Creative a bust?

[Coronus]

Ok, I been reading all the crap going on with creative and while I can see their legal point can also see as a potential consumer that at this point there is no way in hell I am buying one of their cards for their price. So what would be equivilent to the Creative 70SB046A00003 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz PCI Interface Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series Sound Card? I am running Vista x64 and dont want to spend this cheese on something that wont work.

Thanks,
C

 

[bigsnyder]

Depends on what your uses are. If you are a die-hard gamer, then IMO there are really no equivalent to the X-fi, though some of on-board solutions of the latest high end motherboards come close. As far as the drivers Daniel_K was modding, the only thing I can find for the X-fi he released was a Dolby Digital Live driver. I have actually read that creative's Vista x32 drivers for X-Fi are currently decent, though I can't speak about the x64 versions. Now if gaming is not your main thing, then there are several alternatives available such as those from M-Audio. The Auzentech cards are also worth a look for music and gaming.

 

[Knavish]

FYI, here's a report on the crap that Creative is up to from Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ar...ista-x-fi-drivers.html

 

[LumbergTech]

there was a sound card released recently that got very good reviews...non x-fi based..i cant remember what it was..it does drop your fps by about 7 or 8 tho over x-fi..who cares though as far as im concerned i will never buy another creative product

edit: i just saw it on the forum. its the asus xonar

 

[Tim]

Originally posted by: LumbergTech
there was a sound card released recently that got very good reviews...non x-fi based..i cant remember what it was..it does drop your fps by about 7 or 8 tho over x-fi..who cares though as far as im concerned i will never buy another creative product

edit: i just saw it on the forum. its the asus xonar

Kind of funny that one would purchase 1 peice of hardware that decreases the performance of other purchased hardware in exchange for a VERY nominal increase in sound quality...

Anyone else see the stupid irony here?

 

[LumbergTech]

Originally posted by: thepladfad

Originally posted by: LumbergTech
there was a sound card released recently that got very good reviews...non x-fi based..i cant remember what it was..it does drop your fps by about 7 or 8 tho over x-fi..who cares though as far as im concerned i will never buy another creative product

edit: i just saw it on the forum. its the asus xonar

Kind of funny that one would purchase 1 peice of hardware that decreases the performance of other purchased hardware in exchange for a VERY nominal increase in sound quality...

Anyone else see the stupid irony here?

I don't really see it as "decreasing the performance of other hardware".
Some people believe that creative has been holding back the sound card industry for a long time.
I don't really see how choosing a sound card for a negligible fps increase is any smarter than for what subjectively can be considered a significant increase in sound quality. The icing on the cake, of course, is not supporting creative who doesn't care about quality audio and only about selling cards. I prefer companies that mix a little of both.

 

[rchiu]

I just bought this Razer Barracuda from buy.com. According to reviews, it is pretty good and I think it support vista-32 at the very least. Haven't put it into my PC yet so can't tell you how it is.

 

[Tim]

Originally posted by: LumbergTech

Originally posted by: thepladfad

Originally posted by: LumbergTech
there was a sound card released recently that got very good reviews...non x-fi based..i cant remember what it was..it does drop your fps by about 7 or 8 tho over x-fi..who cares though as far as im concerned i will never buy another creative product

edit: i just saw it on the forum. its the asus xonar

Kind of funny that one would purchase 1 peice of hardware that decreases the performance of other purchased hardware in exchange for a VERY nominal increase in sound quality...

Anyone else see the stupid irony here?

I don't really see it as "decreasing the performance of other hardware".
I honestly believe that creative has been holding back the sound card industry for a long time.
I don't really see how choosing a sound card for a negligible fps increase is any smarter than for what you consider to be a significant increase in sound quality.

Creative actually didn't hold the industry back untill the release of Vista. Before that their hardware was cutting edge. The product they put out set the bar of quality, hence their success at the time. IMHO, other companies lack to produce competative hardware is what is now holding the industry back.

Also, consider this. This Creative bungle with Vista has sent a lot of people using onboard sound. Although not as superb a quality as the Creative X-FI series, it is catching up! Why bother to buy a descrete sound solution when future integration is looking up? Shouldn't the industry and technologies goals lean towards finding better and more integrated solutions be a priority anyway? Yes is sure looks cool having two video cards and a CPU hooked up to watercooling on a motherboard, but is that necessarily better than progress towards a chip the size of a thumbnail that can perform all of those task faster and better? I think not.

As far as the quality difference between a discrete solution and onboard, like I said, the gap has been narrowed and continues to do so. Anyone but true audiophiles wouldn't even notice the difference in sound quality at this point.

I guess what I'm trying to say is IMHO, the death of the discrete sound solution (it appears to be headed that way) is a GOOD thing and should be welcomed.

