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Is Aureal Dead?

Posted by Cliff on from the reports-don't-look-to-be-exaggerated dept.

nuntius asks: "I went over to Aureal's Homepage to check for any news drivers, but all I saw was talk of the resignation of all senior staff/executives and talk of Chapter 11. What's happening? When did I miss this?" Looking at the state of Aureal's site, and the plethora of 404's, the obvious conclusion is, at the very least, that things are not going well. It's a shame. Aureal looked to be doing some pretty neat things for the state of Linux Multimedia. Can anyone shed some light on what is going on and whether the company has a future?

5 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. Guillemot Buy-out? by zarmok · · Score: 3
    Read on Bluesnews the other day:

    Vortex of Sound has obtained a letter from Oakland's Bankruptcy Court that seems to suggest that Guillemot wishes to purchase what's left of Aureal, the beleaguered audio hardware company. If it goes through, this wouldn't be the first time Guillemot bailed out a company in danger of going under - they previously purchased Hercules and Thrustmaster.

    -------

    http://www.vortexofsound.com/news.htm

    is the URL.. but I got a DNS lookup fail :-\

    RB

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    --- RB
  2. Aureal is all but dead by mmaddox · · Score: 3

    4 of Aureal's board members walked out in March of this year, along with all 8 of the company's senior executives. Two weeks later, the company filed for Chapter 11. Now, although Aureal has recently re-filled these management positions, and contends that the Chapter 11 filing was for the purposes of reorganization of their financial affairs, the similar actions of companies like SyQuest and Adlib (remember them?) and their subsequent demise lead me to think that this is about it for Aureal.

    This is a shame, too. Good products can fail because of poor management...an axiom that many of us geeks should learn and remember.

    Although the company appears all but dead, I would hazard a recommendation that anyone looking to buy a sound card avoid the purchase of any Aureal or Aureal-based products.

    --

    What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?

    1. Re:Aureal is all but dead by FigWig · · Score: 4

      Good products can fail because of poor management

      Not to mention frivolous lawsuits by behemoths like Creative. Those bastards were so use to sitting on their laurels that they tried to crush the superior technology that Aureal developed. The Vortex chip is awesome, far superior to the EAX system that is on the SBLives. It actually does wave tracing to calculate 3d sounds, while EAX just adds reverb and other cheesy effects. EAX can sound pretty good if done right, but A3D sounds awesome. If only the Linux drivers would be open sourced (I think the web site promised this before the company fell apart), I would be a happy man.

      --
      Scuttlemonkey is a troll
  3. Aureal Files by maggard · · Score: 2
    Though their web-site has been butchered the FTP servers and their files remain active. The beta Linux drivers are there as are the beta Win2K drivers. The Win9x drivers and developers kits also remain.

    The interesting question is if someone does buy Aureal's technology will they open it (and expect to recoup on hardware sales) or at least license it to developers who can continue to support it.

    --
    I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
  4. Sourceforge Project by Grandal · · Score: 2

    A Sourceforge project has been created to hack on the drivers (to update them to work with new kernels, etc. until new ownership does something or the source is released).

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/aureal


    "Your mother sent me here to kill you..."

    --
    "Your mother sent me here to kill you..."
    - "Bill Cosby - Himself"