The Business of Technology: Creative Labs

by Ryan Smith on 10/2/2007 5:00 PM EST
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  • Sabresiberian - Saturday, October 6, 2007 - link

    After having trouble with Creative products a couple of years ago, I'm not a fan. Fine with me if they belly up, I'm not going to buy any of their products anyway.

    I am saddened to think the high-end graphics card might die out, though; I can't help but think on-board audio and software reliant audio means reduced quaility. I hope this doesn't happen.

    Vista handles sound through software, by-passing the audio card? I thought audio was handled by DirectX, which largely bypasses the OS. This is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
  • Sabresiberian - Saturday, October 6, 2007 - link

    Well after reading saratoga's comments, I see I may be wrong :) hopefully the SOFTWARE for audio will be developed to reach audiophile quality.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - link

    I don't think that's possible. When it comes to generating analog signals, extra physical hardware (board space, capacitors) allows for quality. A single-chip solution in an MP3 player can't compete with an Audigy card that's populated with components. There's a reason why high quality receivers are big and heavy.
  • R3MF - Friday, October 5, 2007 - link

    While I see lots of people cheering the demise of Creative (and i loath the company too), are people really willing to see the last proponent of Hardware Audio Acceleration disappear down the pan?

    The amiga way of having dedicated hardware to massively speed-up discreet computing needs is always the best way of doing things, and we know it which is why we buy GPU's, PPU's and APU's.
    Using the generic and unspectacular power of the x86 CPU to shoulder the burden of any of the above tasks is stupid. Period.

    I know that Vista currently has no acceleratable (sp?) audio API, which is making Audio DSP cards like the X-Fi look redundant, but there are two advancements in 3D Game audio that did not appear to be covered in the article above before the authors leaps to his conclusion. They are:
    1) OpenAL - many games now use this API and I believe that Creative do intend that the X-Fi be able to accelerate this in hardware.
    2) Vista SP1 is supposed to bring the Xbox XNA (sp?) 3D audio API to the PC, why could not Creative do with this as they have done with Direct3D/Alchemy.

    There seems to be plenty of future potential for hardware acceleration of 3D Audio in PC gaming, and it seems cretinous for PC gamers to accept that the best place to process the 3D audio is within the CPU.

    What do you think; should the article be updated to make mention of this?
  • saratoga - Friday, October 5, 2007 - link

    quote:

    are people really willing to see the last proponent of Hardware Audio Acceleration disappear down the pan?


    Its not going away exactly, its just moving from proprietary cores on the PCI bus to additional CPU cores, and then onto specialized x86 hardware like AMD's Fusion and Intel's on die accelerators.

    quote:

    The amiga way of having dedicated hardware to massively speed-up discreet computing needs is always the best way of doing things


    This is really nonsense. I've personally seen this strategy blow up because a product was designed to process fully in hardware (not even CPU cores, literally multipliers and registers in series). It works great until someone comes up with a new task, and then you're screwed. No such thing as a software fix when you've fabbed hardware for the task.

    At best hardware works when software is too slow. But its always more expensive and less flexible. Always. As soon as CPU hardware gets fast enough, you want to move to software. Cheaper, more flexible, and in the end its almost always faster just because AMD/intel can afford better fabs and more engineers then the Creative Lab's of the world.

    The Xfi is a wonderful example. Each core on a modern Intel CPU outclasses it by roughly a factor of 5-10, and the gap gets bigger every year. I worked out the math a while ago, and the most expensive Core 2 CPU had something like 100x the throughput of an Xfi. Its its infinately more flexible (full IEEE754 support, large cache, faster memory, no PCI bottleneck, standard development tools, etc).

    quote:

    Using the generic and unspectacular power of the x86 CPU to shoulder the burden of any of the above tasks is stupid. Period.


    I'm sorry, but you're just plain ignorant.

    quote:

    There seems to be plenty of future potential for hardware acceleration of 3D Audio in PC gaming, and it seems cretinous for PC gamers to accept that the best place to process the 3D audio is within the CPU.


    You're really confused about whats happening here. The problem isn't that MS is preventing Creative from using their hardware under Vista. They're not. The problem is people aren't buying XFIs in sufficient numbers to keep it going. Take a look at Valve's hardware surveys sometime. Creative's share has been dropping 20% a quarter for some time now. Sometime in 2008 the percentage of people running steam with SLI will likely surpass the number of people running an Xfi. Think about that for a moment.

    The xfi will be the last of its kind because their is no market for an xfi successor.
  • gramboh - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link

    First off I hate Creative Labs as a company.

    The problem with comparing the Core 2 to the DSP chip on the X-Fi in terms of computational power is you are ignoring the hardware that produces the analog sound signal (as a poster below points out). This is my problem with onboard, the sound 'quality' I get through my phones (entry level Sennheiser HD570) and speakers (Klipsch Promedia 4.1) is awful compared to what I get from my X-Fi XtremeGamer.

    I almost went with onboard on my msot recent build but luckily there was a rebate on the X-Fi XtremeGamer so I got it for $75 (still a brutal, ridiculous rip-off).
  • 0roo0roo - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link

    well i just don't think that there would be no solution to that problem if creative died. there would be m/bs with better sound on the market, and there are always all the other board makers you can try. and atleast none of them would try to waste our time with more eax lock in stuff. and as others have already said, the other boardmakers succeeding as they have shows how many people get by without creative, or buy alternatives to spite that company.
  • 0roo0roo - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link

    yup given the choice between spending on a bigger lcd/faster gpu/cpu and a creative soundcard, people will drop the soundcard. the difference in most games is insignificant compared to the other factors. and in cases where creatives proprietary nonsense isnt supported, theres nodifference at all. best to go with software audio for game development and give your entire customer base access to what you've been working so hard to create.

  • DDG - Friday, October 5, 2007 - link

    Finally, someone who shares my thoughts on this. Hardware-accelerated audio will always trump onboard audio period point blank. While Creative has made mistakes that's no reason to want to see the company disappear. Hopefully Creative can get their financial house together and continue on making great sound cards.
  • Googer - Friday, October 5, 2007 - link

    The author forgot to mention Creative's Purchase of 3d Labs put the company in to the discrete graphics card business. But it seemed they never bothered to do much in the way of product development and were mostly ignored.


