After the relatively quick installation of files, a box came up on screen advising me not to worry, my PC hadn't crashed, but that I had to wait for about five minutes. True to its word the install finished about five minutes later. Thankfully I had run the Cleansweep install monitor, and so after the reboot could examine just what the Creative installation had been doing. I've mentioned in the past that consumer soundcards tend to install many more files than 'professional' ones, but even I was aghast at the 1848 items recorded!
I managed to source almost all of the core components that Maximum PC used in their 2003 Dream Machine. The substitutions I made were the motherboard, no liquid cooling, and small upgrades to the GPU and sound card. Really happy with the result, it's one beastly build!
Creative Sb Live Platinum Ct4760 Sound card PCI 15
This article is for those who got used to squeeze the maximum out of his or her hardware system. Today we will talk about modernization of 4-channel models of the SoundBlaster Live! cards in order to ensure their operation with modern acoustic 5.1 systems. More than 3 years ago Creative released its famous Sound Blaster Live! based on the digital EMU10K1 audio processor. This chip was developed by E-MU (a department of Creative) which is known as a manufacturer of professional audio equipment. Due to an advanced EMU10K1 audio processor, high-quality AC'97 codecs and a competently designed printed-circuit card PC users got in 1998 a card with rich multimedia, game and audio possibilities and with a decent sound. The EMU10K1 processor is quite successful: a line of the Live! sound cards was twice updated but the EMU10K1 processor remained a heart of the system. This chip, thus, is used in a professional E-MU Audio Production Studio (E-MU APS) sound card and in some samplers of this company. I think that the potential of this chip is not entirely used even in the latest Live! 5.1 line (or even in Audigy). A bit of history Let's look at how the Sound Blaster Live! cards appeared and at their hardware possibilities. The first generation Sound Blaster Live! cards appeared on the shelves in autumn of 1998. It was a Sound Blaster Live! (Model CT4620) and its light version Sound Blaster Live! Value (Model CT4670). They were quite different. The full version had 4 metallic mini-jacks and a large 40-pin Audio Extension (AUD_EXT) connector for digital inputs/outputs supplied with the card and other optional devices (Live! Drive I wasn't supplied with the card and became available a bit later for upgrade). The Value version didn't have an Audio Extension connector. It was replaced with a 12-pin SPDIF_EXT one which had only several Audio Extension signals (namely, inputs and outputs of S/PDIF digital interfaces). Besides, the Value had plastic mini-jacks. The G2 Sound Blaster Live! appeared in autumn of 1999. This family consisted of the Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer, Sound Blaster Live! MP3+, Sound Blaster Live! Player and a couple of OEM versions (Value versions). The retail versions of the Platinum, X-Gamer, MP3+ and Player were based on the CT4760 model. The CT4760 differed from the full version of the G1 card (CT4620) in a lack of a I2S connector, in an improved layout and in an additional stereo Digital-Out mini-jack which had front and rear channels in the S/PDIF format on the central and radial pins. The Platinum had a Live! Drive II, and the other cards differed only in software and in marketing outlets (the X-Gamer and MP3+ were meant only for America). The OEM versions were primarily based on the CT4830 and differed from the retail ones in plastic mini-jacks of different colors (and sometimes in codec chips). On some CT4830 versions the CD_DIGITAL connector wasn't unsoldered. There were also such exotic cards as Sound Blaster PCI 512 which were delivered to Compaq and Dell. The G3 Sound Blaster Live! cards appeared on the market in autumn of 2000. The family consisted of the same cards as the second generation one; they, however, were marked "5.1" which meant a support of 6-channel acoustic systems. All cards were based on the SB0060 model, including the OEM versions. They differed from the G2 cards in color plastic mini-jacks and in an additional support of central and sub channels via a non-standard 4-pin Digital/Analog Out mini-jack which could have either 3 digital-outs in the S/PDIF format (front, rear and central/sub) or analog-outs of the central channel and of the subwoofer. The additional channels appeared due to a new 4-channel AC'97 codec (STAC9708) which replaced a dual-channel one (STAC9721 or CT1297). The Platinum 5.1 came with an updated version of the Live! Drive IR with a remote control support. Additional features of the Live! 5.1 family cards The third generation cards underwent considerable changes due to a special program Live!Ware. Apart from normal support of 5.1 systems (2 front channels, 2 rear channels, a central one and a subwoofer) the new version of the Live!Ware featured: Bass Redirect (from all channels to a subwoofer one) so that the sub may help MF/HF multimedia speakers in bass extraction;
trapping and decoding of an AC3 signal taken to the S/PDIF digital-out - AC-3 decode function;
separate volume control for a central channel and a subwoofer one.
