Right out of the box, the Live! Value looks like any other sound card, but looks can be deceiving. The Live! Value has four plug-ins on the card labeled Line In, Microphone In, Line Out (for front speakers), Line Out (for rear speakers) as well as the Joystick/Midi 15-pin connector. But what makes the Live! Value such a powerful card, is the EMU10K1 processor. At an estimated 2 million transistors, the EMU10K1 can do 1,000 instructions per second! With the EMU10K1's use of 8 point interpolation, combined with 32-bit, 48kHz rates, the Live! Value is able to produce very smooth and clear sound. Although the Live! Value is geared more for a four speaker setup, it can use a traditional two speaker setup. My personal recommendation is to use a four speaker setup, because when you have a good quality sound card such as the Live! Value, you don't want to ruin it by having an el-cheapo two speaker setup.

After I installed it into my homebuilt, I was very pleased to find that the Live! Value plug-ins were color coded (Especially since I have the Cambridge SoundWorks FourPoint Surround Speaker Set). I was quickly able to plug the green plug into the green plug-in on the Live! Value for the front speakers, and for the rear speakers, I repeated the procedure, except the plug-in was black for the rear speakers. Unlike the Cambridge SoundWorks FourPoint Surround Speaker Set, Creative actually included plenty of documentation, and explained the setup and features in an easy to understand way. Now came the part where I pop that CD in my CD-ROM drive to continue on to the software installation. When I started up my homebuilt, Windows 98 recognized the Live! Value right away and proceeded to update my system with the Live! Value drivers. When I put the installation CD in the drive, up came a options menu. Personally, I like this feature because I feel it's good to install what you want, and what you don't want, but to the person who likes everything to be installed all at once, this may be an annoyance. I chose to install everything, overall the installation took less than 10 minutes.