The Creative Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 is the latest sound card from Creative Labs, the company that has dominated the consumer-level computer audio card market for most of the last decade. The 5.1 refers to one of the enhancements: Dolby Digital 5.1 channel decoding. The other is the addition of Live Drive IR.
The Live Drive is an input/output panel that slips into a standard 5.25 inch drive bay at the front of your computer. Its great virtue is it sits where you can actually use it instead of at the rear where the audio ports are conventionally located. It positively bristles with connections: two sets of digital audio inputs and outputs, one optical the other coaxial, one set of stereo RCA line inputs, a 6.5mm microphone line input, and a 6.5mm stereo headphone socket.
The standard SoundBlaster connections are retained on the PCI card itself (this connects with the Live Drive via a ribbon cable). These are front and rear speakers, microphone and line inputs, and a combination centre channel/subwoofer output, switchable to SPDIF digital output.
Dolby Digital 5.1, sometimes called AC3, is an MP3-type lossy compression system except that it provides from 1 to 5.1 discrete channels of sound. The Platinum 5.1 will deliver a Dolby Digital bitstream to an external decoder via any of the digital outputs, or it can be switched to decode the bitstream internally.
How well does it work? Fairly well, but not quite as well as Id hoped. First, a minor gripe: while Creatives bundled player, Play Center 2, happily plays back Dolby Digital computer files (these have an extension of .ac3), its File|Open filters dont, unaccountably, include .ac3.
More importantly, there appears to be no way of adjusting the speaker delay times (short of physically moving the speakers so they are equidistant from you). This is a bad omission because 360 degree sound staging depends more upon the arrival time at the ear of the different channels than even their relative volumes.
As a straight audio card, the Platinum is fairly standard. It is limited to 16-bit resolution and 48kHz sampling, and remains excessively noisy, both on the outputs and inputs. The cards various analogue inputs, even with nothing connected, have a noise floor of around -80dB. The front panel microphone input, with the volume turned up to the maximum, comes in at a poor -58dB. Even the SPDIF and other digital inputs, which should produce no noise at all, always add a random signal.
Despite this, the Dolby Digital decoding and the front panel connections, especially a real headphone socket and RCA analogue inputs, move the consumer sound card standard forward one more step and keep Creative as the one the others have to copy.