The most complicated material of the review is written in italics so that you may omit it. There are no any press-releases here. :) So, if you want to read specs and ads just go to another web-site or better right to the official Audigy's site. "Audigy" There are several versions of origin of the word Audigy. The first one is that this word is made up of audio and digital. We are living in a digital age, you know, that is why audio must also be digital :). Another version is that it is combined of audio and prodigy, and the last one I know is that audigy means "make to listen" in Esperanto. But before we turn to the card in question, I'd like to attract your attention to the company. Creative is often accused of the market monopolization and of low-quality products. But all these points of view are wrong since the company became a leader in the market after a long tough struggle. Besides, its products were always of high quality, and prices were always moderate. Here is a bit of history. Chronology of Sound Blaster sound cards At the beginning a computer sound was produced by a PC speaker which could only utter tones of a single frequency and gnash in DOS games. (As for me, I didn't stand aside at that time and even developed a software polyphonic MIDI synthesizer-sequencer for a 1-bit speaker in assembler in 1988). Nobody was pleased with such a situation and many of those who could use a soldering iron assembled simple DACs on a resistive matrix. Such devices were called Covox. The sound was much better than that of a PC speaker; you could hear a result of mixing of several digital streams, and many exchanged various sampler music editors - ScreamTrackers. But a PC platform with its crippled DOS in 80s and at the beginning of 90s was considered a solution for offices and beginning programmers. Major audio companies (manufacturers of professional hardware and software) didn't take it as a competitor for multifunctional Macintosh and ATARI home systems. Creative had a different point of view. The first steps of the company (in 1987) were quite weak, but its audio solution was quite innovative for 1988. It had a appropriate 12-voice FM-synthesizer Creative Music System (C/MS) with a digital part (ADC/DAC) and a set of its own programs for creation and editing of music (C/MS Composer, C/MS Intelligent Organ and C/MS Multimedia Presenter). But priced at $400, this product wasn't very popular with users. The situation was very similar to NVIDIA with its first NV1 chip, which crashed, though was rather innovative for its time. At the same time, the North-American AdLib company released a simple and relatively cheap sound card with an FM synthesizer OPL2 from Yamaha. The quality of the MIDI synthesizer YM3812 was even higher than that of the expensive C/MS from Creative. AdLib was for a certain time a leading standard for PC and was backed by game makers on a par with a PC speaker and Covox (in games at that time you had to indicate manually the type of a sound-reproducing device). Creative did keep its head: it took the same OPL2 chipset from Yamaha and released an inexpensive sound card which outscored the AdLib's one in functionality and was compatible with the latter on a hardware level! It was the first Sound Blaster card which became the first normal mainstream PC sound card. Unlike the AdLib which could reproduce only MIDI music, the Sound Blaster card had 8-bit ADCs and DACs onboard which worked in the pseudo-stereo mode. At that time Creative clearly realized its first experience with a high-quality but expensive and unpopular sound system, and they didn't eager for high-quality cards. Everything is good in its season. After that the company launched a Sound Blaster Pro card with normal stereo up to 22 kHz. It was still an 8-bit card. Microsoft which liked this standard declared it in its MPC (Multimedia Personal Computer) specification in 1991. Since that time Creative Labs got a lot of OEM customers because without a Sound Blaster Pro card inside a system block it was impossible to get the Multimedia PC certification from Microsoft. Creative, thus, opened its branches in Europe and the USA. In 1992 the NASDAQ exchange released 4,800,000 shares under CREAF index. After the company gained a firm foothold, it released a long-awaited normal sound card with a possibility of recording and reproduction of a digital sound in 16 bit / 44.1 kHz mode. The card had a new FM synthesizer chipset - OPL3. The card was named Sound Blaster 16. The prices for old 8-bit cards were falling down and users, therefore, didn't strive much for new expensive cards. Besides, a lot of DOS games supported only Sound Blaster Pro. At the same time the PC market was swiftly extending, and Creative started production of a great deal of variations of the Sound Blaster 16 (SB16, SB16 Vibra, SB16 ASP, SB16 Value, SB16 Pro, SB16 PnP, SB16 SCSI etc.) Many seemed to get confused in such a wide range of Sound Blasters... Some Asian