| Sound Blaster Live! by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson |
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Feature Summary:
It was one of my "isolation" phases, okay? I really wasn't trying to avoid our guests. I just had the need to shoot at something. Moving sneakily down the stairs to my office, I was already picturing the Me 109 in my sights. "Rat a tat tat," I intoned vaguely to myself, a ghoulish grin playing around the corners of my mouth. Our black and white cat eyed me strangley. Ignoring the ignorant feline, I sequestered myself in my comfy chair, fired up the new blazing Celeron system, ensured the volume knob on my Yamaha receiver was at THREE, and loaded up WW2 Fighters (Note: You will need the new driver release to enable EAX and DirectSound3D ability through a stereo receiver).
Jumping into the first campaign, I found myself listening to the marshall trumpet sounds, and staring out the window of a P38 Lightning, loaded for bear at dawn. AH! Perfect! I cranked the volume knob to FIVE and closed my office door. The night before I had replaced an ISA based Turtle Beach Monterey with a PCI based, and fully loaded Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live, the latest generation of digital signal processors (DSPs) on board, FULLY accelerating direct sound 3d, and making use of the latest 3d audio environmental extensions. However, in my role as lead hardware tester and bottle washer for COMBATSIM.COM, these things don't really phase me any more. I wasn't expecting any great difference in sound, only some nice PR phrases and a few more bells and whistles. As I cranked the engine to life, however, something broke loose in my brain. I had forgotten that WW2 Fighters actually supports the EAX extensions for this new board. Impressed, I cranked the volume up to SEVEN. My office filled with the throaty roar of the twin Allison V-12s. Vaguely my mind recorded the creaking of my office door.
Slobbering slightly, I manouvered onto the runway. At low RPMs the engine stuttered and coughed slightly. It doesn't pay to push these things until they are fully warmed up. I waited until the tower signaled clearance and then arced the throttle up to one third. From the corner of my eye I could see the apparent reversal of direction of the windmilling prop, an optical illusion whose roots played with transcendent meanings in the deep recesses of my reptilian brain. Now beginning to bump along the runway, I pushed the throttle to its full arc. My chair began to vibrate. I heard a gasp behind me. Turning to see what was up, I saw my old buddy Nick, his eyes transixed on my monitor. His upper lip trembled slightly. Oh, I forgot, he's almost an "old guy," it might have been the early onset of some debilitating disease. The color was rising in his cheeks, he seemed about to speak but was incapable of it. I realized that my P38 was probably airborn by now, and turned back to the monitor just in time to see the impact. My office fairly exploded with sound. The flames and smoke were incredible. Nick, a real pilot and sometime instructor, was unimpressed by my take off. On the other hand, I bet he dumps his old sound card before much longer... |
Back to reality. I've never been impressed by Creative Labs. Ok, I've owned a few of these boards, but the last one that really liked me was an SB16 SCSI-2. Since then I've owned an AWE 32 and an AWE 64. I only kept them for as long as I had to. In my opinion these were attempts to extend gaming technology well beyond its usefulness. They were merely an attempt to buy time. Now, however, we are seeing some innovation from the folks at CLabs. Yes, this is a "Good Thing"&trade. It could be that PC sound is about to finally catch up with the video revolution of 3d hardware. Technophobes Beware Let's consider for a moment what is at work here. 3D audio systems position multiple sound sources in three-dimensional space. For the non techno-phobes out there, this means that you become surrounded with virtual speakers. With a bit of tweaking, you can use the graphical interface that accompanies this board to make the sounds seem to change location. Say you want the music in a game to have pre-eminence. Grab the MIDI icon and place it front and center. The music will appear to come from directly in front of you. Now grab the WAV icon and place it behind you. The actual game sound effects will appear to come from behind you. You can also tweak the balance of these sounds, or invoke preconfigurations that change the spatial characteristics: the sounds can seem to originate in a huge auditorium, or underwater, or in a small enclosed space. Sound quality is also up over the AWE 64. But let's back up a bit and talk about the actual construction of this board. Based on the EMU10K1 Digital Signal Processor, the half length 32-bit PCI card features 4 gold plated output connectors on the rear panel, a midi port, 5 internal audio connectors, and a Digital I/O connector port. With the single exception of the Yamaha YMF724(XG), the EMU10K1 DSP which is at the heart of the SB Live! is the most powerful DSP available on the market at 1000 MIPS (million instructions per second). Compare this to the Vortex 8820 on Turtle Beach's Montego at 300 MIPS, or the the ESS Maestro-1 on Videologic's SonicStorm PCI. The next most powerful DSP resides on the new Diamond MX300: the Vortex 2 (Aureal) chip processes 600 MIPS. Who needs that much power? It's true that current games don't really require it, but that situation won't last long. Janes is already pushing the frontier with the sounds in WW2 Fighters, and selecting COMPLEX sounds on an older sound board like the AWE 64 or even the Turtle Beach Montego, is likely to give you a frame rate hit. Just as 3d accelerators offload the CPU, so the EMU10K1 takes over sound processing directly and saves your CPU for other tasks. Prior to the release of this new generation of sound boards, the highest number of DirectSound3d channels that could be processed in hardware was eight. A survey of game developers last year revealed that the ideal number of simultaneous DirectSound 3d channels is closer to sixteen. The Sound Blaster Live ups the ante to 40, 16 of which can be EAX environmentally enhanced. (Diamond's new board, like the pending release by Turtle Beach, is similarly powerful). The card itself provides for 2 or 4 speaker output configurations, and also comes equipped with a Digital I/O connector port on the PCB. Using the supplied cable you can attach the SB Live! to its provided daughtercard which features 5 connectors: a midi input and output port, SPDIF in/output ports, and one last digital port for a multi-channel digital amplifier. This daughtercard extends the SB Live!'s speaker support to a full EIGHT SPEAKER configuration. Environmental Audio Extensions The MIDI crowd will also be pleased. The SB Live! features a 256-voice MIDI synthesis capability. But what about EAX: what are these Environmental Audio Extensions? EAX is API, like Glide or OpenGL are video APIs (application programming interface), that has been developed in conjunction with Microsoft. Hmm, at least it should be well supported! Go to Part II
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© 1997 - 2000 COMBATSIM.COM, Inc. All Rights Reserved. . Last Updated November 4th, 1998 |
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