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The Future of Creative and the Sound Card Market
Hanners writes "Elite Bastards investigates the future of Creative Labs, and in particular their PC sound card business, which is facing a number of big challenges during 2007. Windows Vista has seen some large changes to the driver model required by audio devices, the abilities of on-board solutions have improved somewhat, and the amount of competition in the market place has ballooned. So what does all of this mean for the traditional leader of this market? As well as outlining all of these issues, they speculate as to what measures Creative may need to take to thrive once more in this changing market."
Changed a mobo and it's limited on pci slots... the onboard sound (not even sure what chipset) was picked up by ubuntu and works just dandy.
2 words that would make me go out and pick up a Creative card...
Linux Drivers
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I'd still be their customer if the SB Audigy 2 I purchased didn't pop and click all the time. Apparently it's some kind of issue with nforce chipsets, but nobody can figure out exactly what, and the most common fix is to move it to a different slot. I ended up taking it out and using the on-board sound and it's just as good. It sits on top of my PC as a reminder that more expensive doesn't necessarily mean better.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Vista users should have working drivers by 2011.
Their horribly overprived, underwhelming and bloated products are the reason they are facing tough times. Also their insistence on internal resampling to 48KHz of any digital input. And the fact that they used to buy their competitors to get rid of them (aureal anyone?).
as an ex-employee I hope the competition eats them up and they go away.
They're only the "leader" because they have no significant competition in the after-market add-on card market. Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.
Question everything
Since they are moving to Nvidia style drivers, as opposed to the open source drivers they had before.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I bought an SB Live value edition, about 8 years ago, and have used it in every rig I've built since. I've seen nothing come along to make me want to upgrade. In fact, the card isn't used right now - I'm using onboard sound on my current rig, with s/pdif out.
Why would I ever buy another sound card? Would anyone but an audiophile care? I have all the surround sound I need right now.
I know the latest round have onboard ram to "speed up gameing 2 da xtreme", but the numbers dont bear that out - IIRC, only Quake 4 took advantage of it when I checked, and hardly showed any noticable performance gain.
Really, what can they offer me, besides gimmicky stuff?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Creative produces bad drivers and bad software. Your expensive soundcard works badly out of the box, eating your memory, crashing your computer.
And Creative soon stops to update them. Your expensive soundcard still works badly, for years. No updated drivers. If you want new drivers, buy a brand new soundcard (ie: trash your "Live! 1" or "Live! 5.1" to buy an "Audigy" or a "X-fi").
And Creative soon stops them at all (ie: no Vista drivers). And your expensive soundcard can now go to the trash. Use your motherboard's audio: at least, it works.
I will never buy any Creative product. Never.
-- Rastignac was here.
This is why I wrote this journal entry over a month ago (and is STILL pending to be published) http://slashdot.org/~AkumaKuruma/journal/163390/
Once upon a time motherboards didn't have onboard hard drive controllers. Or, if you want to be more recent, RAID-enabled controllers. There were lots of companies fighting and making really good RAID solutions (as well as some bottom-of-the-barrel companies making lousy solutions). Nowadays I'd be hard pressed to find a new modern motherboard without RAID capabilities.
Does no one buy the add-on cards anymore? Well, no, the super high end has amazing 12-way hardware RAID cards that would make the freebie RAID weep.
But, freebie RAID is good enough for most users. I suspect it's the same for sound cards.
Motherboard sound isn't that great, but who has really great computer speakers anyway? What ordinary user even swapped his speakers from the craptastic freebies that came with his Dell?
There will always be a market for sound cards. While they may whine and kick and scream about it because of how hard it is to please the professional audio crowd, that's where it's heading.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Creative would have to be one of, if not the most evil of PC hardware manufacturers.
They are driven purely by their marketing Joes, and not by customer demands, or innovative tech.
You only need to read up on the happenings with Aureal to see the lengths they will go to.
Even after Creative bought out Aureal, none of Aureal's the superior tech made it into Creative products.
The day Creative looses thier hold over the soundcard market, is the day real 3D soundcard innovation will start.
Ran fiber optics from Tivo and DVD player into it for full digital sound against Logitech digital surrounds in my office. Fantastic sound, tons of controls.
Multimedia machine now dual boots Vista........
Audigy 4 Pro reduced to steaming pile of garbage. If you touch the mixer, raise or lower volume, sound goes away and doesnt come back without a reboot. Fiber inputs no longer work, nor does digital coax input. Surround, what do you think? GONE, bitches.
Every boot into Vista comes with the suspense of whether there will be sound or not.
Creative had YEARS to work on Vista drivers. I will never buy another product from them.
Hopefully the distribution of something other than the worst drivers ever created will be a part of their future.
That was what, mid to late 90s? Since then onboard sound chips have been far more than enough for an average user, lately they've been getting to a level that would be good for some of the more audiophile users (full 5.1 or better support, spdif or optical out, etc.)
The only market creative has left are gamers and a small segment of amature musicians who want the inputs of their breakout boxes. I say a small segment, because pros will realize there is much better specialized equipment for that.
They need to seriously innovate and refocus on their customers to grab the market back.
The last time I used a sound card was the Soundblaster Live, at least 4 years ago. Back when SB Live + VIA 686 chipset = hard disk errors. Due to driver hassles and the fact that onboard sound was finally up to snuff, I ditched Creative and have been using onboard sound ever since. Performance nuts claim that onboard sound overhead eats up a couple percent of your CPU, but this hasn't been a perceptible loss to me. Note that I'm only hooked up to a couple mid-quality speakers and a sub. If I was doing surround sound with spdif or opticial or whatnot, I might consider using an Audigy. Maybe.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
All they have to do is find somebody to sue. Isn't that how things work these days?
Sadly, Creative's "professional" division (AKA E-Mu) didn't fare well after the purchase - their lineup of hardware samplers and synths floundered in the early 2000s due to the availability of quite credible software synthesizers. emu.com still produces a handful of "mid-range" professional sound cards that share the same core chipset as many of Creative's cheaper efforts. Unfortunately, they no longer have market advantage in that segment and the E-Mu name has been sullied by their association with Creative Labs (the "Sound Blaster legacy). That puts Creative in a tough spot because decent quality sound is now definitely a commodity product. They've already passed the point of including "silly" features - 7.1 SuperWOWHyperCool sound with 1024 voices of synth playback, etc. The highly profitable soundcard era is long gone and their mp3 player lineup is now being sold at cut rate prices at Wal-Mart. That can't be good for the bottom line.