If none of this ranting made sence, forgive me because I'm drinking right now

 

[postmortemIA]

I don't know what kind of speakers you guys have, but when i tried my onboard Sigmatel hi-def audio it sounded like AC97.

so problem ere is like thepladfad said, nobody wants to make real soundcard anymore - everything is being done in software.

and for the record, I don't have any X-Fi issues in Vista X64, I beleive bundled software and drivers are excellent.

It seems to be "in" to bash Creative.

 

[LumbergTech]

Originally posted by: thepladfad

Originally posted by: LumbergTech

Originally posted by: thepladfad

Originally posted by: LumbergTech
there was a sound card released recently that got very good reviews...non x-fi based..i cant remember what it was..it does drop your fps by about 7 or 8 tho over x-fi..who cares though as far as im concerned i will never buy another creative product

edit: i just saw it on the forum. its the asus xonar

Kind of funny that one would purchase 1 peice of hardware that decreases the performance of other purchased hardware in exchange for a VERY nominal increase in sound quality...

Anyone else see the stupid irony here?

I don't really see it as "decreasing the performance of other hardware".
I honestly believe that creative has been holding back the sound card industry for a long time.
I don't really see how choosing a sound card for a negligible fps increase is any smarter than for what you consider to be a significant increase in sound quality.

Creative actually didn't hold the industry back untill the release of Vista. Before that their hardware was cutting edge. The product they put out set the bar of quality, hence their success at the time. IMHO, other companies lack to produce competative hardware is what is now holding the industry back.

Also, consider this. This Creative bungle with Vista has sent a lot of people using onboard sound. Although not as superb a quality as the Creative X-FI series, it is catching up! Why bother to buy a descrete sound solution when future integration is looking up? Shouldn't the industry and technologies goals lean towards finding better and more integrated solutions be a priority anyway? Yes is sure looks cool having two video cards and a CPU hooked up to watercooling on a motherboard, but is that necessarily better than progress towards a chip the size of a thumbnail that can perform all of those task faster and better? I think not.

As far as the quality difference between a discrete solution and onboard, like I said, the gap has been narrowed and continues to do so. Anyone but true audiophiles wouldn't even notice the difference in sound quality at this point.

I guess what I'm trying to say is IMHO, the death of the discrete sound solution (it appears to be headed that way) is a GOOD thing and should be welcomed.

If none of this ranting made sence, forgive me because I'm drinking right now

Well, I would like to have good sound built into a motherboard, however, this would have to be an enthusiast part because it would just increase the costs of the board

 

[LumbergTech]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
I don't know what kind of speakers you guys have, but when i tried my onboard Sigmatel hi-def audio it sounded like AC97.

so problem ere is like thepladfad said, nobody wants to make real soundcard anymore - everything is being done in software.

and for the record, I don't have any X-Fi issues in Vista X64, I beleive bundled software and drivers are excellent.

It seems to be "in" to bash Creative.

not really, if you havent been paying attention..people have been quite pissed off at creative for a long time......ive seen rants about them ever since i can remember....this particular occurance just has the masses riled up again...everyone gets angry and then eventually resigns themself to the fact that no company is going to give creative the kick in the pants they need in the form of competition

 

[kylef]

Originally posted by: LumbergTech
not really, if you havent been paying attention..people have been quite pissed off at creative for a long time......ive seen rants about them ever since i can remember....this particular occurance just has the masses riled up again...everyone gets angry and then eventually resigns themself to the fact that no company is going to give creative the kick in the pants they need in the form of competition

People rant at Creative for good reason.

Aureal, a fairly tiny startup, launched the whole 3-d PC sound revolution with A3d back in 1996-1997. PC sound was exciting again; games started to pay attention to sound again and make it part of the gaming experience by modeling 3d environments accurately. A3d's use of raytracing and reflection calculations to model direct and reverb sound effects was superior to anything out there. Creative's response, EAX 1.0, was a poor clone; it didn't even model reflections.

So Creative decided to sue in 1998. What did they sue over? Everything they thought might fly in court. First up was generic PCI-based audio technology, which ironically Creative didn't own until they acquired Ensoniq. That seems to have been dropped at some point. Then they tried false advertising, which was also a stretch. But the only one that actually went to trial was an Emu patent (Creative bought Emu in 1993) on "digital sampling using cache memory"; but the jury found in Aureal's favor nonetheless in 1999.

Aureal counter-sued using its many 3d-sound patents, but this lawsuit was never resolved in court because Aureal ran out of money. Investors had stopped giving them more capital while waiting for the lawsuits to play out, and lucrative deals with system integrators like Dell fell through during the same period. In April 2000, Aureal declared bankruptcy.

