Sound Blaster Live!

Sound Blaster Live! is a PCI add-on sound card from Creative Technology Limited for PCs. Moving from ISA to PCI allowed the card to dispense with onboard memory, storing digital samples in the computer's main memory and then accessing them in realtime over the bus. This allowed for a much wider selection of, and longer playing, samples. It also included higher quality sound output at all levels, quadrophonic output, and a new MIDI synthesizer with 64 sampled voices. The Live! was introduced in August 1998 and variations on the design remained Creative's primary sound card line into the 2000s.

Sound Blaster Live! (August 1998) saw the introduction of the EMU10K1 processor, a 2.44 million transistor audio DSP, rated at 1000 MIPS. The EMU10K1 featured hardware acceleration for DirectSound and EAX 1.0 and 2.0 (environmental audio extensions), a high-quality 64-voice MIDI sample-based synthesizer, and an integrated FX8010 DSP chip for real-time digital audio effects.

A major design change from its predecessor (the EMU8000) was that the EMU10K1 used system memory, accessed over the PCI bus, for the wavetable samples, rather than using expensive on-board memory. This was possible at this point because systems were being equipped with far more RAM than previously, and PCI offered far faster and more efficient data transfer than the old ISA bus.

The integrated FX8010 was a 32-bit programmable processor with 1 kilobyte of instruction memory. It provided real-time postprocessing effects (such as reverb, flanging, or chorus). DSP effects in the older SB/AWE family were restricted to MIDI synth (done in software by the CPU-based MIDI softsynth), but in the SB/Live family, the EMU10K1's integrated FX8010 operated on any source. This capability let users select a pre-defined listening environment from a control-panel application (concert hall, theater, headphones, etc.) It also provided hardware-acceleration for EAX, Creative's environmental audio technology. The Effect algorithms were created by a development system that integrated into Microsoft Developer Studio. The effects were written in a language similar to C, and compiled into native FX8010 object code by its compiler, fxasm.

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