Soundboard installations have always been a breeze and with the Magic Sound Live! it's no different. You unscrew the case and gently position it in an empty PCI slot, screw it in there tight, put the lid back on and you're ready to boot. At boot-up Windows will detect the new hardware and prompt for drivers, which are of course included on the pack-in CD. Windows loads the drivers, detects the multiple features such as MIDI, Joystick port and so on and you'll have to reboot but then that's that.

Now we've covered the specs, time to answer the real question, is this board any good. The answer is unfortunately No. It's not a bad sound card but I found it lacking a lot of the things I've come to expect from a good PC sound card these days. First of all, while it boasts that it supports just about every 3D sound API out there I encountered nothing but problems trying to run A3D enabled software on this board, even applications with native Q3D coding sometimes didn't run well, this might of course have had something to do with the given application but regardless, it was disappointing.

The second thing, which in my eyes is far worse than not supporting all the 3D audio standards perfectly (because to be honest it doesn't really make that much of a difference in most titles) is that the sound board was incapable of playing multiple audio streams under Windows. Why these kind of capabilities haven't been implement in the board's Windows drivers puzzles me as the hardware no doubt is quite capable of supporting it. Multi stream playback is very useful in many cases, for one, playing Quake 3 with MP3 music playing in the background, or just a simple thing like hearing that "ohoh" sound ICQ makes when you get a new message while playing Mp3's in the background, neither of these things is possible with the Magic Sound Live!