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127th AES Convention Coverage (New York, NY Oct. 9-12)
PRESS RELEASE

$99 Sound Blaster Live! Value Ships Next Week

September 02, 1998

Complementing its highly successful Sound Blaster Live!, Creative Technology Ltd. (Nasdaq: CREAF) today announced its newest audio card, Sound Blaster Live! Value, at the incredible estimated street price of US$99.99. Shipping next week, the Sound Blaster Live! Value will change the way mainstream PC users experience audio - music, entertainment and games - forever. Using Creative's industry standard Environmental Audio™ technology, Sound Blaster Live! Value delivers an unmatched, incredibly real audio experience that goes beyond "Hollywood" quality audio and offers unprecedented immersive audio on the desktop.

Sound Blaster Live! Value delivers the same unparalleled quality and performance of the high-end Sound Blaster Live! Incorporating the same powerful EMU10K1 audio processor, Sound Blaster Live! Value uses Environmental Audio technology to enhance all existing audio content as well as deliver a new level of interactive gaming capability through its widely-supported open API - Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX™).

"With this Value edition offering awesome technology at a 'no-brainer' price, Creative shows that it can execute at lightning speed to meet the needs of the mass market," said Sim Wong Hoo, chairman and chief executive officer of Creative Technology Ltd. "Creative aims to rapidly bring the revolutionary Environmental Audio platform to our 60 million Sound Blaster users around the world. PC entertainment will never be the same!"

In order to enable an unparalleled level of quality at this mass market price, Creative has optimized Sound Blaster Live! Value by removing the professional-level Digital I/O card and related high-end software found in Sound Blaster Live! Sound Blaster Live! Value is a "must have" upgrade and an ideal solution for PC enthusiasts, audio enthusiasts, gamers and everyone who cares about the quality of audio they listen to from their PC.

Leveraging the effects and audio technologies developed for Hollywood by E-mu® Systems, Inc., a subsidiary of Creative, the EMU10K1™ and Environmental Audio technologies in the Sound Blaster Live! Value produce the most awesome performance and experience on the PC. These technologies have been instrumental in producing some of Hollywood's most popular soundtracks including Titanic, Independence Day, Mission Impossible and The Hunt for Red October. Musicians such as Stevie Wonder, Celine Dion, Herbie Hancock, Garth Brooks and the Chemical Brothers have used the EMU10K1 technology to compose unsurpassed CD-quality audio.**

Features of Sound Blaster Live! Value

  • Hollywood Quality Audio Re-creation: Excellent audio fidelity with a -120 dB noise floor - a level unheard of in the PC industry.
  • Powerful EMU10K1 Audio Processing Engine: Superb signal processing at 32-bit, 192 dB, 48KHz using 8-point interpolation. This smoothes the sound waveform, instantly improving any audio source including existing content, Internet audio, CD audio and WAV files.
  • Environmental Audio Technology: Enhances all existing content and audio sources in real-time including CD audio, WAV, MIDI, VCD, DVD, Internet audio, line-input and microphone.
  • Multiple Speaker Output: Built-in support for two or four analog speakers.
  • 256-Voice Music Synthesis: 256-voice capability that goes beyond the quality and performance of professional music equipment. Professional quality sample banks are included in 2MB, 4MB and 8MB configurations for music reproduction. Up to 32MB of memory for amazing SoundFont™ fidelity can be used to provide fantastic quality music synthesis.
  • Sound Blaster PCI Standard: Near-perfect Sound Blaster legacy support in a single PCI card - no need to keep a separate ISA card. Not available on any competitive audio products, the patented Sound Blaster PCI Standard includes support for previously written MS-DOS and Windows titles.
  • Broadest Software Support: The open-standard Environmental Audio API assures the broadest software support including games and applications written for Microsoft DirectSound®, DirectSound3D® and derivative technologies.
  • Software Bundle: Sound Blaster Live! Value comes bundled with Epic MegaGames' Unreal™ Special Edition, Associative Computing's Prody Parrot™, Creative Keytar ™, Creative Rhythmania, and a collection of useful applications including a Sound Blaster Live! demo, a music library of GM banks, SoundFont samples and MIDI clips.
  • Dedicated Sound Blaster Live! Website: A continuously updated Website providing the latest product news, exciting new environments, feature enhancements, software drivers, SoundFont samples, FAQ, newsgroups and much more can be found at: http://www.sblive.com/.

Complete Systems Approach To Deliver Environmental Audio Platform

To achieve a true Environmental Audio experience, Creative has introduced a complete system to deliver Environmental Audio to its customers. The system is comprised of the following components:

  • Environmental Audio Hardware - Sound Blaster Live! and Sound Blaster Live! Value both utilize the EMU10K1 chip, the most powerful audio processor chip ever designed - with 1,000 +MIPS and two million transistors.
  • Environmental Audio Software Technology includes state-of-the-art algorithms for sound effects, accurate accoustical rendering of 3D objects and its reflections in a real-life environment, as well as real-time panning and mixing of multiple sound sources using two or more speakers.
  • Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX) API for enhanced interactive gaming software.
  • Environmental Audio Speaker Systems including Cambridge SoundWorks' PCWorks™ FourPointSurround™, a four-channel audio system that is the ideal companion to the Sound Blaster Live! family. The upcoming Desktop Theater 5.1™ speaker system with built-in Dolby Digital (AC3) decoding offers an exciting Environmental Audio experience.
  • By adding Creative's PC-DVD solution, Creative is poised to deliver the most compelling interactive gaming and awesome home entertainment on the PC.
  • Live!Ware Continuous Software and Applications Upgrade providing new features, functionality and applications that can be down-loaded from the dedicated Web site (http://www.sblive.com) on an on-going basis. Live!Ware, part of Creative's Living Product program, is the subject of a separate announcement also made today.

Game Developers Support Creative's Environmental Audio Platform

To date, more than 100 top developers have signed up to support Creative's Environmental Audio Platform with its open Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX) API. The EAX API extends Microsoft's DirectSound® and DirectSound 3D®. EAX allows developers to add and tune effects for immersive acoustic environments including distance cues and reverberation. Creative's EAX API has been adopted by top developers including Electronic Arts, Epic MegaGames, DreamWorks Interactive, Rebellion, Shiny Entertainment, Rage Software and Virgin Interactive, to name a few. Expect to see exciting titles forthcoming from these and other developers in the near future.

Sound Blaster Live! Value will be shipping next week to Creative's extensive network of distributors and resellers worldwide at an estimated street price of US$99.99.

For more information, visit their web site at http://www.creative.com/.

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