Sound Blaster Live!
 

Hey all I just ordered a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 card for my PC. (been playing a lot of pc games lately, have to keep up with the times i guess) Just wondering if anyone else uses one of these and what you think of it? Any bugs to worry about?

SB makes some great hardware. The Live! series was an amazing card - the Audigy and Audigy 2 now eclipse it but IMHO the Live! is still a VERY viable card for any application other than audio production.

You will hit a snag, however, with drivers. Creative sucks at writing drivers, and they suck worse at supporting legacy products. Since the live is now considered a legacy product by Creative, you may have trouble in a year or so getting it to work with new hardware (dvd decoders, etc). It probably won't be an issue before you upgrade anyway though.

I personally like the Live! series. If I buy another then I will get the 5.1 version, but I bought mine right about when it came out.

Personally the audigy and audigy2 seem like a waste of money for what I do. Listen to music and play the occassional game. If this is basically all you are doing and as long as you arent a crazy music person then you probably wouldnt even be able to tell the difference.

to me though I stopped really getting new cards after the Live! it has been through so many different machines.. I might get a new one so i can have two machines with it, but since I usually only play music on one the other make do with my "extras" :D

I have an audigy and I am dissapointed in Creative's driver support. It took them quite sometime for them to release drivers for XP and even then I had problems listening to heaphones on the card (the sound would reset to the highest level whenever I rebooted).

My friend has a Hercules Fortisssimo card and I am impressed with the level of control the drivers/software give you. You can change the volume for individual speakers (front-right, back-left, etc.) if you have a 4.1 or above set up. Creative as far as I can find only can change the volume for each channel (right or left). If I needed a new card right now, that is what I would go with.

Ah yeah I'd heard about the bad Creative drivers but hopefully I'll have my next major upgrade before it becomes a problem. Thanks for the feedback!