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Dlabs">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Dlabs
  • Freddo - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    Sometimes I wonder how PC audio would be like if Creative actually made their stuff themselves instead of ripping it out of their dead competitors. We could have cheap, high quality MIDI (E-MU), compatibility with ISA cards (Ensoniq), superior 3D sound (Aureal), and Dolby Digital encoding in hardware (Sensaura), but nooo, Creative had to ruin the fun for everyone, and keep their "monopoly", which now bitten them in the back.

    I really liked their Sound Blaster cards back in the DOS days, but EAX never impressed me and I've been a very satisfied customer of Terratec cards now for almost a decade.

    There are a fair amount of people who will buy the latest Sound Blaster cards just for EAX or simply because it's "the soundcard to have". I'm a member of a few swedish hardware forums, and if a person there ask for soundcard recommendations, everyone will come and yell "Sound Blaster!".

    I'm quite grateful for what MS has done, too, with their audio changes. And with Service Pack 1 for Vista they are adding the XAudio2 API which will probably give excellent 3D audio (Xbox 360 uses the XAudio1 API). Sure, it will use the CPU for the audio processing, but that's hardly any issue when dual-cores are the norm, and soon quad-core will be. Which removes the need for EAX, even for the EAX enthusiasts. Unfortunately, Creative pulled a patent stunt on ID software and forced them to add EAX for Doom3, so I guess they might continue to do so.
  • DDG - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    I'd rather see more competition now that ASUS has released their Xonar card. Discrete auido is still a vital component for an enjoyable multimedia experience on the PC and if it dies then you'd best believe that discrete video will be next.
  • lsman - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    Thanks for different angles on Technology.
    I will like to view a follow up of Sound card "creative alternative" for gamers....if you can.
    I currently own X-fi gamer and Audigy 2 zs, a creative mp3 player (a Zen before)
    Although Audigy 2 has some problem in gaming (could be the game developer or so), its been well in X-fi so far.
  • jay401 - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    It says a lot that many gamers were willing to go with (comparatively) unknown brands for their soundcards when given the opportunity. It tells you just how big a pile of crap Creative's products were and just how little they listened to their customers to address and improve the problem areas.

    Creative insisted on releasing crap for years, and still often have crap for drivers and software control panels. If they hadn't been so bull-headed and actually listened to the consumer and addressed those issues, one can only guess that they would have done better and competition that cropped up like Turtle Beach, the Diamond Monster Sound MX300, and Auzentech wouldn't have gained the footholds they did because people would have actually been satisfied with their existing Creative products enough to not bother trying another brand. Creative was so bad for a while it actually encouraged other companies to get into the audio peripheral arena who likely would not have otherwise (e.g. Diamond).

  • jay401 - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    By the way, people rating posts down are folks who've never heard of the SoundBlaster16, AWE32, AWE64, etc. Newbs who don't really know Creative's history, just their X-Fi series that is actually decent (aside from a few games where they cause crashes or lockups... classic Creative driver bugs).
    I do wish Creative well but if they don't shape up, this is really just what they deserve for ignoring customer feedback over the years.
  • AggressorPrime - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    I just started using Creative products when their X-Fi came out. Just when they start having a quality product, they must die? The X-Fi provides numerous advantageous over onboard sound. Battlefield 2142 sounds so much better with full EAX 5.0. Of course, I know only gamers along with music enthusiasts will support X-Fi, since people might see it as a pain to hand over $100 for a quality audio experience. All Creative needs to do is then force people to use their product. What I mean by this is do what they are doing with onboard audio and MSI with everybody: every motherboard, whether desktop or notebook, oem or retail, DIY or Dell should have an X-Fi. Even better is if they can make a deal with nVidia and put X-Fi's on their video cards in order to compete with AMD's audio chip on their video cards. Then their HDMI would be better than AMD's considering the audio quality would be so ahead. And don't put on a cut down version on the motherboard or the video card. Put on the full fledge version and charge the mobo manufacturer / video card manufacturer $20 for the chip and X-RAM. Sure, you lose per product sale (considering you could've made $100), but you gain because everything uses your product. Moreover, you still make a profit $20/chip. If I saw an X-Fi Elite chip on a notebook, I know I would heavily consider getting it (since all Creative does for notebooks now is waste an ExpressCard bay for XtremeAudio, but since I got it I still think it's worth it for the serious gamer/movie/sound lover, even in Vista).
  • deptmaster - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    With the advent of HDMI Creative should be licensing their audio chips to video card manufacturers or if possible get into the video card market themselves.
  • jmurbank - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    The sound card business is slow and coming to a stop because nobody cares for quality sound. I rather have sound quality, but not from Creative Labs because what things happened in the past. I think my first sound card is created by Voyetra. I bought a Creative Labs Soundblaster LIVE! in 2000 thinking it was the best, but it was not. The sound quality of the card after I changed it to a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz was worst. The Santa Cruz had better sound quality and it did not hurt the bus that the LIVE card likes to do. My next sound card is Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 which has equal sound quality compared to the Lynx Studio Technology LynxTWO.

    The E-Mu is a fantastic DSP chip, but Creative Labs only went for numbers instead of sound quality. If a better company used the E-Mu chip, it will be a lot better than what Creative Labs did to it.

    An discrete sound card and graphics is necessary to include special features that a motherboard does not have. These discrete boards provides extreme performance that motherboard manufactures skim or cut corners to sell their boards at low prices. Discrete boards will always be in when people want very, very high quality graphics with the highest frame rates and the very best sound that a motherboard can not do.

    From what I learn over the years from the sound industry. A company have to have a distinct audio tone, so that it can survive. The tone that Creative Labs is playing is more machine than an actual tone. A machine tone is not very attractive. There is a sweet, dynamic, warm, etc tones that different people like. These tones attract people to certain music artist and audio manufactures.
  • grantschoep - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Sorry bought that half post, fingers hitting keys a too fast rate.

