December 21st, 1999

[12:30 PM] One Of The Most Important Announcements This Year: SoundBlaster Live! Coming To The Mac by Oliver Dueck Creative Technology, best known for their Sound Blaster line of sound cards, announced that it will start to offer Mac OS compatible products. Initially, the company will offers Mac users its Sound Blaster Live! line, along with its NOMAD and WebCam Go hardware products. Creative Technology Ltd. today announced broad support for the Macintosh platform. Creative's popular line of Sound Blaster Live! audio solutions and Personal Digital Entertainment (PDE) Internet Solutions - which include the NOMAD line of portable audio devices and the WebCam Go line of portable PC cameras - will be the first in a series of products from Creative to support the Mac. Creative will demonstrate these products at the upcoming Macworld Expo, January 5 -8, in San Francisco, CA, at the Moscone Convention Center in Booth 2339. "The success of the Macintosh line of desktop solutions, coupled with the success of Creative's Sound Blaster Live! audio cards, Nomad portable audio digital players and the WebCam Go product line, make Mac support a natural for Creative," said Craig McHugh, president of Creative Labs, Inc. "Multiple-platform support is the next step in our long-term PDE strategy. We are focused on bringing a high-quality entertainment experience to mainstream computer users. Mac desktop solutions - with their elegant, consumer friendly design and engineering - complement our goal perfectly." The award-winning Sound Blaster Live! audio solutions are designed to provide the ultimate in digital audio quality and the company's popular Environmental Audio for an enhanced entertainment experience with music, games, MP3 downloads and other Internet audio solutions. As part of Creative's initiative to support multiple operating systems, the company has established a dedicated team of engineering and R&D resources. "Cross platform support from PC entertainment companies certainly bodes well for all PC consumers," said Tim Bajarin, president at Creative Strategies, Inc. "Support from PC entertainment companies underscores the potential and great appeal of the Power Mac and iMac desktop solutions for the home computing enthusiast." Direct pricing and availability have not yet been announced. The Mac Observer will be watching this development closely. You can find more information on the SoundBlaster Live!, WebCam Go, and NOMAD product lines at the company's web site. The Mac Observer Spin: This is great news for Mac users. Ever since the Mac II of 1987, we have enjoyed high-quality stereo sound out of the box, and we never failed to remind our PC using friends of the fact. Unfortunately, subsequent advances in sound technology mean that Mac users have been left behind while the PC market offers literally dozens of sound card choices. Although some Macs have included additional sound hardware such as a built-in subwoofer or SRS surround sound, no third party solutions have existed until now. That means that Mac users could not enjoy features like true (rather than virtual) surround sound. This announcement is especially important now that many Macs sport DVD drives. DVD movies offer very high quality 5.1 channel Dolby Digital soundtracks, and without a sound card, you have to make do with 2 channel stereo sound. One of the advantage of using your computer to watch movies, besides the enhanced resolution of your monitor, is that it is a lot less expensive to purchase a DVD drive and sound card than it is to buy a Dolby Digital receiver and DVD player to hook up to your television. The big question is, will Creative successfully port its EAD API to the Mac OS? Games that support EAD have great 3D sound. Naturally, Creative will have to tout this technology to Mac game developers. On the PC side, over 80 games currently support EAD. If some of these games get ported to the Mac OS, we can expect EAD support to be brought over as well. This ties into something we have long advocated at The Mac Observer. Game development, as well as the entire gaming experience, on the Mac is key to the long term growth of the platform. This is important to all Mac users, even those that do not play many games. For the first time, Mac users have access to a consumer sound card that greatly enhances (and let there be no mistaking the fact that the SoundBlaster Live! is the finest consumer sound card on the market) the gaming experience for the Mac. This will translate into more consumer Mac sales to gamers. Of course, it does need to be said that this card will not work in an iMac which does not have PCI slots. Still, with the low end professional line of product from Apple priced cheaper than they have ever been, we think that many Mac users will welcome this move from Creative. Mac support for the WebCam Go, an inexpensive digital camera that doubles as a video conference camera, and NOMAD, a portable MP3 player, is also welcome. This shows that Creative is not simply making a halfhearted attempt at entering the Mac market. Bringing us three hardware lines at once is a commendable achievement, and we applaud Creative for doing so. Creative Labs