The Creative Labs
SoundBlaster Live Value
(part 2)
The Software bundle
The software bundle included on the installation CD can be divided in two categories: The audio applications and the music applications. First, let's have a look on the audio applications.
The picture below is a snap shot of the audio applications group included with this soundcard. All these applications are reachable from an Icon installed in the task bar tray, from the program list menu under the name 'Creative" or by moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen where a drop down menu bar is appearing when the mouse pointer is located at this place. In other words, you are never far away from your soundcard settings and audio applications.
One of the first thing I have been pleased with when I first began to work with this soundcard was it's tone control capabilities. Yes, you've read right, the SoundBlaster Live Value comes equipped with bass and treble controls to let you adjust the level of these audio frequencies to you own tastes. As we all know, most of all speaker set included with computer systems are pretty cheap and are lacking of definition. Most of them are suffering of a deep rolloff in the low frequencies while some others are not very good at the high frequencies. Thus, the use of these tone controls can greatly compensate for the weakness of these reduced size speakers and bring a whole new sound environment not possible before.
Another very interesting feature of this soundcard is that you can now use the digital output (SPDIF) of your CDROM drive and plug it directly into a specific input designed to take care of this type of signal. So, you will never need to use the analog audio output of your CDROM drive to listen to your audio compact disk anymore as the Live Value is taking care of it for you. Note that a special cable not included is required between the SPDIF input on this soundcard and SPDIF output of your CDROM drive.
The audio applications included with this soundcard are very diversified and much too numerous to be all described here as it would easily get out of the scope of this review. So, I will try to describe the most interesting and I'll let you discover the others at your next visit to your local computer store.
The first audio application I would like to talk about is probably the one you will be using the most and I'm talking the audio mixer which is pictured in its actual size down below.
The many controls available on this mixer are from left to right: main volume, rear speaker volume, bass control, treble control, CD audio, line-in, microphone PC speaker, auxiliary, telephone answering device, wave,midi, CD digital, SPDIF.
The next most interesting feature in my opinion is the environmental audio control panel where you can select the many PRESET sound effects.
This control panel is also where you can choose preselected effects for one of the many already available games enhanced to support the SoundBlaster Live 3D audio environment.
The next picture is an image of the Play Center. This nice looking program is not only nice but very versatile. Using this program, you can create albums of all your midi files almost instantly . For instance, all I had to do is to indicate where were located all my MiDi files and the program created an album out of it in a finger snap, then I loaded the album, hit the play button and all my MiDi files used to play one after the other. The Play Center can be used to play any aufio file format including WAV, MiDi, MP3, CDA and AU.
Finally, I would like to say a word about the audio applications included with this soundcard. If you are a music enthusiast, no doubts that you will be pleased with this soundcard. The music applications included with this soundcard are full of very interesting features that will let you use your imagination to its full potential to create new music files or edit existing music files.
For instance, the Wave Studio, pictured below, is allowing you to work with .WAV files and edit them the way you want.
The SoundLE, pictured below, is a digital recorder which will allow you to digitally record any sound sources.
The Rythmania, pictured below, is an application that will let you exercise your talents to play music while a whole rhythm section will be automatically accompanying you while you play. A very wide variety of preselected rhythm patterns are offered and you may even edit the tempo to fit your needs.
The Listening Experience
Listening to sound files such as MiDi files or WAV files with this soundcard is a very pleasant experience. This is by far the best soundcard I've heard to date. A choice a 2Mb, 4Mb or 8Mb wavetables is available and the least I can say about these wavetables is that the 4Mb and the 8Mb wavetables are absolutely fantastic. The fact that this soundcard comes equipped with a pair of tone controls contributed to make my speakers sound like they never did before. The low frequencies reproduction are amazing while the high frequencies are crisp and very detailed. The exceptional signal to noise ratio of 96db (A-Weighted ) combined with the excellent -115db front channel noise floor are contributing to give to the music a noiseless quality reproduction and a dynamic range rarely encountered on this type of soundcard. Until now, from all the soundcard I've tested to date, none of them has been pleasing me enough to convince me to get rid off of my good old Ensoniq Soundscape S2000 soundcard. However, I can tell you that I sure will miss the Live Value soundcard pretty much when I will have to get back to my old Ensoniq Soundscape.
continue on next page with the Frequency Spectrum Analysis