firms made use of such situation: they started selling 8-bit cards marked as "Sound Blaster Pro (compatible)" which were 2-3 times cheaper and had awful quality of sound. At the same time the market offered wavetable synthesizers with 1 MBytes ROM with samples of 128 GM instruments. The users were discussing the advantages of WT synthesis over the FM one (the latter was used in all Sound Blaster cards). Creative didn't like the situation and started searching for ways to strengthen its image. There is an interesting story how Creative bought E-mu, a famous developer of professional audio technologies, first of all sample-based ones. The founder of E-mu, Dave Rossum, a manager of the development department with Creative Technologies afterwards, says that they also got a proposal from another company to license their technology. But if they had agreed, they would have had to exclude Creative from all their future licences. They had several weeks to think about it and a couple of guys which could get into contact with Creative. At last they got in touch with COO (Chief Organization Officer) and CFO (Chief Financial Officer) who both had home studios equipped with technological developments from E-Mu. They were excited with the products their company made and the next thing they found out was that they decided to come to the agreement. That is why this deal of 1993 was rather a mutually beneficial amalgamation of two companies - of a leader of audio sample-based technologies and of a professional in audio equipment proimotion, than a capture of the poor EMU by the monopolist Creative. So, with a good financial support E-mu, as a department of Creative, developed an audio processor EMU8000 (EMU8K) which made Creative a leader in quality of MIDI synthesizer sound and of a digital part. Just look: a WT synthesizer based on the E-mu professional sample-based technologies, 32 voices, storage of samples in ROM/RAM (bank size up to 32 MBytes for SIMM modules), 2 6-stage waveform envelope (delay, attack, hold, decay, sustain, release), 2 low-frequency generators (LFO), a controlled resonant filter and a reverb/chorus effect block, amplitude modulation with LFO1 and Env2, frequency modulation (Env1 and both LFO), cutoff frequency (Env1 and LFO1). An effect type (8 presets for reverb, chorus and delay) is common for all, a depth of each effect is set separately for each voice, high-quality 4-pixel interpolation is used in case of a sample shift. The new card was called Sound Blaster AWE32 (AWE - Advanced Wave Effects, 32 stands for the number of voices of a MIDI synthesizer). The card was fully compatible with the Sound Blaster 16 on a hardware level, and the digital part sounding was improved at the expense of more perfect converters. The AWE32 was the best card for budget home audio studios at that time. A bit later the company updated the card. The Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold is available on the market even today. It has 64 voices, with 32 being a not very good program synthesis of the Creative WaveSynth, but 32 hardware voices were more than enough at that time. This card was a flagship of the SB32/AWE32 series. By the way, the company made the first attempt to realize 3D sound (or rather, sound panning). The technology was named E-mu 3D Positional Audio. The card met the requirements of the Plug'n'Pray specification from M$ and supported DirectSound on a drivers' level. The card had an S/PDIF interface (16bit 44.1 kHz). When the PCI bus came Creative got some troubles. The competitors were selling out their PCI cards, and Creative had nothing to oppose to them. According to Dave Rossum, although they had a sample of a card with the EMU8005 on the PCI bus Creative didn't want to mount an old chip on the new bus. They needed a completely new product to take a lead. While losing its market and profits, the company decided to wait and see what its competitors would come up with. At the same time it was developing a new audio processor. But major OEMs weren't pleased with such a situation. They needed a new brand product - a sound card which would associate with high quality and reliability. Creative thus agreed to endanger its temporary "mercenaries" and its reputation, and released PCI cards on chips from Ensoniq, a company which badly needed money and therefore was captured by Creative (later the R&D departments of Ensoniq and E-mu were joined). Those were Sound Blaster 64 PCI and Sound Blaster 128 PCI cards. They were not worse than AWE64 Value card in sound quality but they were cheap (due to lack of a normal audio processor) and had DirectSound3D drivers. But the competitors could easily beat Creative: Aureal Vortex chip based sound cards glutted the market (they were promoted by Diamond Multimedia, the cards were named Diamond Sonic Impact and Diamond Monster Sound). ESS with its cheap PCI solutions won the Low-End sector. The Home Studio sphere was taken by Yamaha with its