Creative Redefines Sound Card Market with Internet-Enriched Sound Blaster Family

- New Sound Blaster Audio Cards to Include Internet Audio, Browsing and Communications Tools -

17th September 1996 - Creative Labs, the leading provider of multimedia products for the PC, announced at its annual European Technology Forum in Marbella a new range of audio products. The company has redefined the sound card market by enhancing its award-winning Sound Blaster family of audio cards with powerful Internet audio capabilities. Creative's industry standard audio cards are now bundled with Internet tools to enable multimedia-rich entertainment, business and Internet applications.

Creative's INTERNETedT Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster 32 and AWE 32 sound cards are aimed at home PC users, gamers, musicians and also business users looking to add audio features into presentations. Each card now includes Microsoft's Internet Explorer for browsing; Creative WebPhone for local rate phone calls worldwide; and Progressive Network's RealAudio player for playing back stored real time news and radio intercast over the Internet. The high-end AWE32 also includes 3D Positional Audio and the latest Vienna 2.0 for Win 95.

"By including Internet tools with Sound Blaster, we're continuing in our strategy to make the Internet experience easily accessible and more rewarding to all of our customers," said Mike Chandler, Sound Blaster audio marketing manager at Creative Labs.

Creative has added these Internet applications at no additional cost to the consumer, making the entire range now even greater value. Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP, Sound Blaster 32 PnP and Sound Blaster 16 PnP have estimated street prices of Ł169, Ł109 and Ł85 respectively.

Features And Benefits
The new Internet tools provide the following features and benefits:

Creative WebPhone - Provides single-line, long distance, international phone calls without at local rates and unlimited talk time. It also supports real-time, full-duplex communication, voicemail, caller ID and call hold/mute/block.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 2.0 - A full featured browser with built-in Internet audio support.

Progressive Network's RealAudio Player - Plays 'live' and on-demand, streaming audio over the Internet. Eliminates the need to download audio and playback off-line. With the RealAudio player the user can easily listen to broadcast news, entertainment and speeches from around the world.

Industry standard audio - The Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP and Sound Blaster 32 PnP deliver wavetable audio based on the EMU8000 from E-mu Systems, Inc., with real instrument sounds for a more immersive audio experience. All Sound Blaster sound cards including the Sound Blaster 16 PnP, provide CD quality, industry standard Sound Blaster PC audio.

SoundFont Technology - The Sound Blaster AWE32 PnP, and the Sound Blaster 32 with a memory upgrade, provide a solution for customising PC sound. SoundFonts provide an easy-to-use format for creating new instrument sounds, different voices and special effects for unique compositions and great personalised sound for the PC user.

About Creative ...
Creative Technology, Ltd., is the world's leading provider of multimedia hardware and solutions for personal computers, including sound, graphics, communications and video conferencing products with its Sound Blaster technology adopted as the world-wide standard sound platform for PCs.

Founded in 1983, Creative Technology's corporate headquarters are based in Singapore with international subsidiaries and affiliate offices in China, Europe, South Korea, Australia, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and the US. The European head office is based at Ruscombe near Twyford in the UK. In January 1994, Creative opened its European operations and technical centre in Dublin, which provides telephone support for European customers in six languages. Creative Labs Europe has grown eight-fold in the past three years with subsidaries in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, UK, Benelux, Denmark and Sweden. The European operation currently employs around 450 staff.