A cheap card that doesn't sound....cheap

Ok…..first things first. I bought this card to upgrade my (absolutely horrid) onboard sound for two channel listening…mostly through my Sennheiser HD-497 headphones. I listen almost exclusively through headphones. Thus, I didn’t buy this for the surround sound. I didn’t see any stereo only cards (at any price) and it would have been silly to pay as much or more for a stereo card anyway.

Next, you might want to skip this review if you’re looking for details on the 7.1 sound or gaming applications because I haven’t tested it with those. I also don't do any home recording and haven't tested that aspect of it. Admittedly, my review isn’t complete without those things but I don’t even have 7.1 on my home system and my computer speaker system is only 2.1 (and isn’t a great system anyway) so it’d be kind of hard to do.

The included instruction manual is little more than a pamphlet in several languages. Very incomplete. However, the installation disc will allow you to go to the online documentation which is very good and complete.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really what you’d call an audiophile but I do care enough about sound quality that I actually want to be able to hear something besides buzzing, pops, clicks and hiss. Thus it was that I set out one day, about a week or two ago, to rectify this little problem. I was looking at spending less than $50. I figured even the cheapest of cheap cards couldn’t possibly be as bad as onboard and I’d remembered seeing decent stereo cards pretty cheap a couple of years ago. I figured they could've only gotten better and cheaper by now.

At around $30 at Best Buy, the price for the Sound Blaster Live! 24 Bit was right. I actually really didn’t want to buy a Creative product but I do not do mail order…at all. The Creative cards were pretty much the only thing they really had locally in my price range.

So, why didn’t I want a Creative card? Have I ever owned or heard one? No. I’ve heard bad things about them and I was reluctant to buy yet another product that I’d end up being disappointed with. But, $30 isn’t a lot of money and part of the reason I don’t do mail order is to facilitate fast and easy returns/exchanges in the (all too often, it seems) event that I’m not satisfied. I was tired and was in no mood to run all over town so I reluctantly picked up the box, quickly read the specs (as if that means anything when you don’t comprehend half of it), opened the box to make sure everything was there and nothing was obviously broken and I was done.

Got the card home, popped the cover off the PC, installed the card in an empty PCI slot, booted up, disabled onboard audio, installed the software, restarted (naturally) and I was ready to test it out. I found the two channel output and plugged in my headphones. When I first put them on, I thought I must have done something wrong because I heard nothing but dead silence. Naturally, this was quite a shock to my system after living with noisy onboard audio for years. I moved the volume slider up close to max. Still no noise. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was even working (silly me, huh? I‘ve learned to just expect things not to work properly).

Alas, I forgot to turn the volume back down to a sane level before I started browsing folders (looking for any available music file). Well, I didn’t get quite that far. I did something XP didn’t like and I got one of those wonderful Windows error bonks in all it’s obnoxious, full volume, ear-damaging glory. I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill my hearing but my ears definitely weren’t pleased. OK, so, we’ve established that the built in amplifier will go more than loud enough to drive my headphones to adequate volume. And we’ve also established that the card is working. But the real accomplishment here is (drum roll) no more noise! Well, I’m sure if I measured it with some super sensitive scientific equipment or something, there’d be some noise or imperfection but there was nothing that my ears could hear (with decent headphones cranked up to near full volume, no less) and that’s pretty darn good for a budget anything in the audio world! I'm sure I'll eventually be ready to upgrade to something far better but for the time being, good audio starts with being able to actually hear the quieter parts of your music over the noise floor so I'm a happy camper for now.

So, now on to how the card sounds. Firstly, I had to rip some music to my hard drive (I‘d deleted it all because it wasn‘t worth listening to with the onboard sound card). I chose to do it with CDex and Monkey’s audio (.APE format) on normal compression. My test discs were Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut and Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. Both of these discs have much better than average audio quality (in case you don’t know). I tried both discs with WMP and Foobar 2000 media players. I prefer Foobar because it can be easily configured to handle the upsampling before the sound gets to the card. Creative cards are said to do a poor job at upsampling and 48 kHz is the card’s native resolution so it MUST resample 44.1 kHz CD sound. The Foobar resample plugin is said to do a better job than the Creative resampler does but to be honest, I didn’t detect much (if any) difference.

Foobar also allows Kernel streaming, which, for the uninitiated, allows you to listen to your music without being inundated by those previously mentioned Windows noises (it leaves you with only one master volume control and the Windows sounds can be independently adjusted to low volume without turning the music down as well). I haven’t dug much further than that into just what other benefits kernel streaming have to offer. I’m just happy Windows can no longer deafen me at the least expected moments whilst listening to music.

OK, so let’s get to the actual sound quality. Actually, I was/am VERY surprised. Firstly, I noticed a BIG difference between the onboard sound and the Live! 24 Bit and I noticed it right away (and continue to notice it as I rip more music). This thing, believe it or not, sounds better than my home receiver! The receiver was $400 (granted, I probably overpaid but still). I’ve been picking up things in my music that I honestly either never heard before or was very vague. Musicians breathing, fingers on the frets, those kinds of things. It’s not that any of this is anything new or miraculous. It’s just that you don’t expect that level of detail from a $30 card (or at least, I didn‘t). Yes, everybody seems to say this with every audio purchase but I’m pretty sure I’ve not said it in any of my reviews.