The most interesting function here is a software decoding of an AC3 stream directed to the S/PDIF-Out (DigitalOut) integrated into the driver. It, for example, releases a program DVD player from decoding of an AC3 stream by its own means and from a necessity to be informed about the current configuration of the acoustic systems connected to the card (2.0, 4.0 or 5.1): all parameters are set in the Surround Mixer program from the Live!Ware set. Unfortunately, all these features can't be made use of if you install the Live!Ware for 5.1 cards on the models of the previous generations. Moreover, the Live!Ware and drivers for old cards weren't updated for about a year. Well, if all these cards are based on the same EMU10K1 processor, then does it matter to buy a new card on the same chip? There are limitations only on a software level. I found out that the data peculiar for each Live! model are kept in a small 8-pin PROM chip (EEPROM 93c46). This chip is an electrically erasable PROM with a serial access and 64 bit X 16 data organization (i.e. 128 bytes). On the Live! cards this chip is located between the EMU10K1 chip and a side edge of the card (on the photo it is in a red circle).
The build quality of the card is excellent. The irritating hiss that has always plagued sound cards are barely audible here. It is much lower than previous Sound Blaster products, as well as other cheaply manufactured sound cards. S/N (signal-to-noise) ratio is also better with a good quality card.
The term "wavetable" became mainstream for most PC users when Creative Labs introduced the Sound Blaster 16 in June 1992, which was the first sound card to come with what they called the Wave BlasterTM header - a connector onto which you could install a daughterboard called the Wave Blaster (CT1900). This added hundreds of real instrument and drum kit samples that could be used to bring more authentic music and sound effects to your PC. It used a wavetable patchset called E-MU Sound Engine Rev. A from a specialist audio company called E-Mu.
Leap forward to 1991 when Advanced Gravis launched the first audio card, the UltraSound, that used software-based samples that could be loaded into onboard RAM instead of having them stored on a ROM chip. This meant you could change the samples to suit what you were doing [or the game you were playing!]. Because of the flexibility of using different patchsets (a collection of samples held in a single file), their UltraSound sound card could be considered one of the first cards that met the General MIDI standard, which was also announced the same year.
All of the above achieve the same thing, though the audio quality can differ massively depending on what you get. For the majority of PC gamers, if you had any of the above you had effectively drastically upgraded the music portion of your PC gaming audio! While wavetable synthesis did include some sound effects such as birds chirping or a bell ringing, the majority of games tended to continue to use the PCM 'digital audio' part of a sound card rather than a sample for sound effects.
As the name implies, these are external boxes which receive MIDI messages from your computer, process those messages, and output the actual audio either directly to speakers connected to the MIDI module or back to your PC sound card's "Line-In" socket to be mixed into the overall audio output.
The earliest sound card that supported wavetable synthesis was the Sound Blaster 16 which came with a new 26-pin header called the Wave Blaster connector. By purchasing the Creative Labs Wave Blaster (CT1910) daughterboard and plugging it into this connector, your SB16 could now output sample-based audio that was compatible with the General MIDI standard. Without the daughterboard attached it could only output the poorer-quality FM synthesis.
While the original Wave Blaster greatly improved upon the acoustic quality of the Sound Blaster 16's built-in FM-synthesis, the acoustic quality of its instrument-set (patch set) was regarded poorly by the general public. Despite this, the Wave Blaster sold well (Creative Labs were very good at marketing!), and soon Creative launched the Wave Blaster II which came with a new synthesis engine, EMU8000, again from specialist audio company E-Mu. This would later also be used on their AWE32 sound card.
Furthermore, other manufacturers recognized that this technology was where the PC audio market was heading, and they too added a Wave Blaster-compatible header to their new sound cards - it was a very cheap cost to add the header since all the actual costly technology would be on the daughterboard you had to buy separately. These manufacturers also created their own Wave Blaster-equivalent daughterboards so owners could extend their sound card's audio support to include General MIDI. Even budget sound cards eventually came with a Wavetable header to the point it's actually quite rare to find a sound card that did not support this expansion option from 1993 onward. 2ff7e9595c
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