How about Diamond which has been making sound cards about as long as Creative and how about the high end market with companies such as M-Audio?
The changes in Vista completely bypass any sound card's hardware acceleration. The only way to use it is to use the OpenAL API instead of Direct Sound or other default Windows APIs. Since many games already use OpenAL, I don't see this as a big issue.
Most people who buy just because the box says "great sound" won't hear the difference (although they might think they do) and those who actually care about this will make sure they play OpenAL enabled titles.
In addition to all the other problems in Vista, the audio driver model has removed any/all support for hardware acceleration of sound. This isn't exactly the best solution in my opinion because many older systems with AC '97 sound don't work as well anymore. Case in point, my Dell M60 laptop with a Centrino 2.0GHz and integrated Soundmax audio used to be able to play raw full-res HDTV clips using hardware accelerate with processor cycles to spare. Under Vista, the combination of crap video drivers and complete removal of audio acceleration means that disabling sound gives me just enough horsepower to skip every 5th frame instead of every 2nd frame. As far as I'm concerned, I'm sticking with XP.
Drivers that worked would be nice. Hardware that didn't freeze would help. Finally, sound cards should be heard and not seen: They should ditch all the extra garbage they install. Look, I bought a stupid little sound card, it's not like that bit of phenolic and silicon is the centerpiece, the very *core* of my PC experience. Yet the bloatware certainly thinks it should be and insists on putting startup junk in my face, installing processes that God only knows what they do, and (I have vague memories of:) calling home to Mom to update itself.
I stopped buying Creative once it was clear they weren't going to support SMP systems anytime soon (heh, hyperthreading *forced* them to, finally), and that any improvements in their stuff was just going to involve shovelware on top of a bunch of creaky drivers that they were never going to fix any bugs in. Meh.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Asus announced that they are making their own sound card that will be fully compatible with vista.
:)
Why not just use your onboard sound while you wait for asus's card.
heck my onboard sound max with optical digital out sounds twice as good as my creative card in vista.
I say wait for the asus card
Soundblaster Live was the last external sound card I have had, some years ago.
Currently my pc has SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio, whatever that is.
It just works. As a casual gamer I don't see the need to buy an extra sound card and deal with the crap software that comes with it.
The onboard sound works good enough for me.
The name SoundBlaster doesn't mean as much as it use to.
Creative needs to embrace the embedded sound market.
Creative puts a cheap, powerful DSP in every computer they serve. They should sell DSP coprocessors to accelerate "business" functions, which could extend the life of existing PCs. They would have even more success on the Linux platform that's rising as they sink, because anyone can patch existing apps to use the extra processing power. Creative should be leading the world in GPAPU (General Purpose Audio Processing), especially as they need the business.
Of course, they don't even release driver source for Linux coders/users to fully exploit the soundcards we already paid for, so I doubt they'll wake up.
--
make install -not war
10 years ago i would have picked up a creative sound card solution without a second thought. they quality was greater then, there were no on-mobo solutions yet, and the competitions was either 1) crappy OR 2) over priced. Jump about 5 years later, on-mobo sound is in it's early years, but it is so crappy that even a low end SBLive was infinitely better now.
Jump to today: Audigy cards are overpriced bloatware with cheap hardware components in them. Each new Audgy "revision" adds more useless features. The only way I would pay the prices they want for their recent sound cards if that they were decent for semi-pro use, which, unfortunately they aren't. That and on-mobo sound systems work, for the most part, pretty damn decently these days (esp. for basic audio playback). The only reason I would want any external or PCI-card based solution is to get some real clean inputs for vocal recording or other sound inputs, and for that, there are better solutions than creative.
Ok.. Ok... E-Mu has good inputs on them and is a "Creative-owned" brand. Honestly, tho, if Creative went under, could E-Mu just move somewhere else?
Also, at least in the US, they suck as an employer. Not because of the environemtn, their web-dev/customer-service facility in Stillwater, OK was a FUN place to work at - the corporate disparacy (and IT struggles) between the OK and CA offices were enough to make your head spin, and their compensation is HORRIBLE (Java devs with 2-3 years of experience getting maybe 30-32K???? Even with the small amount of experience they shoul dbe getting 40-50 in OK)
i originally purchased an OEM audigy card which i later upgraded to a platinum with a front drive i got off ebay. that is being used in my HTPC right now. i use the optical in to get nice surround sound with my xbox. my main rig has an x-fi platinum which hasn't given me any trouble. i mainly use headphones on this system and the surround sound through just a basic set is pretty amazing. i also enjoy the crystalizer because it makes my mp3s sound a lot better.
PC sound card business
PC sound cards are still a business???
In 2007 PC sound cards with digital output are onboard and muted when I use flash.
Everyone who, in 2007, assembles his PC himself and breaks his poor head about the sound card clearly needs a different hobby if not a life!
End of story.
with fixing their drivers. I have an Audigy 2 on my Windows system and the creative control panel absolutely sucks. Settings are scattered across multiple different applications that are extremely slow, bloated, confusing to use and buggy. Because of their stupid driver policy I also had to download the original driver disc image from eMule since I lost the original, as the drivers they offer for download do not work without the original driver from the disc installed. (Though that was a while ago, they might have come to their senses already)
I liked the SB16 I had, and the SB128 worked well too but buying the Audigy 2 was a big mistake.
The sound quality difference between latest creative cards and onboard processors are as indistinguishable as the difference between 1993 creative sound blaster 16 and pc speakers.
apparently article poster didnt try out new X-Fi series from creative.
Read radical news here
is speakers. What good does a $200 dollar sound card do without a good set of speakers, which are not cheap or even easy to come by.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You know what two words would make *me* buy a Creative card?
Smell Blaster
Sony ha
slashdot effect
No sig for now.
Too bad the article is Slashdotted. In any event, this is a great point. Creative has the problem that it isn't high-end enough to compete in the professional audio space, yet their core business is all but commodified. It's a good example of how companies are increasing being forced to join a race to the bottom, specialize in high-end/boutique-style wares sold in low quantities for high margins, or get clobbered. Companies like Creative get screwed either way -- they aren't well situated to join in the commodity arms race, and going high-end is hard because of their brand and because of the serious scaling-back it would entail.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
E-Mu had some cool stuff. I miss their 1U rack based "ROMplers", or basically storage for a number of good samples. You could buy one unit, stuff 2-3 ROMS from others in there.
