NEW YORK — Creative Labs Inc. demoed SoundBlaster Live! here recently and guess what — the new audio card is not 100 percent SoundBlaster compatible.

SoundBlaster Live! was designed from the ground up with the primary goal of producing realistic sound. Customers also wanted the card to reside on the PCI bus, said Micah Stroud, audio product marketing manager for Creative Labs (Milpitas, Calif.). But while the PCI bus offers new levels of audio performance, Stroud said that 100 percent SoundBlaster-compatibility requires use of the ISA bus.

The EMU10K1, a 1,000-Mips DSP developed by E-mu Systems Inc., a subsidiary of Creative Labs, aids the improved audio performance of SoundBlaster Live! The multiple hardware resources of the EMU10K1 are controlled by what Stroud called KLIW, a "kind of long word instruction word." The chip uses a 48-kHz audio sample rate and a 32-bit fixed-point DSP.

The sound-processing and special-effects engine can manipulate and combine audio signals from multiple sources, including SPIF inputs and outputs, three digital I/O ports, separate ports for joy sticks and MIDI, and an I²S interface. It incorporates a variety of 3-D audio models, including head-related transfer functions, inter-aural timed delays, transaural cross-talk cancellation, Doppler and reverberation effects. Preset environments on SoundBlaster Live! include caves, halls, arenas, underwater and a variety of other audio effects intended to add audio realism to an interactive PC game.

These effects and others, such as occlusion — in which a moving object momentarily passes in front of a sound generator — utilize different processing capabilities, Stroud said. Rather than underutilize the power-hungry processor, the KLIW instructions parallelize and sequence the DSP's resources for the tasks at hand. As with VLIW processors, the EMU10K1 depends on software coding, Stroud said, and is 10 to 15 percent hardware and 85 to 90 percent software.

The device cannot handle Dolby AC-3 decoding or other FFT-dependent operations, Stroud said. End users seeking those operations are steered toward the DeskTop Theater 5.1 from Cambridge Soundworks Inc., another subsidiary of Creative Labs. The $299 DeskTop Theater solution includes an AC-3 decoder and six powered speakers, including a subwoofer. While SoundBlaster Live! embodies 3-D audio virtualization algorithms, the company believes the best effects will be obtained with a full six-speaker surround-sound environment.

Special effects instructions on SoundBlaster Live! embody the Windows Device Model for streaming audio and video data, and will likely be embodied in Microsoft's DirectX version 7, Stroud said. Creative Labs is a participant in the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group (IA-SIG), and has submitted its programmers' interface for Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX) for consideration as the standard. EAX is intended to be an open API for special audio effects, and may be downloaded from the Creative Labs Web site.

Despite of the early success of Aureal Semiconductor's 3-D algorithm, computer game developers do not want to utilize a proprietary API, Stroud said. Microsoft's API could shorten the development time of a 3-D software game to a matter of weeks, he said. Developers Bungi, Accolade, Fox and Epic are early users of the SoundBlaster Live! EAX, he said. If the IA-SIG endorses the EAX property sets, Stroud expects Microsoft to use it for the next version of DirectX.

"We wanted something compelling for the listener, but not hard for the programmer," Stroud said. "All this power doesn't mean a thing unless you can get software guys to write for it."