Sound Blaster Live! Review - Best Sound Card for Windows 98?

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[nezimar]

Sometimes it's surreal watching your channel. With all that pristine vintage hardware, I feel like I'm watching TechTV in 1999.

[ClassicalMusicOnline]

This card is a legend. I was blown away by the sound quality at that time.

[munxcorp]

I like how these cards are really cheap and plentiful.
They might be #2 to Aureals Vortex2 when it comes to 3D sound, however the fact that they can be picked up for next to nothing (when Vortex2 goes for no less than $50 these days) makes these cards really attractive.

[bamdadkhan]

just wanted to say that i'm so thankful that your channel exists and that you put out in-depth quality content. without this i don't think i'd have half as much fun with retro stuff. also your site is great for finding drivers and short to the point walkthroughs of things. fiddling with this stuff really takes me back to elementary school days and there are things i only now realise.


so all in all, a big "thank you" to you for being around, i look forward to your videos about almost anything. i know they will be professional.

[drumboy]

Hey Phil, I'm glad you gave the SB Live! a second chance. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge and expertise with us!

[Ycreak]

I'm using this card in my main pc with Linux right now! Works like a charm :D Didn't know it was that old already.

[rebeccaschade]

I had the original SB Live! back in the days. It worked fine on my Via MVP3 based motherboard as long as I made sure to have the Via 4-in-1 chipset drivers installed, but this was required for all pci sound cards. Playing Unreal with headphones and EAX was truly spine chilling.

[Xeonspec]

I loved sb live. I bought first sb live value card when i was 10 yrs old and i still have it in the box. Not only good for gaming, Many amateur musician bought it for recording and midi works.

[ManWrenching]

I REALLY think this card is awesome. You know, I STILL use these cards, they made OSX drivers for it that work to this day in existing versions of macOS, as long as you have a machine (hackintosh) with PCI ports. I bought these cards back when they were new, got the "Value" version back in the day. The full version was over $150 new, circa 1998/1999. I scored 5 of these gold Live 5.1 cards off eBay about 6 years ago when their value was rock bottom, like $3 each. The original driver package for these was the best, had all sorts of fancy sound effects in Windows 98. Every driver after that removed one feature after another, really sucked.

[phlosopher]

Good stuff, Phil. I reproduced this on my PIII Cu 1Ghz system with 98SE. After a lot of problems, I uninstalled the drivers in safe mode, leaving AudioHQ, and reinstalled w/o DOS drivers, then installed VXDs and now things are working. I noticed that the Soundfont loaded in AudioHQ is available even in MS-DOS mode, which means that DOS games which can use General MIDI at 0x300 will have access to Sountfonts, and don't have to use the bland sounding OPL2/3.

[miguelque]

I have a CT4670 with an external Digital I/O bracket. It works fine when recording music to my Minidisc player. As for choosing SB Live! cards, I'd say AVIOD SB0200 (Dell OEM), which is based on Ensoniq AudioPCI.

[ian_b]

I had two of these in one machine using modified E-MU APS drivers, for music production. Amazing card. Not just a soundcard, it was a synthesizer and sampler too. Absolutely amazing for the time. The only minor downside was the 44.1kHz, which would not stay in sync, if you really wanted that sample rate.

[WaybackTECH]

I remember when Windows 2000 started hitting the scene, Creative had a real hard time writing drivers for these SBLive cards. I think by the time they actually figured out how to code for NT, these cards were already on their way out and the Audigy was starting to become the hot stuff. I am not sure they ever did fix all of the bundled software for the Live that came on the CD to work under 2000. That year, 1999 was very chaotic, with these Live cards, Windows 2000 and the new Athlon. You want to talk about a recipe for headaches, lol ya I had it!.

[lucaspam]

You know, I had this card, the 4.1 live value, for a long, long time. I didn't knew anything about soundfonts or MIDI. I used it a lot in DOS - It was the golden age of emulation and emulators worked great under DOS. This card had some incompatibilities with some emulators. I also had problems with some games, like Ultima 7. But the card was very good with mp3 playing, it made my computer work faster. But I also recall that some DOS games sounded worse than my OPTi 931 ISA card. After experiencing ISA cards, I have mixed feelings about the SB Live. It was a good PCI card, but for old games an AWE 64 sounds better.

[retroftw]

"The video we need, but not the video we deserve!"

Thanks for the detailed walkthrough and files provided :-D

[dizzym]

I used to use the SB Live a lot back in the day. In addition to being great for games on Windows and DOS, on Linux, back before PulseAudio and ALSA dmix, its strong hardware mixing was the best way to get sound working with multiple audio streams at once without using laggy, broken mixing software like esound. This mattered a lot for Linux-native games at the time which needed memory mapped sound (basically, bit-banging-level access to the card) to sound good, so for example Doom 3 and games that use its engine like Quake 4.

[davidinark]

Just tossed one of these into a CA-10, ran the DOS driver setup, and now have a cool little pure DOS retro machine. Your videos are entertaining and informative as always! (Er, sorry my previous comment was posted as my work account, so I deleted it - haha)

[mmaxeator]

Im no audiophile, but I just disabled onboard CMI8330 ISA audio chip on my retro rig and unleashed SB Live (the OEM DELL SB0220 type with EAX) in WinME. I finnaly found the correct drivers. The sound is at least 5x better even with the crappiest speaker built in the LCD monitor

[GameplayandTalk]

This video was a live saver. Kept getting BSODs on a new Windows 98 build. I thought the last thing that could be wrong was with the sound card.. Nope, it seems the SB Live is what was causing my issues. Went through the installation steps featured in this video and it seems to be operating just fine now. Although.. DOS games when run in Windows don't seem to be recognizing the SB16 emulation, which is an issue I did not have with this card back in the day. Ah well, at least I can use the system now! Thanks for the video.

[jolesco]

I also had a SB Live card back in the late 90's to early 2000's. Used to play FastTracker II channels through EAX to get reverb etc. on the tracks. I don't remember having any issues with it, probably due to me using Win XP at the time