    I've always hated that I had a Soundblaster Live!, its decent, but it was just the Soundblaster name. Any one who gamed in DOS, in the early/middle 90s, that had the Gravis Ultrasound sound card, knows what I am talking about. It totally blew away the sound quality/features of anything else. Playing Doom, was awesome. 32 stereo voices... my favorite quote "SBOS installed"(which when the Soundblaster emulator started up, the driver said this on boot.

    Sure there was a few kinks to work on in the drivers, but then this was DOS, what product did have some kinks. They were good about updating software. I remember dialing via modem in long distance(to Canada from the US) to update drivers.

    Anyways, competition is always good. Hey, Gravis really kicked Soundblaster's butt when it came to features. The Ultrasounds 32 stereo voices vs Soundblaster 4 voice mono, was the comparison at at time.

    I think Creative should really focus on a very good power effiecent, cool processor for sound. I really don't think that many people run 7.1 audio from their computer(our home theater systems actually, since few movies even support that)

    Give me a good, fast, power efficient, 2.0 stereo sound processor. Get the sound as clean as possible(low THD). I'll buy. My $2500 dollars of B&W Speakers is attached to my home theater. My 30 dollar 2 speaker/sub is attached to my computer.

  • Schugy - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Who needs Creative if there's no open ALSA driver for their sound cards? Who needs sound cards with disabled digital connectors because everybody is supposed to be a pirate? Who needs players with MS DRM instead of gapless ogg vorbis support? Who buys an X-Fi for PCI if there are rumors about a PCIe version of it? Ever heard of competitors products like Noxon or Soundbridge or maybe Evoke? We all like digital radio like DAB, DMB or internetstreams but who still buys FM radios? Well, digital users might become victims of encryption but I would boycott digital radio in that case :-)
  • shortylickens - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Creative would have done better to work with onboard audio instead of fighting it so hard.
    Instead of trying to convince a small portion of the market (gamers and enthusiasts) to buy a $100 add-in product, they should have been putting $20 audio chips into motherboards, and reaching 100% of the market.
    Thats the standard to surviving in business. You either sell a handful of very expensive products to a few customers, or you sell a buttload of cheap products to many customers.
    When the overpriced, low-sale items (Live, Audigy, X-FI) werent keeping them afloat, they should have switched tactics.
  • MadBoris - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    They are being put out of audio card business by Microsoft, simple.

    I cannot understand how people can so easily swallow what they are fed.
    Somehow the great variation of OEM onboard sound cards with minimalistic drivers (written in some third world closet) is going to be a benefit to all of us.

    Now you will have 10-30 variations of onboard sound cards in crrent platforms all competing to be the lowest priced $1.25 chips on future mobo's. They will have their own idiosynchrocies just due to the extreme variety and poor minimalistic drivers. Instead of a HW MFR's bearing the major burdens, it will be the API's now, but mainly Microsoft that will directly control the future advances in sound processing. Furthermore, MS pushing their software based sound API's for gaming like XACT is really just a shift to move PC devs to their console market (part of their device in every home goal).

    Sorry, I'm not buying the whole Vista is improving on the auditory benefits of humanity. Creative may not have been the greatest thing since sliced bread in people's minds, but their was possible competition. MS's directsound API blew really. But MS 'really' handling it all now is not an improvement to me. Just another move MS has made in putting their foot in as a door stop and making sure they dominate/control an area, unfortunately they are very slow in even stealing and implementing other peoples ideas, let alone doing anything really well on their own.

    I used to slam people who were MS conspiracy theorists but eventually you have to see what is really going on with their motivations a seeing a few moves ahead. The new wddm driver models and DX API's was another step in MS placing in a door stop with future GPU design decisions being directly controlled by them, just more goals of isolating.

    I would like to see Anandtech take a hard nosed look at MS business strategies, not just at a company being forced out of business, now that could be an article. :)
  • BitJunkie - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    They aren't being put out of business by MS. They are being put out of business by an inability to change and innovate because they are still in the mindset that "creative labs IS PC audio". All they had to do is start to develop HD Audio compliant solutions with all their funky hardware DSP effects and they would have been in a very competative position.

    They didn't innovate, so they aren't competative. Worse than that, they knobbled the competition, sat on the technology and stagnated the PC audio market so we as consumers are in a worse position. Thank god for HD Audio - I just hope someone starts making decent HD Audio add-in boards to extend the capabilities under Vista.

    All MS did was fix a fundamentally crap driver architecture and audio stack - what I don't understand is why a company making it's business off of the back of one computing platform was arrogant enough to think that they could survive for long by ignoring that change.
  • Zak - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    "inability to change and innovate because they are still in the mindset..." - does this remind anyone of RIAA? LOL...

    Z.
  • Reflex - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I'm guessing you are not a developer. Your post seems to ignore some very basic realities. UAA is not new, it is the OS level implementation of the Azalia/HD-Audio spec, and its a standard that is open to any developer on any platform(including Linux). It is not MS owned. Every single audio chip maker of any consequence signed on willingly with the single exception of Creative Labs. They all agreed that it would reduce development costs, increase platform stability(regardless of platform) and increase audio quality. Once again, the only dissenter was Creative. I understand your concerns, but honestly they are not reflected by anyone credible in the industry.

    "Now you will have 10-30 variations of onboard sound cards in crrent platforms all competing to be the lowest priced $1.25 chips on future mobo's. They will have their own idiosynchrocies just due to the extreme variety and poor minimalistic drivers."

    Just to address this issue specifically, have you plugged a flash drive into a computer recently? How about a digital camera? Mouse? Keyboard? All of these devices use the same concept as UAA, namely a minimal class driver that allows OEM's to add extensions to take advantage of individual features. The end result is that these devices 'just work' for all basic functionality out of the box without a specialized driver required. None of them have the capability to bluescreen the OS, nor do they compromise security via poor coding practices. This is the future of drivers on the Windows platform, and it is a major part of why each successive OS is more stable than the previous version. I would not be suprised to see network drivers head this route soon. And yes, the specs for all of these things are open and generally not controlled by MS(Intel is typically the prime mover actually) and are also implemented on other OS's, including OS X and Linux.