Yes, one can do the same on a PC, but the nice thing about discrete components -- your gig isn't up if some asshole runs by your rig during setup and rips off your USB license dongle for Cubase or whatnot, as people do today.
> The highly profitable soundcard era is long gone and their mp3 player lineup is now being sold at cut rate prices at Wal-Mart. That can't be good for the bottom line. Creative posted record profits after winning the Zen suit against apple. The money they got from that was eleven times more than their profits for last year.
The need for a "high quality" consumer sound card doesn't exist anymore. Most of the super-cheap sound cards or audio embedded on the motherboard is comparable to your average consumer electronics (i.e. your Sony stereo system). Most computers have more than enough processing power to handle all the wavetable stuff.
And if you need high quality (you are an audiophile, or you are doing pro or wannabe-pro recording), you would jump up to professional recording hardware, which would cost you only marginally more than a Creative Labs product.
My SoundBlaster card was a lot of fun back in the day though. At that time, sampled sound playback was still somewhat of a novelty, and the soundblaster was pretty damn cool.
My $20 Chaintech AV-710 with its Via Envy 24 chipset sounds much better to my ears than the Creative Audigy that it recently replaced. I wasn't expecting there to be such a huge difference in sound quality. I found myself enjoying songs which I had long ago become bored with, because I could suddenly hear the music come to life with a detail, richness and sweetness that I had never noticed before. No doubt M-Audio has some better sounding solutions, but not at this price. Creative needs to get their act together and produce something with good sound quality. I mean, is there any feature of a sound card that is more important than that?
From a gaming perspective maybe true 3D positional audio like Aureal produced with their A3D Vortex chips in the late 90s before Creative sued them out of existence in a lawsuit involving...you guessed it, patent infringement. A lawsuit which Creative lost. Creative was not so interested at the time in using positional 3D cues. They were highly successful however if their goal was to prevent anyone else from pursuing accurate positional 3D audio in computer games. Have they finally caught up in terms of 3D audio to where Aureal was a decade ago? This is a particularly telling example of how useful patents can be at keeping smaller, more innovative companies to a minimum. They don't even need to win the lawsuit, just outspend the smaller company in lawyer fees.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Please... a pair of $150 Klipsch ProMedia 2.1s will quite capably reveal the difference between a crap sound card and a decent one.
I got bit by the SMP bug, with the Sound Blaster Live! Platinum. They flat-out denied there was such a bug, blaming the chipset, despite their usenet newsgroup being FLOODED by workstation and high-end PC users who confirmed the bug, on a variety of chipsets. You could work around some of the race conditions by manually setting the sffinity using intfiltr but it did not resolve all of the issues, and it defeated the purpose of a high end card in an SMP system. It took a big OEM (Compaq) who had access to the source to produce a workable fix, but by then it was too late. Many Creative customers found alternatives such as Hercules Game Theater XP or Turtle Beach sound cards instead. It wasn't until Hyperthreading was announced that Creative resolved the issue once and for all, because they could no longer deny the bug existed now that SMP-like architectures going mainstream forced them to make their products thread-safe.
Like ATI I avoid them, because they did not care about customer support issues once it endangered their bottom line. I also do not sell or recommend them to clients.
Some of the PCI Audigy sound cards have looked fantastic, and they are more Linux compatible than my Game Theater, but I am too attached to the convenience of the external breakout box to give that card up. Are their products so good that I should give Creative a second chance? Have their policies changed for the better?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It's nice getting some bits and bobs with your soundcard. I enjoyed playing with the EAX control thingy for a while that let you make all output sound high pitch / echoey / etc. However, perhaps they could concentrate on writing a few tools that actually work, instead of a ton of shovelware. I don't want Creative news updates launching on startup, thanks, and your Lava player may well be interesting, if it didn't continually crash. Also, including versions of programs which have as much functionality as the Windows-bundled Sound Recorder and CD Player, except with some ugly skin that's supposed to look like a hi-fi is maybe not a good idea. And so it goes on. Be more selective!
I remeber my First Creative labs ISA card.. I put it in my Hyundai Super 286AT and thought it was the most awesome thing in the world.. my friend gave me brass monkey and 1 other song on a 3.5 inch disk. I thought the quality couldn't get any better. I now have a infinitly more powerful computer with a on-board solution and the only thing I listen to is internet radio and the occsional *ding* or other windows sound. I realized hearing a ding in 8-bit or 128-bit is about the same. I personally don't need a expensive sound solution, and wouldn't buy one.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
That's funny because the best workstation out there, the Korg Triton is powered by a supped up version of the Live!'s audio chip the EMU10K which obviously came from the EMU side of the house.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Or better yet buy a pair of Sennheiser HD555's for ~$100 and you can tell the weakness of even a great soundcard =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The cards themselves are good. It's definitely all in the drivers. For example with my good ol' SBLive:
Windows (Creative's Driver): Soundcard caused freeze-ups and crashes
Moved to linux (open source drivers): No more freeze-ups (switched to Cedega for my gaming needs)
so then I tried
Windows (Open Source Driver): Again, worked very nicely, without freeze-ups (although in general I still stay mostly in linux nowadays)
Now as far as linux goes, I love my old SBLive 5.1 cards. They're cheap, and do hardware mixing so I can happily use ALSA/OSS apps alongside KDE/arts or Esound without having the card tied up. On my other machines (laptops etc) that don't have hardware mixing, I generally go with esound but unfortunately not every application supports it (some are OSS/Alsa only).
I'll happily buy creative cards that have good OSS drivers. I won't buy the others because, no matter how good the card might be, my experience with Creative's drivers have not been good.
Outside of the soundcard realm, I remember that their "Creative Webcam Go" actually came with a driver CD that did not work. Yes, the drivers would not install from the accompanying CD (I know other people with the same camera, same problem), so you needed an internet connection to download the updated drivers. Way to go, Creative.
"their lineup of hardware samplers and synths floundered in the early 2000s due to the availability of quite credible software synthesizers"
Yeah... right. If that was the case... why is it Korg, Roland, Moog, Nord, Yamaha, Access *still* making hardware and making money?? Could it be Creative sucked the juice out of EMU and only kept what they thought was of value, i.e. nothing?
