Creative share price hits lowest point since 1996.

[FoBoT]

Originally posted by: JohnCU
How much better can they make a sound card, though?

yeah, it is like a restaurant charging for water, probably not the best business model

 

[aldamon]

Originally posted by: Aharami
so are you telling me that the X-Fi Extreme Music for $50 is no better than Realtek ALC888 onboard audio?

I prefer hardware EAX and OpenAL acceleration (CPU utilization sucks with onboard audio) but if I didn't play games, I would not have an X-Fi. My Logitech speakers are not good enough to leverage higher-quality DACs so onboard audio would be fine.

 

[AndrewR]

Originally posted by: SinfulWeeper
Maybe AMD will do us all a favor and buy them out too. :laugh:

If they could buy their patent technology for a pittance to help in motherboard integration, it might be a nice combination.

 

[crystal]

My main reason was and still is on board sound works fine for me. The reason I switched to on board was because their drivers crashed my system or hang and forced me to reboot. After a few weeks struggling with it, I just removed it out of my system. This was many years ago. It is likely no more delicate sound cards for me - no matter from which companies.

 

[dr150]

Originally posted by: bigrash

Originally posted by: BrokenVisage
Zen > iPod

hahaha.

Corrected:


Meizu>Ipod

 

[TipsyMcStagger]

It's always been a major pain in the ass to get drivers off their site

 

[Aimster]

They sell nice speakers? but who really makes them ?

 

[Mark R]

Originally posted by: pontifex

Originally posted by: NanoStuff

That's part of the problem, sound DSPs are obsolete. Everything the X-Fi did could have been done in software at no cost. From a business standpoint, that was not an option, so the X-Fi had to be necessarily shipped with a truckload of marketing bullshit. <snip>

so why does some random dude on a forum knows all about this yet no company out there is doing anything you say?

But that's the point, many companies are. MS have been planning this for ages, and have finally released this in Vista. Everything that the X-fi can do is supplied as standard in the Vista audio engine, as well as much, much more. And, because it's pure software, it's fully upgradeable - and you can even write your own processing modules for it.

Vista has moved game audio largely into software, and modern CPUs aren't really much bothered by it. However, you also with sophisticated home-theater processing (e.g. speaker time delay, and echo/reverb compensation), microphone array processing (e.g. if you want to capture speech, but you have 3 or 4 microphones, the audio engine will automatically determine which microphone has the best signal, and use the others to perform active noise reduction).

But it's the same with other creative design choices. The Live and audigy were supposed to be high-end cards. What type of audio media would be played most often on such cards? CD audio, and CD audio derived formats (e.g. MP3). What format did the cards not support? Yup. CD audio. If you wanted to play CD audio (44.1 kHz) the card would emulate it by resampling it to 48 kHz - because of limited DSP power on the card, the algorithm used was piss-poor. Audigy owners who have upgraded to vista have commented on a sudden improvement in sound quality - attributable to the pure software approach used.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Mark R

Originally posted by: pontifex

Originally posted by: NanoStuff

That's part of the problem, sound DSPs are obsolete. Everything the X-Fi did could have been done in software at no cost. From a business standpoint, that was not an option, so the X-Fi had to be necessarily shipped with a truckload of marketing bullshit. <snip>

so why does some random dude on a forum knows all about this yet no company out there is doing anything you say?

But that's the point, many companies are. MS have been planning this for ages, and have finally released this in Vista. Everything that the X-fi can do is supplied as standard in the Vista audio engine, as well as much, much more. And, because it's pure software, it's fully upgradeable - and you can even write your own processing modules for it.

Vista has moved game audio largely into software, and modern CPUs aren't really much bothered by it. However, you also with sophisticated home-theater processing (e.g. speaker time delay, and echo/reverb compensation), microphone array processing (e.g. if you want to capture speech, but you have 3 or 4 microphones, the audio engine will automatically determine which microphone has the best signal, and use the others to perform active noise reduction).

But it's the same with other creative design choices. The Live and audigy were supposed to be high-end cards. What type of audio media would be played most often on such cards? CD audio, and CD audio derived formats (e.g. MP3). What format did the cards not support? Yup. CD audio. If you wanted to play CD audio (44.1 kHz) the card would emulate it by resampling it to 48 kHz - because of limited DSP power on the card, the algorithm used was piss-poor. Audigy owners who have upgraded to vista have commented on a sudden improvement in sound quality - attributable to the pure software approach used.

You're spot on about Vista when it comes to the Audigy, but I disagree when it comes to the X-Fi. The X-Fi does a better job resampling and the CMSS HRTFs are leaps and bounds above what Vista or any other software audio engine does. Vista is a step back in too many ways because it's removing all hardware audio processing and moving it to software, at which point no one wants to do any serious processing because they're spending CPU time they'd rather spend on graphics. Take a look at Quake Wars: you can have 5.1 sound or stereo, there's absolutely nothing for vertical sound positioning or any configuration that isn't 5.1 (>5.1 or headphones). Or Bioshock, where occlusions don't even work so you can't tell if something is behind a wall or not.

Vista was an improvement to those on the bottom, but boy is it a drag on those of us at the top.

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: Ktulu

Originally posted by: Fenixgoon

Originally posted by: bigrash

Originally posted by: BrokenVisage
Zen > iPod

hahaha.

larger screen, fewer restrictions, drag&drop transfers (as opposed to itunes), equal capacity at lower price. i don't see the problem.

apple marketing simply wtf-pwned everything in sight.

Go compare an Zen Vision M and an Ipod at $250 and comeback and repost please.

Zen Vision M

Ipod Classic

I used to be a die hard IPod hater and Creative supporter but Apple simply crushed the MP3 player market, plain and simple.

the Zen is what at least a year old if not older? and the ipod is the brand new one, when the zen first came out, the smaller version it was better then the ipods at the time, i owned both, my iaudio spanked the ipod ntil its latest revision as well

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: novasatori
the problem mainly is on board audio
why do I want to spend $100-300 on a sound card when I can get onboard audio which sounds decent, and spending that $100-300 on a nice set of speakers more than likely would show more benefit that a sound card.

yup, lack of competition as well for the longest time. i'd rather not dump my money into creative's overpriced stagnant tech. hd audio on m/b's are good enough

 

[Shawn]

Last Creative product I bought was the Sound Blaster Pro.

 

[Pocatello]

I'm not an audiophile, on-board audio is good enough for me.