    These advances benefit everyone. Unfortunatly Creative could not see that. All they had to do was focus R&D into making a truly beneficial programmable DSP for audio and they'd have had a real winner, but their unwillingness to do so has made them irrelevant.
  • MadBoris - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Not a sound developer. No developer is expert in all technologies.
    While I admit I lack the expertise to see all the underlying facts of the case.

    My concerns are purely on the surface and no self serving MS articles or videos will illuminate me to the real facts. Just on the surface alone I see issues, but we will see how it will all play out. It will likely affect different segments of the PC differently with some good and bad.

    As to minimal class drivers, the only problem is that they provide minimal functionality out of a given device as i understand it. There is no room for a hardware MFR to expose new functionality unless it is adopted by everyone and as a standard. It removes the beauty of what R&D can do in moving technology forward, a minimal class driver is an unfortunate direction. Overall stability can never be attained, MS themselves consistently prove that, but their are other ways to move in that desired direction rather than a minimalistic approach. Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken, since you appear more versed on the subject of the direction of drivers.
  • saratoga - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    quote:

    It removes the beauty of what R&D can do in moving technology forward, a minimal class driver is an unfortunate direction.


    I think you're seriously confused about how the industry is moving forward. DOS is long dead. You're not supposed to be doing things like sound effects in a driver on a modern system. Sound was one of the few areas that got a free pass from MS/Apple to stay in the stone age when OSes were dragged into the modern era. This led the the ridiculous number of problems with sound drivers over the last 10 years.

    Moving this stuff into user mode is absolutely the way forward.

    quote:

    Overall stability can never be attained


    Which is not a justification for using unstable or shoddy methods. You're trying to say that since something cannot be perfect, theres no sense in improving it. Thats wrong. If something is imperfect, improving it is often a sensible course of action. Its also why we don't run Windows 98 anymore.

    quote:

    but their are other ways to move in that desired direction rather than a minimalistic approach


    Well, theres the Windows 2003 approach where the entire audio stack is just turned off rather then risk it taking down the machine. I don't think thats a better solution. Other then that, theres not a whole lot you can do. If you're letting people run enormously complicated code in drivers, you're going to have a lot of problems. Its really that simple.

    And anyway, you keep implying that something important is being lost here. I really don't agree. This is the way forward if we want to have multicore and GPU-coprocessor accelerated sound. These are worth the cost of making the couple percent of the market who have an XFI install the OpenAL comparability layer since it will open the way forward for far more stable and far more advanced positional sound engines in the future.
  • BikeDude - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    quote:

    This is the way forward if we want to have multicore and GPU-coprocessor accelerated sound.


    First things first: I wholeheartedly agree on the stability issues. Creative has proven, time and time again that they cannot be trusted to write a driver that doesn't seriously compromise your system's stability. (mind you, nVidia are fast approaching that stage too IMO)

    But I am curious how you so categorically can state that moving the audio driver into user mode aids multicore accelerated sounds?

    I do not know the exact details, but if you look at Mark Russinovich's book "Inside Windows 2000", he explains that the GDI was moved in to the kernel (from user mode) because that was the only way they could see their way of improving multi-core performance. Prior to NT4, graphics performance was actually hurt by using several cores (or CPUs rather). Photoshop used to run slower on a dual-CPU rig.

    But of course, the Windows team are more aware of this situation than I am, so hopefully they have given this subject a lot of thought. Although I suspect/fear that the stability argument has been fairly heavy, because... Creative's drivers plain suck. They are a menace to any computer. From what I have seen, only a handful people are skilled enough to write kernel device drivers and none of them have ever been employed by Creative.

    (FWIW: I distinctly remember the time when NT4 introduced the changes I refer to, as well as all the cries of "OMG! they moved the graphics driver into the kernel! Total mayhem will ensue!" -- completely missing the obvious: The third-party graphics driver from ATI et al, was already running in the kernel, starting with NT 3.1! But GDI wasn't, and without GDI Windows pretty much doesn't function, so it has to be rock solid and has a pretty good track record)

    As for Windows 2003 -- the audio stack is turned off by default. You can easily set Win2003 up as a gaming OS, just like XP. (I've used it that way since before its release) But certainly, by default it runs without any fancy features enabled. With good reason, e.g. nVidia quietly dropped PAE support after 79.11. After version 79.11, stuff stops working when you have 4GB main memory+. (32-bit Windows 2003) I can easily imagine similar issues arising with drivers such as the ones Creative puts out.
  • saratoga - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    quote:

    But I am curious how you so categorically can state that moving the audio driver into user mode aids multicore accelerated sounds?


    It lets developers write sound code without writing drivers. Pretty simple really. It also allows for easy development of middleware for doing accelerated sound.

    quote:

    I do not know the exact details, but if you look at Mark Russinovich's book "Inside Windows 2000", he explains that the GDI was moved in to the kernel (from user mode) because that was the only way they could see their way of improving multi-core performance. Prior to NT4, graphics performance was actually hurt by using several cores (or CPUs rather).


    GDI was moved into kernel mode so that the system didn't have to switch processor modes over and over again just to draw simple GUI elements. This has nothing to do with GDI.

    quote:


    Photoshop used to run slower on a dual-CPU rig.



    Photoshop is not a driver. I don't know why you're bringing it up.

    quote:

    As for Windows 2003 -- the audio stack is turned off by default. You can easily set Win2003 up as a gaming OS, just like XP.


