SoundBlaster Live! Soundcard
Creative Labs

Installation

The installation of the card wasn’t a hard thing to complete. Plugging the card into an empty PCI slot isn’t hard (I think even my mom could do it). The easiest thing to do when inserting the digital I/O card in its place is to first connect the ribbon cable to the SB Live! maincard then connect it to the daughtercard, after that put it in an empty bracket. The only hitch here was with the I/O card and my tower, it didn't sit very well with only one screw.
Starting up Windows the hardware detection worked fine and found a new device and was asking for its driver, and then you just inserted the driver-cd. I plugged in the PC Works four-point surround speakers and then I installed the Creative Software.

Since Creative released the Live! card there has been several driver updates and of course to test the card properly i had to download the updates. Now this card is ready to face the testing...

First look (and listening)

After the reboot you hear a new windows startup sound, the sound of a thunder storm with enormous depth. Inside Windows 98 you have a new pop-up bar with all the links that has to do with the card.
This, as Creative named it "Creative Launcher". Here you'll find shortcuts to the environment settings, speaker setup, volume and the Creative applications. First thing I wanted to check out was if the 4-point speakers worked, opened up the speaker configuration utility, here you can personalize your own speaker settings by dragging these little different sound icons, midi, wav, cd-audio and so on. The configuration is easy to use if you want to check the four speakers, I just started Winamp and played a MP3 then moved the wav-file icon around in all the corners of the room-like configuration window and you heard the sound "moving" around.

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