One such revelation came on the second disc of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Track 2. Is There Anybody Out There. All throughout the duet of the accoustic guitars on this track, I could easily discern one of the musicians breathing. I’ve been listening to this album for quite a few years and have heard it on a wide variety of equipment and am quite sure I never heard that before. Small, seemingly minor details such as this have set many out on a very expensive journey in pursuit of that “intimate” listening experience. It just surprises me that I got much of what I was looking for with the cheapest item I could find. So, to recap, my $70 Discman doesn’t resolve this detail, my $400 receiver (both of them with the same headphones) won’t do it either. Who’d have thought?

Overall, everything about my music has significantly improved over every other audio component I own. Granted, I don’t have any audiophile grade equipment but you could easily spend hundreds on equipment and speakers and not get sound as good as this. You put this card together with a decent pair of headphones or a good pair of amplified speakers and you’ve got very good sound for the money.

So what's bad about this card? OK (and I’m really reaching here. I have to actually look pretty hard to find gripes with this thing). For digital connections, if you want to use optical, you have to buy an add on module that’ll give you that capability. That kind of sucks but I guess you can’t ask for miracles for the price. I haven’t tried it but you could probably rig up a coaxial digital interconnect without having to but the module.

As far as I can tell, there’s no facility to connect my front headphone jack to the card. This means I have to crawl under my desk in order to plug or swap connections. I’m definitely not overly fond of doing this! My knees aren’t getting any younger and that web of wires behind my desk gets a little more frustrating to deal with every time I touch it. Additionally, I’ve probably got a permanent lump on the same spot of my head where I always whack it on the same sharp, metal corner.

The sound quality might not be quite as good as, say, a $60 - $150 card. OK…is that really a valid gripe for a $30 product? I honestly don’t think so. I hear that there are (supposedly) better cards in the $30 range but I didn’t see them on sale anywhere locally. Granted, I didn’t look everywhere but the usual suspects (Best Buy, Staples, Circuit City) almost always have the same stuff at around the same price. If I can’t see them and can’t return them in a few minutes , I’m not buying them.

I’m not madly in love with the software that comes with this card. It installed a lot of stuff I really don’t need (or want) on my system. I already have (several) media players that I’m perfectly happy with. I don’t need the Creative media player…or most of the other bulkware. Nevertheless, the drivers are installed via an executable (which installs it all, by default) unless you let Windows install the drivers only. I did want some of it so I didn’t have much choice. However, if you didn’t already have any other versions of this software, it probably would be nice to just buy a sound card and get most of the additional software you may need along with it. I ripped a few tunes with the included software and it worked about as well as most rippers do (which isn‘t perfect but pretty good).

The card (obviously) does take up a PCI slot in your computer so I guess that’s something you need to think about if you care. It will also use a percentage of your system resources just as virtually anything else you add on. You should factor in whether you have enough RAM and free CPU time (Almost any newer computer probably will if you’re not running a lot of processor intensive stuff in the background). Although I haven’t tried it, this card probably will not speed up your games. If anything, it’ll probably slow them down a bit so you may want to think about that if you’re already teetering on the edge of acceptable frame rates, etc. This particular card is an upgrade you make because your motherboard audio just plain stinks. Not necessarily to improve any other area of performance. You have to probably look higher up in the sound card line for that. And to Creative's credit, that's pretty much what they tell you on the box. They don't promise things the card won't do. They tell you this product is the cheapest, easiest upgrade for motheboard audio and that's exactly what it is.

In conclusion - I'm just happy that I don’t have to listen to static anymore when all I’m trying to do is listen to a few audio files with acceptable sound quality. I probably should have made this upgrade long ago. I’ve been disgusted with onboard sound since I owned my first computer about five years ago. I just never really got around to it. I’m glad I finally did.

Obviously, I’m seriously recommending this card to people who just want a decent sound upgrade at a bargain price. Anything more than that and you’re probably going to want to look elsewhere. In stereo mode, this thing will blow every onboard sound card I’ve ever heard away in terms of both SNR and overall sound quality. I’ve been listening at moderate volumes to music on this card for well over a week (running a variety of programs in the background) and have yet to hear a single pop, hiccup or any other noise (other than the music). The Final Cut is a very dynamic recording with a lot of relatively quiet passages. If the card was adding a lot of noise in the audible spectrum, I’d certainly hear it.

I thought I’d add just a bit of my personal thoughts at the end of this review. After hearing this card, I have to admit I’m a little puzzled at why there’s so much negativity about Creative sound cards in general, even amongst enthusiast types. I can only conclude that either this card is better than it’s predecessors, I have "tin ears" (which is certainly possible), or the people who criticize it are shooting for absolute perfection and will settle for nothing less. There’s also the possibility that there are some driver incompatibilities with some operating systems and other installed software/hardware that I’m not aware of. I have XP, SP2, which is certainly one of the more common operating systems. I have a good variety of miscellaneous software installed on my system and haven’t ran into any serious problems as of yet.

The Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24 Bit internal card gets 4 stars….and only because of the few gripes that I could personally find. I can’t find too much wrong with a $30 upgrade that solves my particular problem and also gives me better sound quality than I actually expected. I’ve spent $30 (and up…and up…and up) on a lot of things related to audio and have been completely and utterly under whelmed almost every single time. This time, at least I got what I expected (and then some).