    Yes, but then you would incur the same stability issues as other versions of Windows.
  • BikeDude - Friday, October 5, 2007 - link

    [quote]
    Photoshop is not a driver. I don't know why you're bringing it up.
    [/quote]

    Because back then (NT 3.51) this was the side-effect of having GDI in user mode. Moving GDI into the kernel was mainly done to increase performance on SMP rigs. (according to Mark's book)

    [quote]Yes, but then you would incur the same stability issues as other versions of Windows.[/quote]

    ...provided you use an audio driver from a not-too-bright OEM. Not all of us still use Creative you know... :P (granted, my CMedia chip triggers a BSOD if I enable EAX2 in "Medieaval Total War 2", the situation is nowhere as bad as it was with the Creative drivers I have used in the past)
  • Reflex - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    "My concerns are purely on the surface and no self serving MS articles or videos will illuminate me to the real facts."

    This is not a Microsoft standard, it is an industry one. Work on it began back in 1995 and was originally pushed by Intel and several laptop manufacturers looking for a way to make machines cheaper. The AC'97 and (rarely implemented) AC'99 specs were the initial results of it. HD Audio/Azalia(UAA in Vista) is simply the latest implementation. It has been ignored from the beginning by Creative, while endorsed by the vast majority of the industry, from motherboard makers to OS venders to sound card manufacturers. The videos that were linked merely explain the MS implementation of what is an open and free standard.

    "As to minimal class drivers, the only problem is that they provide minimal functionality out of a given device as i understand it. There is no room for a hardware MFR to expose new functionality unless it is adopted by everyone and as a standard. It removes the beauty of what R&D can do in moving technology forward, a minimal class driver is an unfortunate direction."

    This is not true. The existing class drivers, as well as UAA, have the ability to be extensible. That means that while basic functionality is identical between them, special drivers can be created that expose additional features and abilities of the device to the OS. There is no real limitation here, and just as video cards can expose new functionality to game developers that are beyond the generalized DirectX or OGL API's, a device with a class driver can extend the interface for applications that wish to take advantage of it.

    "Overall stability can never be attained, MS themselves consistently prove that, but their are other ways to move in that desired direction rather than a minimalistic approach."

    This is not really the point. The point is that when you have crashes you analyze what caused them and sort them into buckets to determine what causes the most problems. Microsoft has stated publicly that 97% of all OS crashes are due to third party drivers on their OS's. This mostly has to do with the fact that most drivers in the past have been kernel mode, ie: the operate at Ring 0 and as a result can take down the entire OS if they do anything wrong. The point of a class driver is that the kernel mode portions of the driver are developed by and the responsibility of Microsoft themselves, and that those class drivers provide a 'hook' that the third party can use to write a driver more specific to thier device, but where their driver operates entirely in user mode. This improves the OS in two distinct ways when a crash occurs:

    1) If a crash happens that takes down the OS, it will obviously be a bug in Microsoft's portion of the driver, and they will own all of that code and be able to issue a fix on thier end without waiting for the third party. Furthermore, such a fix will improve stability for ALL devices of the class, rather than just that specific item of hardware.

    2) If the crash happens with part of the driver that the third party developed, the OS will not go down with it, and in fact can simply restart the driver safely with no effect to the end user, no data loss, or anything else. The OS stability is not in any way impacted.

    This also makes driver development cheaper since Microsoft is taking on the development of the most complicated portion of the development and taking responsibility for the results, plus users benefit from a true 'plug and play' experience, everything just works, even if its not utilizing all features(need the third party driver to enable everything).

    Now in the previous two paragraphs, feel free to substitute 'Microsoft' for 'Linux' or 'Apple' since they also can and are implementing this system as well.

    Hope that makes some things clearer!
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    MadBoris, you're pretty much spot on. From everything I've researched in to UAA there's no real option for interfacing hardware with the audio stack; you have to use another API like OpenAL to do so. This does bring about that level of stability Reflex was talking about, but it effectively fixes everyone's hardware at a least-common-denominator (though it should be noted that you can bolt on software to the stack to do effects, Creative already does this in some places with Vista; it eats up even more CPU time though). This is great for RealTek and the like who are making low end gear, because now Microsoft is doing all the hard work for them and they can ship what amounts to a DAC with a few lines of code once they no longer support XP.

    Microsoft's vision going forward is that all audio effects will be done in software. For example, a game like BioShock will build or license an audio engine (FMOD) that can do all of these effects we've come to expect via software, then Vista lets the game see each speaker to write out the appropriate hardware. Good processing is expensive (the X-Fi and its 51mil transistors isn't just sitting on its butt), so what we get today isn't very good processing.

    Things may improve with more processor power. They may also just stay the same while companies focus on graphics over audio.
  • BitJunkie - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    So how did we end up in this position? What prompted MS to be so heavy handed (or radical?) in their approach to changing Windows audio? There is no major advantage to MS in dictating things in this way that I can see - other than stability.

    There has to be some reason for the Microsoft Azalia / intel HD Audio standard becoming dominant, what exactly was Creative doing or not doing - with their defacto monopoly on gaming audio? All interesting questions in my view. Would be good if anyone could shed some light on them.

    I can't help but feel that as consumers we've lost out because of Creative's business practices and attitude - maybe I'm being unfair in that. Ultimately though Creative have to carry the can for where they are at present.
  • Reflex - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    "From everything I've researched in to UAA there's no real option for interfacing hardware with the audio stack; you have to use another API like OpenAL to do so."

    This is explicitly not true. UAA does allow flexible DSP's to be developed for hardware accelleration. Re-read the spec if this is the indication you got.

    "Good processing is expensive (the X-Fi and its 51mil transistors isn't just sitting on its butt), so what we get today isn't very good processing."

    First off, no, its not expensive. The reason the X-Fi is 51 million transisters is because it is a software designed chip. That is a notoriously transister intensive method of designing a chip, and they have done little manual tweaking to reduce its transister counts. This is one reason that on the surface video chips appear to be more complicated than CPU's, but ask designers of both what they think and you'll find that GPU's aren't even in the same league. Creative went cheap on the design process and the result is that their chip is transister heavy.

    Secondly, reviewers of Bioshock who tested it on Vista noticed that the sound was exceptional. I would suggest looking into that. It really had no serious issues although it did have a bit of a perf hit(but this was mostly due to audio drivers not being mature).
  • BikeDude - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    At first I thought "great, let us see what is going on with Creative then", but the article left more questions than answers.