What does Creative still has to offer? Their drivers are bloated and buggy, the audio quality of their sound cards is average, and they are overpriced. The only reason they have survived this long in their current form is that they ate all the competition in the sound card gaming market and that, as a consequence, they pretty much have a monopoly on 3d audio. Their buyers are mostly gamers who are willing to blow a hundred dollars or more to get 1% less cpu usage. On board sound already offers features that Creative doesn't match, and Vista will force them to rebuild their drivers from scratch, so it may take years before we see a sound card from them which makes decent 3d sound on Vista. If they don't bother updating the drivers for their Audigy line of cards, they are going to alienate themselves with a lot of their current customers. That leaves them with their line of mp3 players, which isn't too hot (or that much different from other products already on the market). I have no idea what they're going to do, but it really looks like continuing on their current path is a recipe bankruptcy.
What are the alternatives? This is an honest question, I'm looking at picking up a sound card sometime soon. I would be using it for gaming in Windows so it would have to have good driver support in Windows XP and Vista. Hardware-accelerated would be nice but I _suppose_ not a requirement. I would also be using it in Linux (in fact, primarily in Linux), though not for gaming. Still, I'd need good drivers in Linux for watching DVDs, playing downloaded movies in Kaffeine, that sort of thing.
Ideally something better than my original Soundblaster Live.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Not at least while their ex-customers can remember being shat on by these miserable bastards, and their non-existent driver team.
I haven't had a sound daemon running in over a year. It's only the last six months or so that it Just Works, but with a recent kernel and ALSA libs everything from Flash to Totem to Gaim is mixed in software just fine.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Do I need a sound card with audio hardware acceleration? I have a Chaintech PCI card with an VIA Envy-24 chipset that sounds great. Doesn't have EAX or OpenAL support. The only game I have audio problems with is Supreme Commander when I have 300+ units in the game but that might be a memory/CPU issue.
I've had Sound Blasters since the unbelievably long AWE-32 sound card. Even my current rig has an Audigy 2 LS, which works fine under Vista except for one thing:
THE FREAKING GAMEPORT ISN'T SUPPORTED UNDER VISTA.
OK, now I get that modern game controllers are USB now, and I do have quite a few nice USB joysticks, gamepads, and force-feedback steering wheels. However, I also have lots of old Thrustmaster flight controls (stick, throttle, pedals) that I use almost every night, and they all still work fine in XP, and I have enough spare parts to last until the next epoch.
That said, Microsoft removed gameport support in Vista. I'm sure Creative didn't go to bat and ask MS why this was really necessary, and just bent over and took it.
So with that off my chest, the only real reason I've been buying SB products these past 15 years is to get a functional gameport for my legacy gaming hardware. Now that Vista is here to stay, I don't even have that reason to stick with Creative anymore...
If you remember back to the 1980s, the thing that allowed them to gain a foothold was their inclusion of FM synthesis at a reasonable price.
True, the original Sound Blaster did undercut the Adlib FM synth card they competed with on price a bit, but that was not why they owned the market. That feature was the DAC channel which provided for the first time a standard interface for recording and playing back digital audio on IBM-based PC's (PCjr excepted).
I have a ton of old DOS games that I really used to enjoy. They are just sitting around in the box collecting dust. Getting those DOS games to work on XP with either DosBox or the built-in XP "compatibility mode" is a hit or miss deal - some times it works great, sometimes not at all, and sometimes it's excruciatingly slow or buggy. I would love to have a *new* DOS machine with all the standard hardware and drivers for that era - like the Sound Blaster 16. Yes, I know your saying "E-Bay", but I want something that is not going to fall apart, catch fire and trip a circuit breaker, or be covered with 15 year-old coffee stains. Maybe there is a (small) market there.
The mainstay of Creative's business in soundcards has, since the introduction of REAL competition like RME, MOTU, and M-Audio, been the low end market. Now you have companies like M-Audio producing better cards in the same price range, and so their niche really isn't there. Not to mention the fact that Creative earned a reputation early on for less than optimal noise/THD/latency/etc specs as well as driver installation and uninstallation problems...the soundblaster was awesome in the 90s but IMO Creative is nowhere near as relevant as they used to be.
This isn't entirely true. The thing that really clinched the foothold for them was the fact that they produced a card with Adlib-compatible FM synthesis as well as an 8-bit DAC for digital sound, at a price that was half the cost of the Adlib at the time. The DAC, combined with perfect backwards compatibility with Adlib cards, is what really let them take off, since games didn't have to change their music routines one bit -- all they had to do was add the routine for pumping sound effects out through the DAC.
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1
Hmmm....there seem to be a lot of posts flaming Creative into oblivion.
I've used Creative sound cards for years, and I've always been relatively happy with them. While there are certainly better audiophile/musician audio interfaces available (M-Audio, Echo, MOTU, etc.), they are mostly geared towards WinXP/Mac OSX users. I'm an amateur musician using a Linux box to record my music. My rig currently consists of a a Behringer UB1204 mixer, an ART 351 Graphic EQ, an Aphex 204 Aural Exciter, and my speakers are M-Audio BX-8's. My soundcard? An SB-Live. My only gripe with the SB-Live is that the Linux ALSA drivers don't support the MIDI interface on the SB-Live (although the ALSA drivers work on the Creative/Ensoniq Audio PCI card that I used to use).
If I were more serious (read that: "making money with") about my music, I'd run OSX on an Intel Core Duo Mac with one of the high-end audio interfaces I mentioned above, but for what I'm doing right now, the SB-Live with ALSA drivers on a Slackware desktop is just fine.
Personally, I hope Creative continues to do well. They may not be the best, but for the money (and in my experience--YMMV) they've always done reasonably well.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Because I heard it could do hardware-accelerated OpenAL in Linux.
All these comments above about crap drivers made me change my mind. I'd rather take a CPU-limited framerate in games than a soundcard-limited uptime.
I'm really curious -- how hard was it to get the Alesis working? I've been thinking for a while about getting something like that, and although I'd probably use it with a Mac first, I'm no longer buying hardware that's only tied to a proprietary OS. (The Company Formerly Known As Apple Computer is starting to make me a bit nervous with all this consumer-electronics stuff they seem to be concentrating on. But more than that, I don't want to get stuck working on an OS I hate because of peripherals that I stupidly bought without looking at broad compatibility.)
Was there a lot of mucking around involved in getting it working? Or was it plug-and-play? I've heard some mixed reviews on how the multichannel Firewire interfaces and mixers are currently supported, but there seems to be a little more standardization in USB Audio.
