SoundBlaster Live! Soundcard
Creative Labs

About the card

It's a half length 32-bit PCI card and it has a midiport, line in, mic in, front out and rear out on the rear panel. On the card you'll find 5 audio connectors for various purposes. One thing is especially useful, the SPDIF contact and the bundled audio cable which you can use to get digital sound from your CD-ROM, if it supports it.

This soundcard is based on the EMU10K1 Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and its the most powerful DSP on the market, for example the DSP on the AWE64-card managed 36 MIPS (million instructions per second) this DSP is capable of 1,000 MIPS, pretty impressive.
This leads to less CPU usage as the DSP does a large load of the work.
The card does the sound processing at 32-bits and it is able to produce sounds up to 48kHz.

You can use both 2 and 4 speaker configurations, preferably you use 4 speaker system (actually it's 5 since there's the sub woofer as well) to enjoy the 3D sound fully.
As mentioned before there is also the digital I/O card which features 5 new connectors, midi in and out, SPDIF in and out and a digital DIN out for future expansion to multi-speaker systems.

SB Live! comes with an efficient MIDI synthesizer, 512 PCI Voice Synthesis (with the latest drivers).
The card uses 2-, 4-, and 8MB of your system memory for the sound fonts (4 Mb as default).
Here I made a little test (Thank you Philip for this one), connected a cable between the output port and input port. I played a midifile and tried to record it at the same time, it didn't work.

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