    I would love to learn why Creative's drivers "suck" under Vista. I can't remember seeing an article explaining how Vista's audio stack works, nor why hw acceleration is less important.

    I also see many commenters here who say MS killed EAX. How so? There are plenty of existing games supporting it? E.g. in BattleField 2, to get an echo effect inside a warehouse, you are pretty much limited to the X-Fi as other EAX implementors don't go far enough. (at least that used to be the case)

    Instead of answering such questions, Anand presents us with a "why buy/sell Creative stocks". Honestly, I could not care less about the stock market at this moment... :P (not exactly stable at the moment, now is it?)
  • Zak - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    "a company being forced out of business" - CL is getting the taste of their own medicine...

    Z.
  • MadBoris - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I was a real fan of Aureal back in the day.
    I am good with that, what goes around comes around.
    I just don't like the way it came around with MS drawing the line, MS is a great chess player thinking many moves ahead, where it's difficult to see where they are going.
  • BitJunkie - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    MS did a lot of work behind the scenes on Vista that changed the way audio is handled. For those that are technically orientated and can understand pretty techy chat there's a good video here: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1468...">http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1468... on the vista audio stack.

    For a higher level overview, there's a good video here: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2155...">http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2155... in which the move from AC'97 to HD Audio (Azaelia) and the requirements for hardware design and driver programming are discussed. You can see that a lot of effort was focused on routing circuits on PCBs to avoid noise and to design hardware to minimise interference. Sounds like an OEM gave Scoble a call and bitched about the Vista logo program back in 2005 - regarding the audio stack perhaps.

    It's all MS "propaganda" but gives a good insight in to their design philosophy. It also gives a better understanding of why Vista is a big step forward.
  • Christobevii3 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    How can you only blame the market?

    First up creatives pricing sucks. Even an entry level card is nearly $100 on the x-fi or was when i looked. So what did this $100 offer me?

    1. A sound card that can't do dts encoding for games to my 5.1 receiver.
    2. Drivers that are worse than a steam update

    I haven't used a creative card since their sblive in 1999 because of the drivers. It worked ok on an fic az11 but when i upgraded it crackled like hell. But not only that, when i tried to update the driver to fix it, it hard locked the os but even safe mode couldn't uninstall the drivers. The next setup of trying to get it to work failed and the drivers had grown to roughly 60MB. So I gave up and just dealt with onboard sound.

    Now, I have an HT omega sound card and love it. The drivers only problem is the mic boost button has to be rechecked on startup!!! Not only that but the drivers are like 15MB 8 years later after creatives and i can do dts output to my receiver in realtime. Interesting that the $60 sound card i purchase has now gotten so popular that it is $80, but also that it uses higher quality solid state capacitors where an equal creative has old style ones suseptable to rotting out.

    Last but least, screwing over aureal and then not supporting a3d. Fuck that.
  • cosmotic - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I can't believe no one has mentioned Sensaura yet. Its another company, like Aureal, that had a superior product which Creative bought for their IP.

    Sensaura produced software that let other sound card manufacturers take advantage of A3D, DirectSound, OpenAL, and EAX 1 and 2. For years third party sound card manufactures have had this same list of supported APIs without adding new versions of EAX, most likely because Creative now owns them.
  • Christobevii3 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Sensaura was always plauged by being lower end. The companies that supported them would throw out trash $20 cards so that basically was their problem.
  • Zak - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Corporate bullying, bloated software and crappy drivers, overpriced hardware, destroying superior Aureal3D technology, they got themselves into bad position. I've been using on-board sound for years via SPDIF fed to a AV receiver and I haven't touched a CL card in all this time, don't miss them.

    Z.
  • chizow - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I've always had a soft spot for Creative throughout the years. I'll never forget loading up Wing Commander for the first time after plunking down $100 for my first Sound Blaster and just oogling over actual MIDI sound (and later, voice with the voice pack) rather than beeps and buzzes from an internal speaker.

    Throughout the years I've continued buying Creative products with the latest being the X-Fi. After countless hours trying to troubleshoot it with Vista and my 650i mobo, I finally called it quits and came to the same realization the article predicts: add-in sound cards are dead.

    Sure Creative products have had their share of problems here and there, but I'll certainly miss the superior positional sound of EAX in games. As much as people want to bash Creative, their drivers and their products, they sure as hell knew what they were doing when it came to audible differences in games. So long Creative, here's one person who will miss having a company who actually cared about PC sound.
  • leexgx - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    new vista drivers are out for X-FI now ? not tryed them yet as i am running on me XP drive now (some games little BSOD unstable still heh)
  • KillerCroc - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Creative were really responsible for putting sound cards and PC audio on the map - but they lost their dominance to advances in on-MB audio (despite Realtek's gaffes)and better chips from the competition. And as I'm writing this and listening to MediaMonkey/Shoutcast, I'm hearing a perfect example of "Years later, I come across many SB cards with horrible crackling noises," from my Audigy 2ZS card. maybe I'll do better with an M-Audio card....
  • psychotix11 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Other companies are releasing better sound cards. Creatives' junk really only has a point if you are a gamer and only a gamer. Their professional branded cards are a joke so let's not even delve into that. However unless all you do is play games that can use EAX5 auzentech, htomega, hell even asus now, make a far better product in both build quality, feature set, sound quality, and driver quality.

    Happy with my sound cards with full dolby DTS! Screw creative!
  • IKeelU - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I really hope it isn't the end of add-in sound boards. I don't care who makes the hardware, but I like having noise-free output w/ positional sound. The so-called "HD Audio" on my motherboard is utter crap. Even with a mediocre pair of headphones I can hear the noise. I just don't get how people can get by with that junk.
  • Demon-Xanth - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    When I had an AWE64 soundcard, I thought Creative was awesome, I had one of their Permidia2 cards and I was happy with it. I even had their DVD kit (with decoder card!). I was practically a poster Creative Labs fan. But then I got a Live card, and was less than impressed. It often flat out didn't work in my system, I ended up getting another as a gift and THAT one worked right. The first card worked in other systems, but not mine. So I stuck with the AWE64. It handled the inputs well and the sound was good. And best of all, the drivers didn't install extra crap that cluttered Windows.