Also, have you tested the latency at all? I wonder what it would sound like if you were taking an input from the USB device and routing it out on your internal audio device to your monitors; the Mac is pretty good at this -- there are probably people out there that can tell, but to me it sounded like a straight-through analog connection.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
After they pulled that patent crap on Carmack who _invented_ Carmack's reverse!
/ 1529222
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28
God I miss my Ultrasound!
I am an audio professional and am rather hardcore when it comes to my gaming. Over the last few years I have built several gaming rigs and they've always had the top of the line Creative cards. Each and every time I have thought to myself how piss-poor the drivers were, how god-awful the customer service was, and how fantastic the sound quality and EAX effects were in my games.
.wav file through my X-FI rig versus my Pro-Tools setup using an M-Audio ProjectMix board - though I would never want to use the Creative stuff for any professional projects.
With the latest line of Creative products they have introduced X-FI and these cards, when used with great speakers and properly tuned THX settings, sound even better then the Creative cards from a few years ago. Infact it's hard to tell the difference playing a
Still, looking forward, why do I have to buy a card at all? Creative should put all their basic features needed for surround gaming and 24bit96khz audio on a chip and let mobo designers license the technology. Write up a simple and unified control panel and again let the mobo manufacturers put as little or as much bloatware in as they want.
At the end of the day I don't care who makes the product, my demands as an audophile and gamer are for:
1. 24bit/96khz distortion and noise free audio.
2. 3D Surround processing for gaming - pitch shifting 32 individual bullets and having multiple reverbs for different acoustic zones IS rather CPU intensive (say 5-20% I would guesstimate) and is best offloaded onto specialty audio hardware.
3. Unified control panel for setting basic features, input levels, output levels, EQ, etc.
4. Support for multiple output formats. (coaxial, optical, multi-channel analog)
Creative does most of that right, and with no competition right now... If someone else can step up to the plate and deliver... I will glaaaaadly avoid Creative products for the rest of their existence.
This is me not spending $200 on a X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card.
Sorry, but I'm not nearly leet and uber enough for one. To my (slightly motorhead damaged) ears the onboard sound on my MSI mobo is just fine. You can add sound card to the long list of cards I once would have bought with a new PC, but now are integrated on the motherboard. Add-on RAM boards, serial/parallel ports, hard drive controller and now sound cards. Video card I still buy extra if I'm going to game on the box, but if it's for work, then on board video is OK too.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I have the solution to all of your problems:
http://www.usb-port.com/rm203.html
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Creative makes great hardware. there drivers for windows have traditionally blown chunks. but i would buy an X-Fi if Linux drivers were available.
I think the sound card market should stay strong into the future. Regardless of the improvement in capability of onboard audio, there will always be a certain group of audiophiles and musicians who will need something more. At one time, Creative targeted this market and provided a decent, cheap entry into DAW with technologies like Sound Fonts. I remember someone giving me a Creative Sound Blaster 6 years ago that had digital I/O, real Midi connectors instead of a game port, and a breakout box that fit into a 5 1/2" slot. For people who didn't have the wherewithal to use Gigasampler, it was possible to use Sound Fonts as virtual instruments with surprisingly good fidelity considering their size.
Yes, there are a number of companies serving the professional musician market for sound cards and other DAW gear, but there's not really a lot of choices for the high-end audiophile. I'd like to see some first rate PCIe sound cards that can handle high bitrates and depths and digital I/O and all that other good stuff. It seems like a natural in an age of integration of the PC into the entertainment system.
When someone orders a Dell, where's the choice for a really good Sound Card? Not just something for the gamer, but something for music.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Creative did in fact acquire E-Mu; which was not without their own internal, product design, technology and other manufacturing problems at the time. But they should have left them alone to be a true 'professional' division, continuing to produce samplers and synthesizers that pushed beyond average and well beyond any PC-based environment. In fact, E-Mu lost some of their oldest employees in the process to rush to Creative. As a longtime remanufacturer of several of their lines (emaxII through the entire EOS line) we constantly were faced with both hardware and software engineering challenges. We supplied a niche product to the entertainment, visual and military simulation industries which used E-Mu products as the hardware foundation, modifing them for specialilty needs and then accessed/controlled them using our internal, proprietary software. As they got closer to the Creative acquisition they essentially gave up support for their high-end products, opting instead for a PC-based alternative. Their older engineers and execs - the guys that had been around since the beginning - really knew sound synthesis - period.
'Decent quality sound' may be a commodity product, but slapping all the bell and whistles in the world on basically an inferior quality sound card designed to work in an inferior computing platform is like putting lipstick on a pig. And while 7.1 may be 'SupoerWOWHyperCool' it doesn't allow sound separation or manipulation from a physics-based perspective. So, if you're building games that great, but if you need to be able to separate sounds using something other than a 'theater quality', e.g, entertainment, standard it doesn't cut the mustard.
Creative should have left E-Mu alone and E-Mu should have worked to have kept the guys they had - and booted the morons with MBAs that came rushing in the door to stake a 'Creative' claim.
Software alone can't make up for a decoupled device being driven by a multi-processor system running something that can symetrically multiprocess complex applications by locking the processors. Vista is crap, the Soundblaster is crap, the whole 'commodity' audio development environment at Creative is effectively crap.
If the original team at E-Mu had a brain they would work with Creative to spin E-Mu out as a private entity and go back to producing extreme high-end products for professionals who have computing needs that extend beyond Vista and a $300 wintel machine. And buy some sheet metal in the process will ya?
I have one of these, and the Radio Shack equivalent. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide power through its gameport until after Windows boots and the driver loads.
This is no problem for a basic gameport device, but if the joystick ALSO has a keyboard port for sending keypressess when a joystick button is pressed (like all the good Thrustmaster products do), then the keyboard circuit doesn't get power until late in the boot process, and the BIOS, by this point, thinks there's no keyboard connected. As a result, none of the joystick buttons work.
If you have actually tested this and found it to work with an FLCS or F-22, please let me know...