XG-MIDI sound cards. Creative, however, decided to develop new market sectors: high-quality multimedia acoustic systems (a 1997 purchase of Cambridge SoundWorks) and DVD sets (drives and hardware decoders from Matsushita and SigmaDesign). Sound Blaster Live! release The situation with a PC sound became hot: the SoundBlaster mark didn't work any more, major customers left the company, that is why it had to launch a normal sound card immediately. Creative was in hurry and put off debugging and improvement of internal algorithms of its new sound chip. It just released an audio processor with a removable internal microcode. They say that their technology allowed users to improve such a sound card by only replacing the drivers. The truth was that the new audio processor EMU10K1 really offered such an opportunity. But just few realized that redesigning of a code and drivers would cost a fortune and take a lot of time. At last in 1998 Creative released Sound Blaster Live! - a family for the PCI bus containing a new processor onboard. Slogans advertised new realistic sound and quality higher than the Hollywood's one, as well as an unprecedented sound submergence effect in interactive games. And it wasn't far from reality. EMU10K: details Let's examine some technical details of the EMU10K1 chip installed into the SB Live! which Creative calls "The EMU10K1 Digital Audio Processor". This long-liver among mainstream audio chips is a unique solution. First, its power (1000 MIPS) is comparable to the performance of the Pentium 100 MHz; it was really impressing in 1998. While sound processing took 20-30% of the CPU's resource in other cards at that time, the Live! made it dozens times less! Secondly, the new processor was meant for professional studio samplers from E-mu, and for its professional sound cards. The processor supports a sample professional format SoundFont 2.X (all samples are 16bit 48 kHz stereo, layer support is provided). Sample banks are kept in the computer's RAM and exceed the limit of 32 MBytes. ASIO is supported in the EMU APS drivers. There is a full set of digital interfaces: S/PDIF, I2S, and AC'97. The chip has 4 S/PDIF-OUTs and 2 S/PDIF-INs! An internal professional effect-processor from EMU - FX8010 - provides a flexible routing of effects. 32-bit internal data representation. Full support of the Microsoft DirectSound/DirectSound3D in 2- and 4-channel configuration, plus its own 3D sound API function extensions which are open for all other sound card developers for better support by game makers (unlike the native API (Aureal A3D API)). The sharpness of a sound image was much higher of the Live! cards due to the lack of rough dithering with SRC. Because of lack of a special hardware unit the Live! had some compatibility problems with the Sound Blaster 16/AWE32 in DOS games if the latter used undocumented possibilities of the previous card generations. But DOS was aging, and the most of DOS game hits (DOOM2, HM&M) had Windows versions. Although MIDI is not urgent any more the integrated professional effect processor is used in the surround sound rendering technologies, and algorithms of operation with MIDI voices are currently used in high-quality hardware realizations of DirectSound/DirectSound3D functions (even today the sharpness of perception of mixed streams of the EMU10K is, in my opinion, the best). EAX technology So, the new cards feature a surround sound rendering based on the Environmental Audio eXtension technology (EAX) which provides realistic sound. The Environmental Audio Platform (EAX SDK) developed by Creative is widely supported by such companies as Electronic Arts, Activision, DreamWorks Interactive and MicroProse. Although the 3D sound wasn't impressing through 2 speakers and headphones with the EAX 1.0 in use, as compared with the competitors, the 4-speaker configuration sounded quite good due to high-quality panning realization. The most important thing was that the EAX API could be easily programmed! Besides, any non-EAX game or any reproduced sound could be "refrashed" with reverb high-quality effects. Old games sounded much better. Well, the Live! turned out to be a successful solution. Now Creative is releasing all possible variations of the Live!: a light version for gamers (with connectors of different colors) and a normal version for advanced users (gold-plated connectors, a daughter card with S/PDIF interfaces). Live!'s Second Generation The typical models are Value, Player, Platinum (the latter name is given by analogy with the AWE64 Gold). The models of the cards are CT4830, CT4760. A finer fab process, an improved card layout, an AUD_EXT extension connector for Live!Drives installed into a 5" bay. The rear panel features a Digital Out. Why not an S/PDIF out? Because it has a stereo mini-jack connector, and, therefore, it is a dual-channel one (three-pin). In the "S/PDIF output only" mode an AC3 stream with a DD5.1 signal is transferred via the central pin.
