Unfortunately, digital processing brought some limitations. The Sound Blaster Live! featured higher audio quality than previous Sound Blasters, as it processed the sound digitally at every stage, and because of its greater chip integration that reduced the analog signal losses of older, larger cards. The effects were written in a language similar to C, and compiled into native FX8010 object code by its compiler, fxasm. The Effect algorithms were created by a development system that integrated into Microsoft Developer Studio. This capability let users select a pre-defined listening environment from a control-panel application (concert hall, theater, headphones, etc.) It also provided hardware-acceleration for EAX, Creative's environmental audio technology. It provided real-time postprocessing effects (such as reverb, flanging, or chorus). The integrated FX8010 was a 32-bit programmable processor with 1 kilobyte of instruction memory.

This was possible at this point because systems were being equipped with far more RAM than previously, and PCI offered far faster and more efficient data transfer than the old ISA bus. Ī major design change from its predecessor (the EMU8000) was that the EMU10K1 used system memory, accessed over the PCI bus, for the wavetable samples, rather than using expensive on-board memory. The EMU10K1 featured hardware acceleration for DirectSound and EAX 1.0 and 2.0 ( environmental audio extensions), along with a high-quality 64-voice MIDI sample-based synthesizer and an integrated FX8010 DSP chip for real-time digital audio effects. Manufactured in a 0.35 µm 3-metal-layer CMOS process, it is a 2.44 million transistor ASIC rated at 1000 MIPS.

Sound Blaster Live! (August 1998) saw the introduction of the EMU10K1 audio processor. Sound Blaster Live! Value / Compaq / Intel / IBM / NEC

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