Now to the good part! My test would be with a music CD. The reason I opted to do the test with a music CD rather than with a game, is because of so many different games on the market and very few of them, to my knowledge, support the EAX standard. I put it in, the Creative PlayCenter came up and started playing the first track. It was unbelievable how crisp and clear the sound was! After I read in my manual about the Environmental Audio Extensions preset environments, I tried a couple of those, but the one that struck me was the Auditorium environment. One word, AMAZING! It really did make me feel like I was in an Auditorium listening to the songs. I spent hours messing with the different preset environments, and my conclusion is that the sound is definitely better with the different EAX environments.

This is another area that Creative did a good job in. They included a complete software bundle to make the Live! Value even more productive. They include PlayCenter which is a multimedia player that can play many different types of files. But I mostly use it as my CD player. Like most companies today, Creative includes a taskbar, that let's you easily select different programs that are included with the Live! Value. Sometimes the Creative Launcher can be very useful, but other times it can be annoying. You can choose to disable it if you wish. They also include something called AudioHQ, which lets you customize and control different aspects of the Live! Value. Such as 3D audio, SoundFont samples, digital effects, audio mixer and Environmental Audio settings. Prody Parrot is a program that let's you perform many Windows tasks with single voice commands. And he does keep you company too, but mostly this was pretty useless for me. Creative Rhythmania allows you to create different types of music along with music sequence presets. Creative WaveStudio is a .WAV file editing program that lets you play and record .WAV files and also lets you convert them into SoundFont samples. I found WaveStudio to be quite useful as I recorded many waves. And finally, Creative Keytar mainly teaches you how to play different types of guitars via keyboard. You pluck the strings on the virtual guitar by using your keyboard, which is pretty cool since I don't know how to play the guitar. Pretty decent lineup of software from Creative.

As an alternative to Aureal's A3D 3D Audio APi, that all the other manufacturer's use, Creative decided to come up with their own 3D Audio APi, called Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX). Software support for EAX is rapidly increasing almost everyday. EAX was designed and based around 3D objects and real-life environments. Take for instance if your in Unreal, and your in a room that only has three walls and your standing on a boardwalk, and you fire your gun. With EAX enabled, (Unreal uses EAX) the sound of the gun will echo off of the walls of whatever room your in depending on the thickness of the walls, and whether your in a small or large room. Another example would be if your listening to a music CD, with the different EAX environments depending on what kind of room your in such as if you were in the living room, and you had the living room environment on, it would sound like if it were playing in a living room. Again, it depends on what environment you are in as well as what is selected. It definitely adds a new sense of realism to whatever you maybe listening to or whatever game you may play. Another tidbit on EAX is that Creative has worked with Microsoft to have the EAX APi incorporated with the DirectSound APi, so that will further enhance the realism of whatever type game you may be playing.