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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."
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
as an ex-employee I hope the competition eats them up and they go away.
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
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.
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.
Incorrect on several levels. As a former employee of Creative Labs I was there when the Live! first came out. The Live! was built around the EMU10K1 processor which was designed by EMU whom Creative purchased. Ensoniq was purchased prior to EMU and was done specifically for their PCI card development, however that tech was leveraged in the Soundblaster PCI 16 (or 16 PCI) and the Ensoniq branded cards.
Secondly although I will not defend Creative's drivers very heavily (although I do think they are better than most give them credit for), their hardware is far from crap. The only bad hardware I have ever seen them produce were some of their mice which had flaws in the hardware itself (this was later fixed).
You might be surprised to learn that Creative won several customer service awards due to their quick adoption of support Knowledge Bases and their phone services. I do feel that service has gone down lately (from my sources this is mostly a result of triming costs) but they still remain one of the few tech companies that does not outsource customer service (US service is in the US, Europe in Europe, and Asia in Asia).
I assume you are refering to Aureal when you say they "squash" competition. There were bad steps taken on both sides of the issue, but it was all started when Aureal began selling their products based on EAX support. Creative took them to court over it and rather than making the correct business decision and settling out of court, they chose to fight it out. This bankrupted the company and Creative purchased their assets. I don't see where Creative was "squashing" them rather than giving them enough rope.