    Then I got their Digital VCR card. My PC wasn't able to capture and convert full TV res to a compressed format at the time, and here was a card that captured to MPEG2. Well, this card turned out to be a steaming pile of crap. In two days I found a rather obvious and major bug in their software. It took them 11 months to fix it. And I couldn't find a single program that could handle the MPEG2 files that it exported to that could do more than just play them. (many failed to do even that)

    But the key tipping point was when onboard audio stopped sucking. Is it as good as a dedicated sound card? Probably not. But it's not the CPU robbing POS that it used to be. And with most boards having it, the soundcard requirement went from nearly 100% to just a tiny little percent of users.

    ...and there was that time they wanted to charge for driver DLs.
  • Dfere - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Not being a techead... two thumbs up on the subject matter. Aslo good job for picking a company near (if not dear) to most of us.

    On the article you end with "only time will tell". IMHO do not equivocate. For a true business article, stick with facts and then possibly a projection -"The stock price is low... here is why", then "forecasts for home theater buys indicate...", or "if peripheral component sales become its focus, the company can still capitalize on its name and branding, it needs to find other companies it can acquire and slap a label on...." or something like "Seems like Creative needs to do something.... but what....?"

    Did Creative release any comments about future direction.. etc etc...?
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Creative has not released its FY2007 shareholder report, nor have they filed their SEC form 20F yet, so no, there's not really much out of them on future direction. Since they are no longer traded on American exchanges, they're not required to publish these documents either.

    What I can tell you from their FY2007 conference call, they're aware their not doing well and they have some vague plans. For MP3 players, they're going to focus on flash players, and look to exploit the few markets Microsoft isn't competing in yet (which will be trouble with the Zune2). Their other big area is X-Fi licensing, including the actual DSP (Auzentech may not be the only one to license it) and the X-Fi crystalizer for other devices. Frankly none of this is very inspiring.
  • KingofL337 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    How do you spend 60+ million in R&D a year and release almost nothing except a few iffy mp3 players. Creative hasn't released a new sound card product in years. They just keep re-releasing the Audugy brand and thats about it. How long has it been since Nvidia released the soundstorm chipsets? Everyone you talk to about sound cards wants real time DD / DTS / AC3 encoding and creative still hasn't released a product with that feature.

    I for one won't miss Creative's overpriced crappy sound cards once they are gone.
  • Scorpion - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I've been saying this since '99:

    Creative doesn't innovate, they regurgitate.
  • Pyramix - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    It was an informative article and I am glad to see this new direction on this website.
  • Spoelie - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    But there are three 'but(t)s' in the last paragraph, but it's not really that annoying, but also a little annoying
  • smn198 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Ditto.
  • mindless1 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I beg to differ with the article on the point of onboard sound being a joke 10 years ago. 10 years ago onboard sound was superior for it's primary (most common) purpose, 2 channel analog output.

    Take for example Intel P2 boards with Ensoniq (later bought by creative) 1370 chip on them. They had a very full sound, better bass, and it was more immune to system noise than today's integrated audio. People I built systems for back then often remarked about how unusually good they sounded compared to what they had been used to with some sound cards. Creative later rebadged the Ensoniq 1370 and made some sound cards, but things when downhill when the industry went to 48KHz rate and resampled everything.

    The same goes for many solutions back then, they typically used discrete sound chips and did fairly well at 2 channel analog output. While there weren't a lot of bells and whistles, and the paper specs didn't look as good, I think we all know paper specs mean little when it comes to sound quality, at least when talking about low level signals opposed to circuits with high gain like power amps.

    The terrible truth is, most people have two analog amplified speakers and nothing matters to them except whether that config sounds good. With onboard sound today there is usually a lot of undesirable noise from the onboard audio, and as such it is almost the worst onboard audio has ever been. I partly blame the higher currents in today's systems, but nevertheless it effects the result. Some systems are bad enough you have to disable ACPI/Halt just to get rid of a lot of the noise, if you care much at all about audio quality.
  • LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Of all the driver problems I had with sound cards, the Ensoniq 1370-based ones were the biggest pains. The entire AudioPCI family was just plain and simple, miserable; I've had numerous occasions where I ripped one from a machine because of cards working, not working next reboot, driver installs sometimes fixing it, sometimes not, etc. Sad, knowing that the original ISA Ensoniq Soundscape cards really rocked.

    Onboard sound was bad years ago. IMHO, it still isn't great, although the ADI/Soundmax and Sigmatel codecs used on Intel boards put most of Realtek's stuff to shame. Creative had a golden opportunity at some point to do this with their own chips, but I think a combination of elitism, and likely demanding higher prices probably doomed this. The only one that has taken them up on this is MSI, and the sound chip used has been the rather lame one used in the Audigy SE and SBLive! 24-bit, with no true hardware DSP. I think the sound card market death is only partially due to Creative; some of it is due to the new way Vista DirectX works, sacrificing possible innovation in audio for relative driver stability, and some of it is due to no other vendors stepping up to the plate to provide true competition, especially in the mainstream and gaming markets.
  • mindless1 - Thursday, October 4, 2007 - link

    I think you just had bad drivers or buggy motherboard bios, I ran 1370 boards without any problem. If you are only referring to early win95 era drivers, ok, but most drivers for win95 were junk, that's how it went with driver development at the time and unfortunately too many people were quick to fault the OS. NOt that Win95 was flawless but there's definitely some variable besides the card when I didn't have the same problems.

  • Cincybeck - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Looking back, I think Aureal probably suffered more from bad legal council and childish antics. Yes Creative issued the first lawsuit but, Aureal fired back with its own counter-suit. Aureal ended up winning that first lawsuit, but the two companies bitterly went back and forth like two siblings. Aureal even went as far as publicly announcing Creative's first PCI card on their website. A low blow if you ask me on Creative's late entry to the PCI market. I don't see how any one can entirely blame Aureal's demise on Creative.

