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Creative Goes After Driver Modder
FreedomFighter writes "Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."
See my post here regarding my personal experience with Ensoniq / Creative
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=503796&cid=22904172
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
That's awesome, heh. Only thing is, it's a gimmick. The famed "tube sound" is the interaction of all of the components and is heavily dependent on the transformer(which causes the "sag") and tube voltage. If you have a tube with a high-cranked voltage and a fat power transformer attached to the output it sounds much better than simply slapping a cold-running tube to the preamp or ass-end of a digital signal chain. Many musical electronics simply chuck a 12Ax7(running at a wimpy plate voltage) into their products and then laud said products as sounding like a mic'd AC-30 or some nonsense. Digital modelling is so good nowdays that being half-ass about tubes dosen't make much sense. Either go all-digital, or all-tube.