I seem to recall the first version of the SB Live! had some kind of design flaw related to it hogging the PCI bus and possibly causing problems with other PCI cards that do bus mastering (SCSI?). I stuck with an AWE64G, so I'm not intimate with this card. Does anyone know of the problems I am referring to? Were they able to get around them with a driver update?

If gold plated connectors is such a concern, why not just buy any card you want and solder them in?

Actually it is not that much of a problem. Probably all Emu10K do the requests to gain control on the PCI bus. It got a problem with the KT133 chipsets since VIA used another logic to do PCI arbitration. You can make this visible by plugging a SB Live! and a BT878 based TV-card. If you play e.g. midi music random green stripes will appear in the image transferred when watching some video from the TV-card.
On other chipsets which do PCI arbitration right this is not an issue. If you have cards that are prone to loose performance due to the PCI hogging then you can just set the PCI burst cycles in BIOS to 64. For those early VIA chipsets (KT133 to KT600) you may want to try George Breeses PCI latency patch.
For a while I had used 3x SB Live! on one KT600 board with kx drivers and had no issues.

As for the different SB Live! versions: A rather unnoticed difference is that cards with the same CTxxxx number can have different AC97 codecs. I have some with 1.0 and 2.0, which differ most noticably on supporting additional features, like 3D enhancement, inputs, gain a.s.o..

What's this i hear about poor 44.1KHz audio compared to 48? Does this affect all Live cards?

Live's DSP operates at 16-bit 48KHz. All source audio is resampled to this rate for mixing and other processing. This is how many cards work. Unfortunately EMU10K1's resampling algorithm isn't great and it causes some minor distortion in some cases. You can feed it specific synthetic audio signals that expose its weaknesses and it is audible, but this isn't very realistic. In typical listening I'm not sure it's perceptible. I have tried to listen for it, and experimented with software resampling but I can't hear it. The quality of the front output is more of an issue.

So in order to avoid distortion, everything should be resampled to 48KHz in software? What happens in DirectSound3D games that use a multiple of 11KHz audio samples (every game ever?)?

They'll get distorted, but you won't usually notice unless you try hard... And maybe not even then.

I'd give it a good old udial.wav, but that may only reveal clipping. Is there another test signal floating around designed for audio resampling?

Why not listen to some music with and without software resampling and see if you can hear anything. I was never able to.

Audigy has the same problem. Again without something like udial, I couldn't hear anything.

any of you guys know about the hacked E-MU APS Drivers for SB LIve!?

im collecting info here :
http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php? … msg3263#msg3263
but i seem to have found teh downloadable files to hack/patch the drivers on a japanese site (linked on page)

I have one of the original cards and mine has the gold plated ports, yet mine is a ct4620 which I thought didn't have the gold

I have the SBLive SB0100 installed in my Asrock 775i65G mobo using VxD drivers. I had to disable the SB16 emulation from installing, in order to prevent a BSOD.

Seems like various members have had different versions of this card (myself included) but is there any unanimous agreement as to which cards are "pretty good" as opposed to "pretty bad" ? From the link posted earlier with all the model codes I would be inclined to think the 0060 and 0100 models are ok but that's just based on what those cards are titled. As we all know, there's no correlation between how fancy the name sounds and how well the card works. The video I watched on Phil's Computer Lab showcased the 0100 and he seemed to think that one was ok. Are there any better models? Since he had a 0060 for reference, why didn't he use that one if it's part of the Platinum series?

I have a CT4620 with CT4660 daughter board but I cannot find the drivers for Windows 98SE. It's the gold plated version of 1998. Which .iso should I download for installing?

JSO wrote:

I have a CT4620 with CT4660 daughter board but I cannot find the drivers for Windows 98SE. It's the gold plated version of 1998. Which .iso should I download for installing?

For the sake of closure, I should probably state that I ended up purchasing the CT4760.
For Windows 98SE, I used the Live!ware v3.0 drivers at vogonsdrivers: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=780

Ensure you've uninstalled all other audio device drivers AND utilities.
Once installed, I had no audio from my Live! because the mixer utility from my onboard audio was still installed. This caused no audio output at all. Once uninstalled, the Live! worked fine.

Occasionally, I do see the odd VXD error /BSOD on this system and the only ever happens when the Live! is installed. Ah, like the good 'ol times! 😉

The "sound blaster live SB0200" is commonly found on eBay for little money.
Creative labs website had the DELL drivers for this sound card.

The SB0200 is a cut down, feature stripped version. The SB0220 is better as it has EAX support.

JSO wrote:

I have a CT4620 with CT4660 daughter board but I cannot find the drivers for Windows 98SE. It's the gold plated version of 1998. Which .iso should I download for installing?

Same exact problem here. I tried LiveWare, LiveWare 2.0, LiveWare 3.0 and current downloads from creative.com. Spend a whole day now troubleshooting this card but nothing. And it doesn't help if you don't know exactly what driver version is the best for Win98SE. So you are troubleshooting and switching driver versions which makes matters only worse...

I gave up for the time beeing on the CT4620 (i have two of them) and also a CT4760 that i bought afterwards. No chance to get them working on a plain fresh Windows 98SE install. Its a mystery to me. Never had a problem with the CT4760 back in the day...

I then proceeded to get a SB0100 because that should be the newest version of the Live! and we have the newest drivers here on Vogonsdrivers so that would be a good match.
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=805

Phil from Philscomputerlab also used the above combination (SB0100 + VxD driver 4.12.01.0905) in his Live! review video.

Worked great without any issues on the same Windows 98SE and Mainboard + PSU that gave me nothing but trouble before with the earlier cards.

I have the CT4870 in my 20 year old PC I'm rebuilding at the moment. It didn't install using the default Live! drivers from Creative, but with a touch of encouragement (force the driver install in device manager) it works fine.

I am using the Sound Blaster live!, 5.1 SB0100 with Live drive and an Toslink SP/DIF adapter connector.
Connect the SP/DIF adapter to the Live drive digital I/O port using pins ( 1, 18, 19 ).
On the SP/DIF adapter RED wire is 5v, Black wire is ground, Brown wire is Signal.
I used Raspberry Pi wires as extension wires. It was easy. No soldering or crimping wires required.
This way you can have the Live drive work and the Toslink SP/DIF adapter on the back plate slot.

If you don't have a Live drive and just want an SP/DIF toslink adapter on your back plate slot then
You can use these same pin number connections on the Sound Blaster Live card.

You can connect the SP/DIF Toslink port to your A/V surround sound receiver for 5.1 surround sound
using Dolby Pro logic or maybe even in true Dolby Digital.

Everything works great now.
Running Win98se.
I used this install CDROM.
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … 805&menustate=0