I have a couple of games I play on Linux and while the built-in nVidia CK804 sound on my motherboard is fine for general applications, I ran into problems when trying to run games. The big problem was that I could not get ALSA to support mixing sound from more than one application at a time. After doing some research, I found that the Audigy drivers supported this and went out and bought one of the cards. Generally it works well, but once in a while it goes into a mode where it makes an annoying click every few seconds where only a reboot will correct it (even reloading the kernel module and restarting ALSA doesn't stop it). My other computer had no built-in sound on the motherboard so I bought a cheap SB 128. It works, but periodically the sound dies and I have to restart ALSA (ES1370 driver). I wish ALSA could perform mixing in software, but at least with the 2.6.16 Linux kernel I couldn't get it working.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I remember waaaay back when, about 1998, I had a Creative Labs S3Savage4 Video card, CD-Rom, Soundblaster, and speakers. It seemed my PC was well on it's way to becoming a CL machine, because I loved their products so much (they just seemed better somehow). Now I only have an Audigy ZS 2 which I just took out because of conflicts with my EVGA 680i... It's such a pretty card though I never even used it's 5.1 output...
Just don't need it when I do much of my gaming a music stuff with a headset. And 5.1 headsets? Meh...
There is simply too much glass..
Much of Echo's pro audio gear has Linux drivers and will sound a million times better than any Creative garbage.
Proper 24-bit 96/192Khz sound. Echo provide Linux developers with information, which is more than you can say about Yamaha (I asked, they declined). Guess what brand of audio interface I use now? (clue: it's not Yamaha).
I prefer the K44 AKGs to the Sennheisers... don't know why. I've got a Samson headphone amp running them, so I don't think that I am running out of juice.
Anyway... I just can't get into headphones. I have them, but simply don't like listening through them. I prefer a good speaker setup (I'm not talking about promedias).
Before I realized that the hobby was taking up too much of my money, I set up a stereo system consisting of an MSB DAC, Aragon preamp, B&K amp, Outlaw crossover, and a pair of Klipsch Ref speakers, and a Dayton Titanic sub. I drive it with SPDIF (44.1 only) from an M-Audio card.
I tried creative... and the last creative card I owned (original audigy) I literally tossed out the window.
The root of creative's problem are not on-board sound as reported here,
It is more to do with the assembly-lining of music production and lack
of any major breakthrough in sound reproduction technologies.
Go through a list of todays famous musicians and you will find that their
music lacks any dynamic range to speak off, dynamic range is a measurement
of the difference between the lowest and the highest sounds in record, and
when you listen to high dynamic range track at a low volume you invariably
should miss out on some parts, but that is a rarity now because today music
is compressed and dynamic range made low to serve you through the day anywhere
and everywhere, at your desired volume levels.
Consequently music sounds almost the same whether its heard from an x-fi or realtek
onboard and most people find no reason to pay extra bucks for a separate card
especially not with the speakers people use these days which are based on technology
of the 1900's, also given that speakers have 'evolved' into tiny, dingy sounding boxes.
The days of the "Sound Card " entry in computer purchase bills are numbered
I like Creative soundcards except for the annoying "Hey, let's resample everything to 48,000KHz" characteristic of the recent ones using EMU chipsets (SBLive!, Audigy, Audigy 2, Audigy 4). Granted, you won't see me shelling out top $$$ for the latest Fatality/"My e-peen is huge!" edition card but their last gen cards are pretty nice for the price (~$35 used), even nicer if you take the bother to modify them (replace the stock op amps).
"Start listening to customers"
Creative needs to change their business model and move into new emerging markets.
I for one am in the market for a stand-alone media interface box that play audio & video files stored on my NAS drive and play them on my television and audio system. The box should play all popular formats including High definition Video formats. There are a few overpriced first generation boxes out there, but nothing for the audiophile/videophile market that does it all.
The first company that introduces a high quality, but not overpriced stand-alone box that will play everything WinDvd can play and includes the proper hardware interfaces will capture the market. I'll buy one, and many of my friends will buy one.
2 words that would never make me go out and pick up a Creative card...
Evil Bastards
I haven't easily forgot what they did to Aureal, to id software, and the same game they're playing today with Apple. Seems that their motto is 'if you can't beat 'em, sue 'em.'
Creative have acquired, by hook or by crook, a stranglehold on IP for PC Audio. That's why there is so little competition for them, the closest we got to a decent alternative was Nvidia's Nforce 2 integrated audio, and even they couldn't develop it further without attracting attention from Creatives legal department, which I bet is a damn sight larger than their R&D team. PC audio tech is a decade behind because of Creative, our only hope is that they die. Real soon.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
It's not all gloom and doom for Creative though...I hear their legal department is quite profitable.
Odd - because if you've got a PS2/keyboard cable snaking out of it, you could be getting power from that port as well.
Heck, you could probably throw in a couple of low-voltage-drop diodes inline with the power leads from both the gameport and the ps2 port, and supply your FLCS/F-22 from either supply no matter what.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
Ever since I won one of their 1 ounce gold coins celebrating their 15th anniversary. The value of the gold is still more than total that I've spent on their cards.
Creative hasn't innovated since it entered the PCI sound card market by buying out Ensoniq over a decade ago and selling their products with the Creative label on them. They exchange finger-pointing with motherboard chipset developers when hardware compatibility problems arise, instead of working together to improve their products. Their drivers are *horrible* bloated messes that cause system instability.
Creative survives through two broad things: Acquisition and marketing. They buy or force any serious competitors out of the market. They market products through brand placement in games and game packaging. They strong-arm developers into including EAX support in their games so that gamers can be more easily convinced to buy their products, exactly the way 3dfx did with Glide.
Creative is coasting along on brand name recognition. Ensoniq's PCI sound cards threatened this and Creative bought them out. Aureal threatened this with their 3D sound hardware and Creative litigated them into bankruptcy. nVidia's SoundStorm eroded this with its hardware OpenAL support and real-time AC3 encoding, and Creative put an end to it from multiple directions (e.g., buying out Sensaura, and "adopting" OpenAL and filling it with EAX hooks).
Now on-board sound has evolved to the point where it is for all intents and purposes on-par with most PCI sound cards, so most users have no need for an add-on card. Creative's competitors in the PCI sound card add-on market are now maturing with cards that support the real-time AC3/DTS encoding first introduced by nVidia - something Creative has tried to ignore because they can't buy out Dolby and don't want to pay royalties (they even went so far as to use a retarded proprietary triple-SPDIF connection for 5.1 digital connections between their cards and their Creative-branded speakers).
I haven't bought a Creative product this millennium and I don't regret it one bit. I still watch the market though because things are starting to get interesting.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
You'll have to pry my AWE64 Gold out of my cold dead fingers! Nothing plays MIDIs like that baby... you kids today, I have entire instrument synth files bigger than your silly Em-Pee-Threes. Although it's getting much harder to find motherboards with both PCI-E and ISA support. You'd think they wanted me to upgrade or something...? Ha, fat chance.
