NOOO! AUREAL GOES TO CREATIVE?!?!?!?! ARG!!!

[Remnant2]

Goi: That's right. I actually still have a GUS PnP sitting in my machine right now. The GUS was my favorite soundcard. Gamers had some problems with compatibility, but for the tracked music and demo scene, it was impossible to beat.

In an era when the SB Pro & 16 was the hot new card from Creative, Gravis had 1mb onboard sound memory, using patch caching to allow the use of a very good sounding 5mb set.

I remember how I bought my GUS in the 256kb version to save money, then cannibalized the RAM right off an old video card (this is the old days, where ram was actually housed in DIP sockets), and filled up all the free sockets to give me 1mb. Damn shame that gravis went under.. they had the same problem that Aureal went through : Great product, niche product, mammoth competitor.

 

[Kill_Phil]

Recneps: your my hero!

 

[OneEng]

Recneps,
I was referring to sound cards. I am not sure how an ATI Rage Pro fits into this discussion. I am certian that it is just another example of one of those technical things I can not understand.

Red Dawn,
Yes, I am certian that the engineering staff at Creative is a fine group of innovators. The sales and marketing divisions are rarely representative of the engineering staff.

My only comment on this whole thing is that .... well, it seems like the SBLive is quite a good value. It is pretty hard to beat a $40.00 card. I am not sure how it could be much more affordable. I agree that monopolies are bad, and competition is good. I am not sure that I see where creative is using its monopoly power in a way that negatively effects we consumers ..... at least not yet.

If we were talking about nVidia, I could understand the concern. Video cards are rapidly making it into the price catagory of "low orbit". I am hoping that either ATI or 3dfx or Matrox can compete with the new video bemoth so prices come back down into the atmosphere at least!

Could someone explain how creative is abusing its market position? I must have missed something.

 

[Soccerman]

it's a well known (at least, I thought it was well known) that Creative has really not entered anything new into the market at all. it was Aureal that forced Creative to release something new (the Live!), becuase Creative was forced to do so, or lose much more market share then they normally would.

not only was Creative just sitting there (ok, some new cards were released now and then, but they weren't much of an improvement at all, in fact, they had bad compatability AFAIK ie, the PCI512), they were charging mucho dollars for them.

I remember a few years ago, looking for a decent soundcard, and landed my sights NOT on a Creative card, but the Opti931, becuase Creative cards (even in the classified ads) were a bundle ($70 for a new SB AWE 64 AT LEAST).

I bought my OPTi931 for $20 thank you very much, it still works in my old 486 too! now, when it became time to get a new one (my old Opti doesn't do multiple streams of Audio) I set my eyes on the Vortex 2, becuase it was on sale for $70 Canadian (ok, about as much as what the creative card was back in the day), and also, becuase I had heard many a good thing about it. the competing Live series cards were ALOT more expensive (over $100) when I got my Aureal Vortex 2 Superquad Digital, and I don't regret not getting a Live one bit.

as you can see, just a few years of competiton has REALLY accelerated this industry, and the prices never skyrocketed much at all. I can say that $70 for what was, then, an over 2 year old design is too much (I'm talking about the SB AWE 64).

 

[LXi]

Recneps: Total BS, it doesnt matter if the video card use more CPU or not, the thing is a GeForce2 will probably produce 10x as much frame rates as a RagePro. The thing we want here is speed, we dont really care about CPU utilization. And the thing is, A3D 2.0 takes away 25% of the raw frame rates, NOT CPU utilization(goddamn we can care less about that), there is a difference between speed and CPU utilizatoin, and a difference when you want it to sound good.

 

[dawks]

Have a look at my post. nVidia to the rescue!! maybe!

Maybe they will do to the sound card market, what they did for the video card arena.

 

[Mem]

Well I think the best thing Creative Labs can do for Aureal fans is bring out some new drivers for Win98/2000 ,I`m sure IMHO there next card is going to be a hybrid of some kind.

 

[Soccerman]

"And the thing is, A3D 2.0 takes away 25% of the raw frame rates"

it wouldn't if Creative hadn't used their much larger pocketbook to buy laywers who would try to sue Aureal for obscure things that they would lose on anyway.

why? in case you didn't know, the SQ3500 would have been released long ago now (we first started hearing about it LAST YEAR).

 

[Ben]

Oh god, I can see the heated NVidia vs. Creative arguments already.

 

[beer]

Heh, at least I'm looking forward to a SLOWER sound card adavancement so I don't need to buy a new one every 6 months.

 

[Zero]

I'm not sure how anyone can say that Creative is innovative in the sound card department. If you go to Creative Labs website and look through past creative announcements, you will find link upon links of Creative purchasing this company and Creative buying that company and Creative joins with this tech company and Creative joins with that tech company, etc. It seems that many companys have done the innovating for them. Now that creative has burried Aureal, I'm sure we'll see Creatives latest innovations.....A3d 4.0! Now that's innovation!

