Over the next few months we will learn more about the EMU10K1 and whether or not 8 3d hardware streams are sufficient for next generation games. Who knows, perhaps some of the EMU10K1's unharnessed horsepower can be channelled to address these concerns. While this is very true, especially because of the great environmental audio effects, I still want to point out that many of these comments are coming from people who had never heard Unreal on the Monster Sound Original or MX200. I did alot of my testing on A3D enhanced games. PCI helps the sound card by improving data transfers, which are slower on ISA slots.
Speakers are an issue with performance on the Live.
This is not surprising, since Creative has been consistently dissing the effectiveness of 2 speaker surround. Right now this card will run everything thing you throw at it meaning almost 100 percent backward Sound Blaster compatibility with Sound Blaster 16 combatibility in a DOS box and Sound Blaster Pro compatibility in real mode. A3D 2.0 applications will only run in full feature hardware accelerated mode on Aureal certified A3D systems. On other non-certified systems, especially those that claim A3D compatibility but are not Aureal certified, applications will not run positional 3D audio . However, given Creative's marketing ability, I expect many developers to support both APIs.