The Specs

Now let's get to the heart of the matter, or matter. The processing power of the SBLive comes from E-mu's10K1 DSP, which Creative claims is the most powerful audio processor ever, boasting over 1000 MIPS. Diamond's MX300 gets its muscle from Aureal's next-generation Vortex 2 chip, claiming 600-800 hardware MIPS (which they are quick to point out differ considerably from the "DSP MIPS" cited by Creative). Each card supports speaker arrays, 3D-positional audio, and stress the importance of accurately recreating the acoustic environment of the game. How they go about this is where the differences begin. Here are the basic specs on each card:

Sound Blaster Live!
96 DMA Channels (64 for output, 32 for effects)
64 DirectSound Channels
32 DirectSound3D Channels
64 Hardware Wavetable voices
448 Software Wavetable voices (depending on CPU)
8-point Sample Rate Conversion
Real-time DSP effects
Wall Occlusions introduced in EAX 2.0 (early 1999)
Object Obstructions introduced in EAX 2.0 (early 1999)

Monster Sound MX300
96 DMA Channels
92 DirectSound Channels
76 DirectSound3D Channels
76 A3D Channels
16 A3D 2.0 Direct Path + 60 Reflection Channels
64 Hardware Wavetable voices
256 Software Wavetable voices
26-point Sample Rate Conversion
Wall Occlusions via A3D 2.0
Wall Reflections via A3D 2.0
Realtime Doppler shift