And in the final, most bitter irony: guess who bought up all of Aureal's liquified assets a few months later, including all of the A3d patents, for $30 million? I'll give you one guess.

Lots of older gamers who remember this mess have avoided Creative ever since.

 

[postmortemIA]

alright, yes they had issues with Live! series and XP.. I believe there's no support in Vista for Live! series at all.

Then X-Fi doesn't work in Linux...

In cases when Creative drivers work as supposed, then there's nothing like it.

Anyway, they are doomed, just like 3DFX, aureal, physX, S3/DiamondMM.

 

[bendixG15]

Originally posted by: kylef
.................Lots of older gamers who remember this mess have avoided Creative ever since.

Add to that ...and non-gamers too...

One of the hardest things to do in building a computer in "the good old days" was to get the Creative drivers to work. They themselves didn't know which drivers went with which card.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: bendixG15
One of the hardest things to do in building a computer in "the good old days" was to get the Creative drivers to work.

Nonsense. In the "good ol' days" all I had to do was to add:

SET BLASTER A220 I5 D1 H5 T6

to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, and then DOS games will put out sound just fine.

Yes, I wrote that line out of memory and yes I know what all the settings mean.

Their PCI sound cards are a different story.

Anyhoot, I consider myself to be a pretty die-hard gamer, and I haven't used a Creative Labs sound card in many, many years - that is except for four ISA Sound Blaster cards in four antiquated machines set up for DOS gaming (complete with ISA 10baseT cards using jumpers). Anyone between Chicago and Milwaukee want to get their game on with Death Rally, Duke Nukem or Shadow Warrior, PM me.

"You no mess with Lo Wang!"

 

[AmberClad]

This whole thing has been pretty entertaining to watch really. And I thought Futuremark brought upon themselves an epic self-pwnage a few weeks ago...this Creative PR nightmare is an order of magnitude larger :laugh:. I have to wonder if this is the final nail in their coffin.

 

[Coronus]

So, what I getting from this is that I should juast go with my onboard sound as it is AC97. DO I need to change any of the configurations to get Dolby 7.1 if I buy supporting speakers? Or does the onboard not support dolby at all?

C

 

[WilsonTarbuckles]

ON OPTIONS
Coronus: Creative OEM'ed the X-fi chip to Auzentech. One of the cards they have made with it is the Auzen X-Fi Prelude (i think there are more). There is also the Asus Xonar previously mentioned, and companies like Turtle Beach, M-Audio, and Diamond that have been making competing cards for a while. The former two (Xonar and Auzen) are really pricey.

ON EXPERIENCES w/ CREATIVE
I've owned several different tiers of Creative products, but no other discrete sound. What has become most important to me are FPS savings in games and analog audio quality. That is, the FPS increase I experience because the sound card is offloading tasks from the CPU - that is, the single core it is usually constrained to >=( - and the clarity of sound for games and primarily music. I'm no expert but I don't notice the difference with the extra API features for gaming (the touted EAX Advanced HD, and predecessors). In the last few weeks I've been using the Azalia HD on my motherboard, and while I miss the old framerates and sound clarity, I just don't notice the difference in the form of more emersive gameplay. Oh and my x-fi xtreme music died (hardware failure that prevents it from being recognized) last week after about 2 years of use.

ON CREATIVE PR
Creative also has a huge PR issue with the 'crackling' problem. There are several threads on their forum about it that turn into frenzied troll orgies full of pissed off customers (http://forums.creative.com/cre...aster&thread.id=71962). In short, they claim the crackling issues in games, most notably the Battlefield line, are the fault of motherboard chipset makers or some such, and most people seem to think it's all lies.

----

> So, what I getting from this is that I should juast go with my onboard sound as it is
> AC97. DO I need to change any of the configurations to get Dolby 7.1 if I buy supporting
> speakers? Or does the onboard not support dolby at all?

Dolby x.x and DTS are surround sound encodings, just audio formats that movies use. Players like PowerDVD can decode them. There are external hardware decoders, I think, and the X-Fi can do it. I'm not sure what that will net you besides offloading processing. If you have all the jacks for x.1, you can wire up analog speakers that way. Dig around the drivers/manual to see how many channels you can get with the digital connections, if there are any (they can be 3.5mm jacks like the rest, digital DIN, optical, coax ... HDMI).

Oh, and I believe one of the big issues of that PR mess mentioned earlier was that Creative's Vista drivers disabled the hardware Dolby decoding functionality, and this Daniel_K guy's 3rd party drivers enabled it. Articles suggest this was a move to protect content against (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/f...x.php?showtopic=50695).

 

[Sigismundo]

Originally posted by: kylef

And in the final, most bitter irony: guess who bought up all of Aureal's liquified assets a few months later, including all of the A3d patents, for $30 million? I'll give you one guess.

