The Creative Labs
SoundBlaster PCI 128 soundcard
(part 1)
Wednesday, January 06, 1999
Introduction
After the analyse of the SoundBlaster Live Value soundcard it is with a great interest that we were wondering what could have cooked up for us Creative Labs with their SoundBlaster PCI-128 soundcard. So, we are inviting you to discover with us what's been packed up in this soundcard.
Installation
The installation of this soundcard is very conventional and all you have to do is to insert the installation CD and type the right path to the appropriate drivers.
The Software bundle.
Even though if the software bundle included with this soundcard is not as extended as the SoundBlaster Live or Live Value, the PCI-128 bundle is not bad at all. Among the programs and utilities included, you will find: the mixer, a wavetables configuration interface, 3 different wavetables including 2mb, 4mb and 8mb wavetables, an audio CD player, a WAVE files player, a MiDi files player, a multimedia player, a digital recorder, a WAVE file editor and of course a users manual.
To help you get a better idea of these utilities, let us introduce them to you.
As usual, and for logical reasons, we will first introduce the mixer included with this soundcard as it is pictured below.
One of the most interesting thing that we've found on this mixer is the fact that each control are clearly labelled contrarily to many other mixers where only not so obvious hieroglyphs are used instead of lettering. Another interesting feauture of this mixer are its bargraph displays available on some of the most important inputs to facilitate the reading. Finally, all the most frequent sound effects are also available directly fron the mixer front panel.
The only weak point of this mixer is that it has been absolutely impossible to find anything about how to enable the tone controls of the mixer neither in the users manual nor in the help guide installed from the CD.
So, to help you solve this problem, here is the complete procedure we had to use to make the tone controls to appear enabled on the mixer front panel.
Adding Tone controls.
Open Windows registry by typing run regedit.exe and then choose Hkey_Local_machine/ System/ Current Control Set/ Services/ Class/ Media/ 0001/ config ,
then change (Allow Tone Controls) & (Enable Tone Controls) from 00 to 01 , save & re-boot.
Note that the media number on your system may be different from 001, so, you will have to make sure that you use the one corresponding to your setup. It might also be possible that the (Allow Tone Controls) & (Enable Tone Controls) keys are missing and if this is the case you will have to create them.
In any case, always make a backup copy of your registry before attempting any modification to it. So, if you run into troubles you will always be able to come back to your original setup.
The following utility we would like to introduce to you is the CD player as is appear in its actual size below.
The below utility is the Midi files player.
The following utility below picturerd is the WAVE files player.
As you can see, these three applications are looking very similar. As a fact, the only difference bewteen them is the type of files they can support.
Down below, we can see the Soundo'LE digital recorder which can be used to record from any sound sources.
continued on the next page with:
The listening and the Frequency Spectrum Analysis.