They are all making hardware and money, but you'll note that their product lines have changed considerably over the past decade or so. E-mu's core business was hardware samplers, and the market for the kind of standalone high-end hardware samplers has dwindled as soft-samplers and lower-cost (and, unfortunately, more "current" feature-enabled) samplers became more accessible. A shame, because their hardware always sounded good - they just never kept up with competative features and products. Their "Z-plane" filters were nice, and to this day I still like the sound of the Morpheus.
Frankly I think they were hindered by their foray into standalone sound modules. The Proteus series did okay, but they flogged that horse into the ground and modules like the Mo'Phatt and the Orbit could only go so far before they became instantly recognizeable as dance-tune-in-a-box machines.
Creative probably absorbed them for the same reason they absorbed ensoniq - they wanted some good sound chip designs. Emu always did that well.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
Emu always had good sound hardware.
Of course, you can take good hardware and still make it sound like complete ass. Cheap out on the ADC/DAC chain, build in a bad sound bank, whatever...you can take a great DSP chip and still make a crap synth, sampler or sound card out of it.
(the new Korg M3's are pretty fly, too. Dunno what's under the hood there)
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
I'm your typical lurker (I don't post & don't have an account) but to comment on there's no need for a "middle man" market is totally wrong. I am not a recording techy but I certainly appreciate high quality audio. For me, Creative just doesn't cut it (and neither does onboard). Not one sole mentioned anything about the Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1. Now that's a SOUND CARD with some serious quality (custom based 8788 chipset). Google around for it and you'll see many sites praise it as "the best card we've ever tested." I have it hooked up via analog (even though it's capable of DDL & DTS Interactive) because it's analog outs are just...that good. I bought LM4562 upgraded AMPs to place on it and it's by far the best sound to grace my ears. It runs through a Denon home theatre unit (yup lots of cabling as it's 6 RCAs) and some high end Grado headphones.
For those gamer techy guys (I'm not one of them) there's a simple program out called Velbac (made by a member on another msg board) which allows you to run 2 sound cards at the same time. I can tag it up with my older creative card and get EAX 3.0+ (since Creative won't allow other companies to utilize their technology past EAX 2.0). Just thought it'd be a nice heads up.
I upgraded to a Soundblaster X-Fi Gamer Edition fairly recently, after having used both an Sblive and onboard sound (ASRock Dual SATA, Athlon XP 64 3700+). I notice a dramatic sound quality improvement for both games and music right away. But the reason I purchased the card was for performance in games.
The performance benefits of a sound card are most significant at key moments in multiplayer games, when you are (virtually) surrounded by models making noise and your computer can't quite keep the frame rate fast enough to prevent hitching. Offloading some of the sound processing to a peripheral card leaves that much more cpu cycles available for graphics processing. The bottom line is that in key firefights, you get to move/shoot first. The positional audio in the X-Fi seems to work a bit better than the SBLive and this also confers a significant advantage in multiplayer.
I've owned four creative cards in the last ten or twelve years. They were all great. Their drivers have been hit or miss in the past but, with the exception of vista drivers and everyones vista drivers suck at this point, I haven't had any problems with them since I used windows 98se.
I own an x-fi and the drivers work well. The sound quality is much better than the audigy was and is far and away better than any on-board sound card I've ever heard. I had some issues on my nforce4 based system but an update to the driver fixed it.
I pretty much only listen to music and play games on my pc. I have a good quality pair of speakers.
I pray for the day that Creative Labs sink to the bowels of hell. They make shitty cards, and pass them off as "pro". Losers. For God's sake, if you're gonna buy crap buy an M-Audio. =0)
Creative Labs can die as far as I'm concerned. They used to be THE sound card to get, but they've managed to get worse and worse until they've exceeded any other hardware company I'm aware of.
I've owned...
- Creative SoundBlaster Pro: An excellent card. Great drivers. Supported every game that knew what a sound card was. No complaints. This one also had an IDE controller for a CD drive.
- Creative SoundBlaster 16: Again, no complaints
- Creative/Ensoniq32 (wrong name?): Pretty cheap. Sound quality was so-so with lots of noise. I could hear the noise level "click" into place as I adjusted the volume. There couldn't have been more than a dozen volume levels... but it worked.
- Creative 6x DVD drive: Good. No problem. Lasted a long time.
- Creative DXR3 DVD decoder: OMG this thing had issues. Crappy software came with it and was the only DVD player that could use it. It had problems with things like menus, stopping and starting, dragging a video window, etc. I had a massive driver conflict with it - caused by my soundblaster drivers. I told Creative how to fix it - not the other way around like it should be!
- Creative SoundBlaster Live!: Eh, it can't do 5.1, but I still love it. There are better technologies than EAX, but it is quite nice.
- Creative SoundBlaster Audigy: I didn't own any of these, but two friends did - they both lost their motherboards and some other parts (RAM, PSU) to the "squeal of death" and wild voltage fluctuations caused by the card. Go ahead and disbelieve me - I didn't think it was possible to make something THAT bad until I saw the results myself.
- Creative Nomad Jukebox 5GB: One of the first hard disk MP3 players. You have to match the right REGION of firmware and synching software. Also, match the VERSION. Even then, it will often fail to see the player. If you walk with the player on your person, the laptop hard drive inside will fail to read the next song, and it will crash. It'll also crash at random. The batteries last a few hours tops. The menus are logically made, but hard to use - selecting artist/album etc by letter fails because it skips letters! Also, lower-case and upper-case letters are in a different group so it sorts A to Z to a to z.
Try running a 64bit windows system on any card from sblive up through x-fi with more then 3GB of ram and then wonder why you purchased the card at all. Nearly all the EAX stuff gets disabled and some kind of hardware buffering on the card gets disabled. I have run into a lot of games that seem to crash just because they use EAX and stuff gets disabled which should not be disabled. This issue has been known for years and I don't see anything that is fixing it however the linux drivers don't seem to suffer from this issue at all.
Creative used to be just about the most compatible sound card system out there and had fairly decent drivers. Now I am more likely to get stuff just working on some built in sound chip on a motherboard without any screwing around. Creative has grown more arrogant over time and closed in how they do things. They already said that x-fi will never have open drivers for it but based on what I have been reading on their windows drivers and that they still don't have that 3GB+ issue fixed on their cards I don't see any point in getting it.