Lots of older gamers who remember this mess have avoided Creative ever since.

Co-Sign....i have bought Creative since only because no other option is available for decent 3d sound. I have not had a single card that made me as happy since Aureal's a3d was still around.

If ANY company made a Vista 64 compatable sound card with decent 3d sound support I'd happily jump ship.....Creative is to hardware what EA is to classic video games series, they destroy anything good in the name of this years profits. If only they realized you build more future profits by caring for your customers.

 

[jaqie]

HT Omega has been the OEM chip maker for just about all sound cards high end and low end (except creative) for many years, and now they are getting into selling cards directly. Do a bit of homework, and you will see they offer some serious contenders for high perf sound cards. If I had the cash to spend, I would definitely get one for my gaming box.

Originally posted by: Sigismundo
If ANY company made a Vista 64 compatable sound card with decent 3d sound support I'd happily jump ship.

Time to put your bathing suit on.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: jaqie
HT Omega has been the OEM chip maker for just about all sound cards high end and low end (except creative) for many years, and now they are getting into selling cards directly. Do a bit of homework, and you will see they offer some serious contenders for high perf sound cards. If I had the cash to spend, I would definitely get one for my gaming box.

Originally posted by: Sigismundo
If ANY company made a Vista 64 compatable sound card with decent 3d sound support I'd happily jump ship.

Time to put your bathing suit on.

HT Omega has never been an OEM chip maker. CMedia has.

As for Vista 64, I believe both Auzentech and HT OMEGA among others have 64 bit vista drivers.

 

[jaqie]

Then the information I researched was wrong. By what I read, HT Omega was a spinoff from C-Media...
If I was wrong, then so be it... do you have information that they were not a spinoff? I can't find any.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: jaqie
Then the information I researched was wrong. By what I read, HT Omega was a spinoff from C-Media...
If I was wrong, then so be it... do you have information that they were not a spinoff? I can't find any.

Uh, well I think if anything you need to prove that they were.

I would think that that would be valuable information to put in HT OMEGA's company history if it were true. However, It's not there, therefore I don't believe it to be true.

Perhaps engineers came from cmedia to work at HT omega. However, many companys have and currently use Cmedia chips.

 

[jaqie]

Where I read it is gone, rather I can't find it with some googling... but you know the temporal nature of webpages specifically hardware related ones (here today gone next week). Anyways, I'll settle fine for "unsubstantiated claim" on my part because I can't find any information either way on the issue now.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: theplaidfad

Originally posted by: LumbergTech

Originally posted by: thepladfad

Originally posted by: LumbergTech
there was a sound card released recently that got very good reviews...non x-fi based..i cant remember what it was..it does drop your fps by about 7 or 8 tho over x-fi..who cares though as far as im concerned i will never buy another creative product

edit: i just saw it on the forum. its the asus xonar

Kind of funny that one would purchase 1 peice of hardware that decreases the performance of other purchased hardware in exchange for a VERY nominal increase in sound quality...

Anyone else see the stupid irony here?

I don't really see it as "decreasing the performance of other hardware".
I honestly believe that creative has been holding back the sound card industry for a long time.
I don't really see how choosing a sound card for a negligible fps increase is any smarter than for what you consider to be a significant increase in sound quality.

Creative actually didn't hold the industry back untill the release of Vista. Before that their hardware was cutting edge. The product they put out set the bar of quality, hence their success at the time. IMHO, other companies lack to produce competative hardware is what is now holding the industry back.

Also, consider this. This Creative bungle with Vista has sent a lot of people using onboard sound. Although not as superb a quality as the Creative X-FI series, it is catching up! Why bother to buy a descrete sound solution when future integration is looking up? Shouldn't the industry and technologies goals lean towards finding better and more integrated solutions be a priority anyway? Yes is sure looks cool having two video cards and a CPU hooked up to watercooling on a motherboard, but is that necessarily better than progress towards a chip the size of a thumbnail that can perform all of those task faster and better? I think not.

As far as the quality difference between a discrete solution and onboard, like I said, the gap has been narrowed and continues to do so. Anyone but true audiophiles wouldn't even notice the difference in sound quality at this point.

I guess what I'm trying to say is IMHO, the death of the discrete sound solution (it appears to be headed that way) is a GOOD thing and should be welcomed.

If none of this ranting made sence, forgive me because I'm drinking right now

their tech hasn't been cutting edge for a long time, they were dragged into surround/3d audio by aureal who had a superior solution but still died, after that it stagnated with creatives effective monopoly and its stupid proprietary eax format i refuse to support. now with vista, creative is dead. the future is multicore cpu and any card you want which is a massive positive for consumers in the long run. i won't help that company keep its silly death grip on the gaming industry one second longer, its been holding us all back.