Creative
Labs SB Live! Platinum review
Posted by Julio
Franco on January 26, 2000 - Page 3/5
Company: Creative
Labs Product: Sound
Blaster Live! Platinum
Installation
Nowadays
installing a device such as a video or sound card isn’t a
difficult task, the Live! Platinum wasn’t the exception,
it was all about opening the case, putting the card on a
free PCI slot, connecting the CD audio cable and finally
connecting the Live!Drive data cable that was provided by
Creative.
Then I had
to install the Live!Drive, I just had to connect the power
connector and data cable, slide the drive in the bay and
secure it using the screws that came included in the
package. Finally I powered on the computer and I was gold.
After
that Windows booted and recognized the Plug & Play
devices, after installing the drivers and additional
software that came in the CDs I was completely done.
Although
the installation process is fairly easy there might be some
people afraid of doing the installation by themselves that’s
why the Live! Platinum includes a very complete
documentation that should help with installation and also
gives you a brief explanation of what you can do with each
one of the programs included with the card.
Creative
Software
Creative
includes with all its Live! Cards a very complete suite of
applications, we can mention as a remarkable utility the
Creative Playcenter in which you can play files of about
every audio format available. An addition of the Playcenter
would be LAVA! (Live! Audio-Visual Animation), an utility I
have seen Creative promoting a lot, in my opinion there is
nothing cool to mention from it, totally useless from my
point of view actually.
For setting
and controlling the various aspects of the audio you have
got the Surround Mixer, maybe one of the best things of
Creative cards, from here you can control everything… set
up the number of speakers, mix sounds and adjust the volume
from various audio input sources and you can also create
environments, using EAX effects.
Another
of the utilities I wanted to try out was the Creative
Digital Audio Center which should let you encode your own
MP3s with no loss of quality… not much to say here, you
could either record from digital or analog sources and use
different compression modes such as RealAudio, Wave and of
course MP3, it just worked wonderfully.
Overall
the out-of-the-box experience with the Live! Platinum is
excellent; I think the end-user will feel very comfortable
with all the features this card has got.

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