Creative is doing a great job of driving me towards console gaming. With consoles at least I can just pop the disc in and the thing will work. For this generation of consoles so far I have a wii and I will probably get an xbox 360 also sometime this year and just use that. Consoles have been getting more powerful but computers have been getting a lot harder to get things running for doing any kind of games. My box is working flawlessly under linux for all my development work (which is the reason I have 8GB of ram) but dual booting to windows sure lets to find out how miserable the support is for higher end stuff. Actually you can even hit the creatieve 4GB memory limit with less then 3GB of memory on the system. Just install 2 8800GTX in the system have 2GB of ram and some other card that eats up a little memory and that will do it. I think you should even use dual 7950GX2 into of 8800GTX + 2GB and that would do it all on its own.
I definitely like working on the linux side of things and windows has improved many things like stability and speed but at the same time vendors have become more closed. This seems to directly be causing the problems of getting the dang stuff to work right. I will definitely miss some of the pc games but getting them to work just takes too much.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Yes, that's a fucking awesome solution.
I thought we all stopped accepting crap like that in 1999.
Let's talk about the DXR3 MPEG-2 hardware decoder board for a moment.
As long as you ran it under Windows 98, it worked well and actually output some high-quality video to various sources. If you tried to run it under Windows 2000 (who'd want to do that?!), you either had to use Creative's perma-BETA drivers or find a way to convince the Sigma Design's Hollywood+ drivers to work.
The only program at the time that supported full the full hardware acceleration that the DXR3 had to offer was written by Creative, and it wouldn't work if you were using the Sigma drivers. If you were using the Sigma drivers on a non-Hollywood+ card, you couldn't run the Sigma software. It was a nightmare I ended by upgrading my processor and turning to software decoding.
I will also add that all of my SB cards (SB 16 Pro, SB 32 Awe (best MIDI card they made), SB 64 PCI, SB Live!, SB Audigy2) feature extra-high latency for all of those wonderful recording programs and DirectX plugins. The ones on the list that support ASIO have never worked with any programs that can use ASIO.
To Creative Labs I say "I keep buying your shit because you're usually the only option that's 'compatible' with what I want to use. If I see one of you morons crossing the road, I will run you over with my car and laugh loudly as I toss an old Sound Blaster card out of my window."
Christ.. I wish they still made the ThunderBoard!
people still buy sound cards?
I mean, making pro music, you kind of need one...
but as a gamer or consumer, why the hell would I need to buy a sound card these days?
- Every motherboard I consider to buy, already has sound built in...
- Games do their audio processing in software now.
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
2 words that make me never want to buy a Creative product again:
Zen patent
Along with the reverse patent, and the EAX patents, and the expense of high-end sound, and the Windows drivers, and the hostility they've always had against Macs, and their PCI oddness...
Never given me any problems in any Linux distro or Windows install, and back in the days I struggled with ALSA and couldn't get the onboard mobo sound to work, all I had to do was pop in a $10 CMI8738 pci card before installation and was assured of sound. The sound quality may not be the absolute greatest, largely surpassed by the onboard sound of mobos today, but the drivers are completely mature - and even better, unobtrusive.
On a side note, I find something puzzling: Almost no add-in sound cards have an industry standard 2X5 pin front panel audio header for headphones and mic. Creative's proprietary connector doesn't count. I actually bought an ENVY24 and later a PSC724 specifically for this reason, because of Teamspeak. I know you can easily get something from Frontx or just hack up something yourself, but why should we have to? Just put some pins on the damn things!
Yes, I'm still using a Soundblaster 16 bit PCI card. I like it and it does the job. I've also had 0 problems with it, EVER. Win 98, Win 2k, Win XP Pro have all worked fine with it. All my games like it, and the sounds quality is very good (i use headphones). Maybe they should just re-release all their old boards?
Buy an Echo
Http://www.echoaudio.com
or shut up and live with Realtek SoundMangler(tm)
I'd say a large, well funded company filing a baseless suit against a much smaller competitor in an attempt to get them to waste as much money as possible defending themselves would qualify as "squashing".
"...high-quality audio cards for the discerning gamer and audiophile."
No "audiophile" is going to touch a Creative card with a bargepole.
Note to Creative labs: Audiophiles DON'T WANT their music to be "crystallized" or sounding like it's in a cave or anything. What they want is a button which says "just play the $$*&!&£&ing music without messing with it", and no Creative driver in the last five years provides that option.
As an "audiophile" I got myself a motherboard with an SP-DIF output for the onboard sound and listen via that.
As for gamers... I was conned into buying an X-Fi card because of the supposed 3D sound via headphones. Take it from me, It doesn't work - not even close. Given that it also messed with my music the card lasted about six hours in the machine and now it's in a box somewhere in the basement. What a ripoff.
And now they tell me that Vista sound is software-only so an expensive X-Fi card is pointless.
No sig today...
I've had a string of Creative cards, and to be honest, the only time they were good was when there was no competition. Around 1990 the Sound Galaxy NX Pro cards completely undercut Creative on price and blew them out of the water on features. Later on Creative ramped up the claims on features (which rarely worked properly).
The AWE64 was a reasonable card, it actually accelerated audio at the time on my P75 although it wouldn't ever run the software installer after I upgraded to a AMD K6-233 so it became relatively useless due it it not working again until I upgraded to a PII. However, the performance of an ISA card started to grate and so the venerable Aureal Sonic Vortex II took over the music duties without a complaint until they disappeared off the face of the planet.
The Audigy's I had were a different matter, they looked like the perfect home musician, home theatre, and gaming card. Sadly, the sync was horrendously out in Cubase, the noise floor terrible, and the performance sucked. It also gave my XP install a shutdown time of 10 minutes.
I ripped the cards out and used onboard audio and an outboard firewire mixer now. Everything works fine, no issues. Plus I can share the proper gear with my Mac now.
I hope Creative read this thread. Their day is up, onboard audio has been quietly improving while Creative sat with their thumbs up their ass.
Why is this modded funny? I don't get it, please explain...
You get a motherboard with a couple PCI slots and put a couple HDTV tuners in them -- so where does the sound card go? Hunting down quality motherboards with enough slots to give you some slack to deal with potential drivers issues with the onboard "peripherals" seems like one of the larger annoyances with linux these days.
But, if you can't carry that with you, an iPod with mp3's encoded at 128kbps stereo is a good and portable approximation of the expensive technology with playbck-biased-warm/uncolored-soundstage they want...