Zero

 

[Zero]

Also, you can bet that Creative WILL support sound cards like the Aureal SQ1500, SQ2500, and any other Aureal base sound card. Aureal has a pretty big support base and I'm sure that most Aureal supporters are not happy with Aureal being put out of business by Creative. So you can bet that many Aureal supporters will do everything they can to not purchase a creative product. But if Creative DOES support our Aureal cards and provide us with good working drivers, you can bet that those Aureal supporters WILL consider purchasing a creative product in the future. And I'm sure creative would be happy with that. If creative is as good at supporting products as I hear creative supporters say, than creative will support our Aureal cards. Otherwise I'll continue to use my Aureal card until there is a creative competitor worth purchasing from.

Zero

 

[BD2003]

Creative is NOT going to support aureal cards. Why would they want to replenish the strength in their compeition? They dont make any money on the aureal cards out there already, so why bother? And the % of people that actually give a crap who makes their card, instead of what it can do is very very small. Just because 3dfx knocked rendition out of the market, and then the voodoo2 came out, do you think people chose not to buy it because they didnt like 3dfx? Hell no! And even if they decided they want to, whos gonna do it? the best qualified people to handle the job would be the aureal engineers, who pretty much were all snapped up by nvidia. Creative purchased the assets of aureal, so they now own the patent on a3d technology, and its theirs to do so as they please. That doesnt necessary mean they maintain control of all the employees...Competition will be a lot easier to come by nowadays anyway, because noone has to worry about sound blaster compatibility, merely directx compatibility. Its not the end of the world, and live prices arent going to rise, and besides, I'm not looking forward to buying another soundcard.

 

[dawks]

A3D will never be the same. Like I've said before, the key people in developing A3D are now working for nVidia (as far as I know). Although Creative has the technology, they just dont have the minds.

 

[OneEng]

Lxi,
You are certianly confused. You can tell the difference between a video card and a sound card can't you? From your discussion, it appears that you can not.

Soccerman,
I agree that the sound card technology has been much slower than say video card technology. I have never followed the market and just assumed that the Sound Blaster series was a decent thing since it was the standard of the industry for so long.

I have heard that A3D is superior in quality to EAX. This is at the expense of CPU processor power (in both cases). Lxi would obveously argue that it makes no difference (in spite of the multitude of benchmarks showing that it does). Some people would like to have the effects even at the expence of some frame rate decrease. I have read an article or two that actually recommends not having the A3D on because it does make the sound more real and thus giving your opponenets an advantage over you (they can hear through walls while you can not).

I hope that the recent loss of competition does not result in the return of higher prices. This is most certianly a vain hope since monopolies invariably result in higher prices to the consumer. I am comforted in the fact that my current SBLive card seems quite adequate to my needs for the foreseeable future. I can find no need to upgrade this part and hope to keep it as long as one would the computer monitor.

 

[Zero]

Bigdee20003,
You have a good point.

Zero

 

[Goi]

I guess the reason why its hard to judge sound is because its a subjective judgement of sound quality and realism. The same thing goes with comparing video card image quality, except the latter is easier than comparing sound because our eyes are inherently more sensitive than our ears since they're used as our primary sense(unless you're blind of course). Video performance is easily quantifiable by the speed of rendering, be it the total time to complete a given video intensive task, or average throughput(eg. framerate), etc. However, there's no easy way to quantify sound performance, since there really is no "performance" to speak or, unless you're talking about amount of CPU utilization. In this regard, sound card are actually "sound decelerators" since they use up CPU cycles. All they do is add features and capabilities. Kinda like the S3 Virge. Sure it could render in 3D, but really slowly. OK maybe soundcards are not THAT bad, but you get what I mean

When soundcard CPU utilization gets to be negligible(say <1%) when all features are enabled, then it'll be really difficult to say which is &quot;better&quot;. Of course you could look at standard audio specifications such as S/N ratio, THD, power ratings, etc...but in a noisy environment such as inside a PC case, with all those loud fans blowing like I'm sure many of you have, its going to be pretty much moot. The only way to differentiate soundcards then will be features, and even then I'm sure features will be standard, the only difference being the implementation of them.

 

[WetWilly]

I'd doubt there will be much support for the old Aureal cards. Looking back to when Creative bought Ensoniq and the Ensoniq AudioPCI (which became the basis for several SoundBlasters) partially out of embarassment because Creative couldn't get SB emulation on the PCI bus working themselves (remember the good ol' unused SB-Link/DDMA connector on system boards?), Creative didn't officially release drivers for the Ensoniq, but did release drivers for their boards that used the Ensoniq chip. I doubt that Creative is going to use the Vortex 8820/8830 chips, since they'll will most likely implement A3D on their DSP, so there's no real motivation to update Vortex drivers. Only thing they might possibly do is complete the Vortex Win2K driver, but even that isn't a sure thing.

Add me to the not-very-happy-about-this camp. The last Creative card I had was a SoundBlaster 16 with the CSP upgrade. Flaked out quite a bit and had problems with MIDI daughterboards on the WaveBlaster header. Creative support really sucked big time. Filled out a LONG questionnaire (took 1/2 hour), send it to Tech Support several times, and no response AT ALL. My ultimate fix was to replace the SB16 with an Ensoniq AudioPCI (then a Vortex 1 card, then a MX300/Vortex 2). The only good that might come out of this is if A3D 3.0 becomes EAX 3.0.