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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
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
as an ex-employee I hope the competition eats them up and they go away.
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
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
Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.
Roland and Ensoniq?
Whoa, sorry. Just had a flashback to 1991.
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.
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.
M-Audio, Turtle Beach, E-MU, off the top of my head. I'm neither a musician or an audiophile, nor have I purchased a soundcard in 6 years.
What I don't understand is why Creative even still exists. Onboard audio has long been sufficient for games/mp3s, and anyone who is serious about audio for recording/mixing/audiophile/etc, is not going to bother with what Creative offers. They are the Monster Cable of the sound card market. Saying they are the only player in the space just means you either work for or exclusively patronize Best Buy and simply haven't seen the rest of the industry.
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.
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.
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
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.
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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
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.
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
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.
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.
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
"Aureal more or less bankrupted themselves with some new tech that didn't pan out. They were sueing Creative over core 3d sound patents and won (not the other way around) but not until they were pretty much out of business."
The Vortex2 was quite successful, so I didn't understand how "it didn't pan out". In fact, A3D 2.0 had a much bigger market penetration than EAX at the time. It was Creative that sued Aureal for patent infringement in 1998 and subsequently lost. By the time Aureal could countersue (to recoup legal costs), their private investors had pulled out, leaving Aureal dry, thus forcing them to declare bankruptcy.
Aureal's assets were then bought by Creative, and eventually made their way into EAX. Much of the technology behind CMSS3D Virtual Surround is due to Aureal's research.
In short, Creative is the one responsible for Aureal's demise.
Sigs are for losers