The technology may be better with Aureal cards. It also costs game developers more money to design games for it. What's the point of having that card if games don't take advantage of it.
That's bullsh|t. It costs game developers more money to put real 3d graphics in a game too, but you don't see them using the Build engine anymore. Considering, that until a few months ago there were a lot more A3D titles than DS3D titles, I doubt that A3D was that hard to implement. All the major 3D engines, like Quake3, Unreal, Shogo 1/2, etc. have always had support for A3D, long before any of them bothered to implement DS3D (if they did at all).
SB Live won because of the stranglehold CL has on OEMs. Aureal is an American company. It's sad to see domestic computer makers such as Dell and Gateway sell out to foreign companies such as CL that make inferior products 🙁