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."

Comments

Creative Labs has a "professional" sound division

[Dzimas]

Creative Labs has never produced high end equipment. 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. The company branched into wavetable synthesis with a vengeance in the 1990s, using chipsets developed by California synthesizer company E-Mu Systems (also seen in cards by Turtle Beach and others). They eventually bought E-Mu for around $28m, primarily because of their ability to design/build high quality multichannel audio synthesis chips (stuff which can be done exceedingly well in software today).

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.

Creative Labs is the next SGI

[Chryana]

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.

Re:2 words for my business

[Nik13]

Vista drivers are just a very small part of the problem with Creative's junk.

When I bought a SB live, I was running Win 2k Pro. AC3 passthru was broken for pretty much as long as I ran that OS.

Then XP came out. XP drivers? Can't have that. You had to install the old and incompatible VxD-based Win9x drivers (which did BSOD my system half the time), then somehow apply the new WDM drivers on top of that. Retarded.

Even today, they still suck. Want app for the live drive's remote control? Download it off their website. Oops, it says "can't find previous version" so it won't install (do they still expect me to use the Win9x drivers disc that shipped with it?) Same for the Play Center app...

Now that Vista's out, same story about drivers. "Just spend a ridiculous amount on a X-Fi you don't need" is their answer. But I've *NEVER* got a single good driver for the 350$ card I already bought in about 6 years, what makes me think me new card will make this any better?

Oh, and drivers are just a small part of the problem.

Adding a SB live to a system with a KT133 chipset made it BSOD like every 5 minutes with Win98. Even the PCI latency "fixes" didn't solve this (just BSOD'ed every 15 minutes instead). Had to buy a new motherboard because of that...

Their promised ASIO support in their drivers for the SB Live? I'm still waiting!

Non-standard interconnects! I'm still extremely pissed off about this. I bought a set of Cambridge Soundworks speakers (Creative's own) -- the DTT3500 along with it. It comes with a short cable. The plugs on that? A 1/8" mini plug on the card - like a normal stereo earphone, BUT with an extra ring (3 pole). Good luck finding one like that anywhere, I never managed. At the other end of that cable, you have a totally non-standard *9pin* mini-din. Good luck finding extensions for that! Even Creative won't sell you any. I called them, and they told me to buy buy one at Radio Shack... I would, if they used NORMAL / standard plugs! I wonder how their X-Fi breakout box connects - likely another weird plug you can't find anywhere should your cable go bad.

So much stuff... And the new cards still suck. No Dolby Digital Live. Very poor connections: on the "basic" X-Fi, the spdif out is same plug as microphone input! So if you plan to use the digital output and that you might need a microphone sometime, then you need something like the X-Fi Elite Pro (300$ instead of 70$).

Way too much problems - more than I've ever had with any other computer part. I've upgraded to an M-Audio card since then. I'll consider using Creative's junk again once THEY stat paying ME to use it. Even the onboard Realtek HD audio on my cheapo HP tower is far better (good drivers, good sound quality, standard plugs and all).