Just when we thought Creative Labs could not possibly cram any more features into its soundboards, the company surprised us once again with the Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1. In addition to the company's typically over-the-top software and accessories bundles, Creative's new flagship offering boasts the most comprehensive I/O capabilities we've seen in a mid-priced sound board, as well as an onboard multi-channel decoder that supports two-, four-, five- and six-cabinet speaker systems, 5.1 Dolby Digital DVD soundtracks and virtually all popular four-channel games.

The downside of all this flexibility is a plethora of input and output connectors that could not possibly be crammed into a single back plane panel. Like last year's Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, the Platinum 5.1 solves this problem with an outboard Live! Drive I/O box that mounts into an open 13.34cm drive bay. This clever approach provides convenient front-panel access to the board's bi-directional S/PDIF coaxial and optical connectors, headphone and mic jacks, volume controls, multiple analog input connectors for external audio devices, and discrete MIDI IN and OUT jacks. This latest version of the Live! Drive also contains an infrared receiver that lets you use the Platinum 5.1's handy wireless remote to launch applications, play CDs, and adjust settings.

Installing the Platinum 5.1 can take nearly an hour, but most setup tasks are well documented and straightforward. Physically installing the board and Live! Drive requires just a few cable connections, and the Platinum's robust Plug-and-Play setup routines involve almost no user intervention. Although consuming about 200MB of disk space, the board's basic driver and utility setup procedure is totally automated and executes from a single self-executing CD. Loading optional Creative applications requires a second disc and a few additional keystrokes, but even these tasks are fairly simple. During our hands-on evaluation, the Platinum 5.1's delivered outstanding output quality, regardless of whether our sound source was MIDI, DVD, audio CD, WAV file or an external analog or digital player. Analog noise levels were quite low, and digital noise was virtually undetectable. Four-channel games like Sierra Studios' Half-Life performed flawlessly on our 450MHz Pentium II test bed, and playing flashy DVDs like The Matrix and Men in Black produced jaw-dropping surround sound through our Cambridge SoundWorks Desktop Theater 5.1 DTT3500 Digital loudspeakers.

The Platinum's powerful EMU10K1 digital signal processor (DSP) chip provides hardware acceleration for DirectSound and DirectSound 3D games, programs that use Creative's EAX 3D-audio technology, and a broad range of real-time effects that include reverb, chorus, pitch shifting and ring modulation. The DSP also serves as a powerful MIDI synthesizer chip that offers 64 hardware and 1,024 software voices, 128 GM/GS-compatible instruments, 48 MIDI channels and 32MB of rewriteable wavetable sample memory. It had no problem playing complex orchestral MIDI files arranged with more than 48 voices, and the board's bundled Creative PlayCenter 2 application ripped MP3 and WMA files at speeds far greater than real-time and at sampling rates as high as 320Kbps.

Our one beef was the board's limited hardcopy documentation. Despite a robust online Help facility, the printed manual covers little more than setup procedures and hardware specifications. Figuring out how to use some of the handheld remote's less intuitive features or how to configure the board for multi-channel output sometimes required a trial-and-error effort.

In addition to a generous selection of accessories, that includes a microphone, audio and data cables, batteries for the handheld remote, and even a power-cable splitter for the Live! Drive, the Platinum 5.1 ships with a huge array of Creative application software, control panels and toolbars, media players, demos, utilities, and games. The package includes offerings as diverse as an onscreen virtual guitar, Internet telephony software, a music-visualisation program, a MiniDisc/DAT recorder, graphical mixers, karaoke software, a text reader, and several voice-navigation applications. More robust applications include Steinberg's powerful Cubasis VST MIDI/audio sequencer, ReCycle rhythm composer and WaveLab soundfile editor, as well as the latest version of Creative's Vienna SoundFont Studio, which lets you create your own MIDI wavetable instruments and organise them into downloadable banks. If all this is not enough, Creative also throws in tens of megabytes of pre-defined MIDI instruments, as well as popular games like Infogrames' Unreal Tournament and Eidos' Thief II and Deus Ex.

If all this isn't enough, Creative also supports the Platinum 5.1 with the company's Live!Ware continuous upgrade program, which lets you download free driver and DSP upgrades that add features and support for new standards.

We were knocked out by the Platinum 5.1. It is one of the most powerful and flexible sound cards ever released for the Windows platform. Learning to take full advantage of all its features may require a bit of effort. Nevertheless, it is nice to know that they are there.

Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1