A welcome update to the Sound Blaster that can deliver perceptibly better audio than onboard chips, but it goes beyond most people’s needs for PC audio.

Creative's best efforts in desktop audio slide their way into the side of a laptop.

An inexpensive audio interface that lifts the podcasting fidelity bar out of the world of cheap plastic microphones.

Better sound for your laptop from Creative, plus the little white lies about its heritage exposed.

Anyone who has heard of the idea of noise-cancelling headphones would agree the idea sounds terrific.

If soundcards were supermodels the X-Fi would be the Claudia Schiffer of the model world. Or maybe Jennifer Garner, since our first hands-on look at this card can be succinctly summarised as 'kicks major booty'.

With the release of version 4.1, Windows users finally get a look at Apple's iTunes software on home ground. From the brushed aluminium and ice blue of the Mac OS branding, to the organisation of the interface, it feels almost alien in a Windows environment.

When we last looked at the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (the Platinum Ex, June 2003) we were highly impressed by the soundcard and its many functions, but felt that there was perhaps too much on offer, leaving you with many unwanted, unused and unwarranted inclusions.

The RADEON 9600 is a funny beast. Technologically it is quite advanced, although it suffers from slightly limited memory bandwidth.

The idea of using your PC as the central control point for your home theatre has been bandied about for some time.

To please audiophiles on a budget at $80 its one of the cheapest surround-capable cards available.

The original Audigy brought ASIO drivers, SB1394 (IEEE 1394) and EAX Advanced HD to the masses, but it was criticised because some people felt betrayed by the 24-bit 96kHz specification, which referred to the DACs rather than the sampling rate.

sound card

Sound Card

Creative has raised the stakes again with the Audigy, this time from 16- to 24-bit sampling.

Four USB ports on the rack also turn it into a useful powered hub

The SB Live! is one of the most commonly used cards, and as such, is a good yardstick for the performance of the new generation of sound cards.

The concept of sticking all that ever-so-sensitive analog circuitry into a box that resides outside the electrically noisy confines of a computer seems conceptually sensible.

Creative has enjoyed a long reign as the driving force in consumer-grade PC audio for the better part of a decade.

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.