the SoundBlaster 1024 Live it is done without having to pay an exorbitant price. Their previous card, the AWE64 stood head and shoulders above the rest – yet with their latest product they have comfortably created a new contender for the crown of best soundcard. The hardware itself has many impressive features. It has 32-bit technology, an excellent signal to noise ratio, a large number of wavetable voices and 48KHz sampling rate as standard (necessary for DVDs in particular else the processor is ...  Read the complete review