Product Reviews

The Live! Platinum is Creative's latest stab at the high end consumer sound card market. The original SoundBlaster Live! broke new ground last year by including all the latest games technologies, along with digital connections for musicians - a feature previously only found on cards costing hundreds of pounds.

The most notable difference of the Platinum to its predecessor is the Live! Drive II, a drive bay-mounted connection panel that replaces the previous card's second backplate. This provides much easier access to the sockets, and makes your PC look posh, but does mean you'll have cables dangling out the front as well as the back.

The Live! Drive includes digital S/PDIF connectors of optical as

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well as coaxial flavours, and a second microphone/line in, which appears to be better quality than the one on the card itself.

Software for musicians is much improved, with Steinberg's Cubase VST, Recycle and Wavelab provided, albeit in their 'Lite' forms. However, with all this professional audio software and interfacing for digital audio equipment, it's a shame there aren't separate drivers for the various Ins and Outs for musicians using an external mixer.

Features for gamers remains pretty much unchanged, although with EAX and 4-speaker support already in place, this doesn't present much of a problem. Internet is more of a buzz-word than ever before these days, and Creative follow suit, supplying a CD-ripping and MP3-encoding application for 'sharing' audio on the Internet, or recording tunes for an MP3 player.

While the SB Live! Platinum is clearly an update rather than a radical new product, its improvements seem to be more cosmetic than technical. While the Live! Drive looks the business, the only new features it adds to the original spec is optical S/PDIF connectors and a price increase of about £25. Admittedly, it is still great value for the amount of hardware on offer, but it's only the excellent software bundle that really justifies the launch of this new model.