Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Future of Creative and the Sound Card Market

Posted by Zonk on from the they-still-make-sound-cards-huh dept.

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."

7 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Re:2 words for my business by brouski · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hell, I'd be happy with Vista drivers.

    --
    Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
  2. Biased by theNetImp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    as an ex-employee I hope the competition eats them up and they go away.

  3. Re:2 words for my business by Joe+U · · Score: 5, Insightful

    2 words that SHOULD make you go out and pick up a Creative card...

    Stable Drivers

    Creative drivers have a tendency to, um...putting it nicely, SUCK horribly.

  4. Dwindling customer base by Applekid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  5. Its about time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Creative Labs has a "professional" sound division by Dzimas · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  7. Problems in Vista by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.