Nice sound, may be troublesome on VIA based motherboards
Written: May 25 '01 (Updated Aug 29 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Wonderful sound, 4 speaker support, live drive panel, industry standard for games
Cons: Widely discussed incompatibilities with VIA chipset motherboards, Live Drive not supported by most software
The Bottom Line: Sounds nice, may be some incompatibilities with VIA and Intel BX chipsets. Some people encounter crackling noises on playback/recording during DMA channel activity (with VIA or BX chipsets).
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| suemccartin's Full Review: Creative Sound Blaster Live! Platinum |
The good:
The Live works in a PCI slot and provides backwards compatibility for older games that run in dos mode (even though I don't know too many people that own any games anymore than run in dos. Maybe the kids would find this an attractive feature); assuming you can get the card to install on the proper IRQ 5 that is.
The Soundblaster Live is by far the most supported sound card and supports EAX for very realistic sound. The card provides utilities that allow you to setup your speakers(whether two or 4 or the very new digital speaker systems), add sound effects (such as echo, stone walls, etc.) and test to be sure they are all working properly. Internally the Live provides a standard flat four pin cdrom sound input and an additional 4 pin input for a cdr recorder, dvd or second cdrom; it also provides a modem sound input for modems that support this feature. Externally, the live provides two speaker outputs, a line-in input, a microphone input, and a digital output plug. The Live supports the most common home theater speaker systems.
The additional Live drive takes up a full size bay and makes a number of extra jacks available such as a midi plug (as opposed to the older cards that need an adapter that fits over the joystick plug) and two full sized microphone and headphone jacks and spdif in and out plugs for home theater speaker systems. (The live drive connects to the soundblaster card via a special proprietary cable.)
The Not so good:
I've owned two incarnations of the soundblaster Live, the Live value and now a Live Platinum (not the 5.1 version). While I think the card sounds very nice and is certainly the most widely supported (by games, music software etc) sound card, I am beginning to believe that those who claim they don't work well with VIA chipset motherboards may be onto something. I've had two different VIA KX133 based motherboards and two different Live products and I've always had the occasional strange freezeup problem that couldn't be traced to any other hardware issue.
Recently as a test, I pulled my Live out of my current ABIT motherboard and replaced it with another brand of sound card. With the Live in the system I would occasionally get freezes to a high pitched tone emanating from the speakers--this has stopped with the new sound card. The machine still freezes but I think it's my video card drivers causing it now since ATI has admitted their Radeon sometimes makes motherboards with my chipset lock. The big difference now is that the music continues to play instead of creating that tone as the Live does when the computer locksup. On my New ABIT KA7-100 motherboard the Live or its drivers causes windows in safe mode to crash every time the control panel is accessed, now that the Live is gone from the machine this problem is gone also.
Many people on newsgroups and other discussion areas have reported noise problems when using the Live (while playing music back and recording it). I personally have never encountered the crackling noises during disk accesses or other types of heavy Direct Memory Access transfer activity encountered by some people. (Most newer hard drives use a DMA channel to transfer data and people have reported that every time the hard drive light comes on they hear crackling and static over their speakers when using a Soundblaster Live soundcard).
There are apparently a number of people who are of the opinion that Creative took some liberties in their hardware design that is causing problems with VIA chipset motherboards. I have also seen occasional reports of problems on Intel based motherboards as well, though not as many as those with VIA based products.
From what I have read, the consensus so far seems to be that as long as the Soundblaster Live is permitted to "hog the bus" when playing/recording music (I.e. hog the irq to itself and hog the pci bus) there are no problems with crackling. Problems only seem to occur if it is sharing system resources with another device.
As of this moment I would say that the Live should be avoided if your system has a VIA chipset and you may experience problems if you have an Intel BX chipset on your motherboard as well.
It's my hope that Creative will get to fixing this problem instead of ignoring it as they apparently have been for quite some time. At one time Creative was an excellent company but as with so many hardware companies they've apparently gotten a little bit lax about their quality being that they have a virtual monopoly on the low cost soundcard market. I've had many Creative products through the years and most were very good but this one apparently still needs a bit of work.
When and if the ultimate answer to this problem appears I will post back here with more information.
8-2001 update: I rebuilt my system with a new motherboard with a highbrid chipset. The new system board has a chipset that is part AMD761 and part VIA Southbridge for the hard drive controller (Gigabyte GA7DXR). In my new system the Live causes no problems that I can detect. I have run into another issue with the Live when trying to use my Telex H551 usb headset, the live drivers must be disabled or the headset won't work. The Live drivers want to rule everything involving sound apparently, shutting them off is necessary to get the headset working (as it has it's own soundcard). I'm glad I've got my Live back, I missed the great directional audio capabilities that this card has when gaming (i.e. you can really hear the monster coming up behind you in Diablo II, or the player off to the right screaming for help)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99.00
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Epinions.com ID:
suemccartin
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Location: Florida, USA
Reviews written: 292
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About Me:
Been building computers for 10+ years. I work to support my computer habit.
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