In the "S/PDIF output only" mode with the "Live!Surround" enabled a 16bit 48kHz S/PDIF stereo stream with encoded (on the fly) into Dolby ProLogic 4 card channels is transferred via the central pin.
In the 4-channel mode a 16bit 48kHz S/PDIF stereo stream of a signal for the front speakers is transferred through the central pin, from the rear speakers - through the middle pin.
The card also has a jumper which determines whether to transfer through the central pin a signal only for front speakers or for front and rear ones.
Well, you can see that the Live! is well equipped and Creative meaningly recommend to use its cards with the DTT acoustic systems. The second generation (for example, SB Live! Platinum sound card from Creative) allows us to connect a PC to Cambridge SoundWorks DTT acoustic sets with an integrated decoder/DAC in a digital mode and to enjoy a multichannel sound which is converted into an analog form by very good external 24/96 converters. The quality of the Creative speakers corresponds to their price. Maybe it is not the best choice for a home theater, but you will definitely enjoy watching DVD movies and playing games. Many are convinced that a video card is worth spending $200, while a $60-70 sound card is too expensive. By the way, you can go with an ESS688 (a cheap and terrible clone of the Sound Blaster Pro). Unlike a necessity in an OpenGL accelerator, Quake3 will work even with a cheap sound card since the sound was originally sampled at 11 kHz. Of course, it would be impossible to get multichannel sound in games or watch DVD or MPEG-4 movies... Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 The third generation of the Live! was named Sound Blaster Live! 5.1. In the review Creative SB Live! Platinum 5.1 sound card I wrote that thanks to the excessive functionality the EMU10K served such a long time. The chips had 4 (!) S/PDIF-INs which made possible to assemble even a 7.1 card on it. The Platinum 5.1 has a remote control, above all. The quality of a digital sound didn't improve much in the Live! 5.1 as compared with the 2-generation Live! But there are other very pleasant things such as 5.1 sound in games (where updated DirectSound3D drivers processed and produced 5 independent channels to each speaker given to the current game situation) and DolbyDigital 5.1 decoding by means of the card. How the decoding is implemented (on a software, hardware or soft hardware level) is not necessary for a user to know. It is important that this function is supported and is not worse in quality than the alternatives (the DVD-players WinDVD and PowerDVD has a completely software realization of decoding). 5.1-sound in games and movies is worth replacing the Live! with the Live! 5.1. And it doesn't necessary to buy a new card. By the way, the Live!5.1 has a more complicated Digital-Out. First of all, it is combined with the third analog center/sub output (the "analog or digital" mode can be set with the "Digital Ouput Only" switch). Secondly, this is a 4-pin connector! Thus, you can transfer 6 uncompressed PCM streams 16bit 48 kHz without quality losses in either operating mode (movies, games or music). You will need 6 decoded channels in movies if you want to listen to a sound track in the DTS standard in the highest quality mode when watching a DVD movie, even without a special hardware decoder (WinDVD 3.0 DTS edition, hence from the Live!5.1 in a digital mode to the 6-channel 24/96 DAC in the DTT3500 - and that's all! You don't need to buy a DTS decoder at $150-200.) You can enjoy a 6-channel digital sound in games the same way. Connection in an analog mode yields in quality to the digital one, especially in high frequencies. But it is for you to decide what price/quality ratio is optimal for you. The problem of reproduction of 44.1 kHz through a digital-out at the data format fixed at 48 kHz is farfetched. There are distortions but they are unnoticeable even on a high-quality system, at least which is less than $1000 (see the detailed information in the Nightingale PRO 6 sound card from Zoltrix). Audigy announcement The Live! bothered many after 3 years of its existence. OEM companies asked Creative for anything newer, especially when Sensaura was promoting its new DS3D extensions to be used in X-Boxes. "Where is the SoundFont 2.1 and ASIO support?" - asked home musicians. "Where are new drivers?" - asked many users, although the Live! drivers (and the microprogram in the EMU10K1) changed three times: Live!Ware2, Live!Ware3 for Live!, Live!Ware3 for Live!5.1.
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