    As for Creative's products I've never had any bad luck with them. They've all worked as they should and I can not remember a single time where I’ve had a BSOD as a result of the Audio drivers. Maybe I've just have been lucky.

    As for Vista support I believe the gun should be pointed at Microsoft on that one. Because not only is Creative having issues but Turtle Beach is as well. Even going as far as stating that any one using their computer to accomplish a task should stick with WinXP "http://support.turtlebeach.com/site/kb_ftp/5882198...">http://support.turtlebeach.com/site/kb_ftp/5882198.... Its obvious Microsoft cut the floor out from under their feet with not supporting DirectSound/3D in UAA, maybe a legacy mode? I don't know.

    Personally I enjoy the quality clear sound provided by my Audigy and still plan on buying an X-fi, if that means sticking with XP for a year or two more I have no problem with that. Granted I haven't heard a new on-board as of late, but the quality still echoes in my mind and just Blah. Anyway XP does everything I need it to and it would appear in most cases it does it better than Vista.
  • PandaBear - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    With everything getting integrated, you either have to move up and be a chipset (at least south bridge) company or consumer product company. They have the Cambridge soundwork name, why not build good home theater system with it? Just relying on Nomad for MP3 is not enough, esp others are doing it for other reasons (sandisk do it to sell more flash, MS do it to get more monopoly, etc). You have to wonder what is the advantage Creative have over the others.

    In the end, I think they should either go into a chipset company for mp3 players like sigmatel or get into home theater business like pioneer. They are just another logitech but with much higher overhead.
  • Sunrise089 - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I'm no expert, but it seems like there are three things they could do to turn thing around:

    1) Market their MP3 players better. I know several people who aren't in the "anything but apple" crowd, but who insist everything other than styling and interface is better in the Creative MP3 players. I'm sure more than 4% of the market would choose better audio quality if they could get it, so that's what Creative needs to be advertising.

    2) Make the X-fi's cheaper, and market them to gamers. The serious music crowd already has an X-fi if they want one. Gamers however like extra FPS, and I've seen plenty of benches showing decent gains for add-on audio. At the very least gamers should buy an X-fi before a RAID0 setup.

    3) Move into the on-board market. Creative still has a better association with quality than Realtec. So I'd have to think there would be some potential for moing the low-end of their soundcard market from discreet to integrated options.
  • heated snail - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Back in 1999-2000, two Soundblaster Live audio boards completely failed to work with my via-based AMD platform running first Windows 98, then ME, then 2000. Sound was present but there were regular blue-screens caused by the audio driver. Creative first denied any problem, then blamed VIA's PCI latency issues. Those issues were true, but the daily crash was still in Creative's drivers. Further customer service (or even official response to the issue on their joke of a support website) was nonexistent.

    Since that time I have eagerly hoped for other consumers to see through Creative's blend of extremely heavy advertising budget and extremely lightweight customer service and support. Their formula worked for years, and now maybe it's almost finished. Creative, rest in pieces.
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Good riddance to bad rubbish. If it wasn't for almost exclusive support of EAX in games, their soundcard division would have died a long time ago. Now all we need is a positional sound open standard (OpenAL is still a Creative controlled standard).

    As much as I dislike Vista, I have to give props to Microsoft for single handedly killing EAX. :0)
  • cambit69 - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    in some ways, Creative Labs reminds us of Eastman Kodak company. They missed the boat on digital cameras because they refused to acknowledge that digital would replace film (film was what the company was knwon to have pioneered). THe same way how Creative Labs just sat on their tried and true Sound Blaster brand and refused to put R&D into newer technologies and branch out.

    creative put 7% of their total revenue into R&D, that doesnt sound a lot to me for a business that relies on technology and it makes me wonder where the other 93% of their revenue is going.
  • The Boston Dangler - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    your analogy would better fit Polaroid. Eastman Kodak is alive and very well, Polaroid would be dead if it weren't for a couple industrial things going on.
  • strikeback03 - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Kodak is alive, very well is a different story. Almost all of their products compete at the low end of the point&shoot market, where the competition is fierce and margins small. It is analogous to the segment of the MP3 player market Creative competes in. Kodak's last adventure with a dSLR did not go well, and if they were to re-enter that market it would likely need to be as a partner to someone, as they don't have their own line of lenses and other accessories, which are where the real money is in the dSLR world.
  • Duwelon - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I haven't read much on UAA, why does the article say the sound card is going away and won't be coming back?

    What is UAA that it makes hardware based positional audio obsolete?
  • saratoga - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I'm no expert on it (never did any Windows driver development), but its basically a standard for audio cards that moves most of the processing into standard Windows components that run in user mode.

    The upside of this is that sound cards will be able to work correctly and provide a high degree of functionality (5.1, etc) with no extra drivers at all (think how USB flash drives work without a driver disk). Additionally, since they run in user mode, bad drivers will no longer be able to BSOD Windows, at worst the app would crash to the desktop. Presumably, the ultimate goal is for MS to move audio processing over to more standard multicore and onboard accelerators (built in GPUs/PPUs/etc) rather then expensive and less functional proprietary PCI devices.

    This really screws over Creative of course, since effectively MS is putting their sound card business out to pasture. I can't say I blame them though. After all the stuff Creative's pulled, MS clearly wants to get them as far from their OS as possible.
  • leexgx - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    quote:

    is UAA that it makes hardware based positional audio obsolete


    it can still be done in hardware but its more standardised


    there drivers still suck and thay Refuse to support OEM sound cards that CAN ONLY be made by creative (it be like nvidia saying we not going to support an BFG NVida video card coes it has an badge on it that says BFG)
  • EarthsDM - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    ...fast enough. The soon they are gone, the better. They started a real revolution, and then drove their popularity into the ground.
  • EarthsDM - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Sorry, I meant to say 'sooner' not 'soon.'
  • tacoburrito - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I bought the Creative Rio when it first came out and loved it. Lent it to my grilfriend but she lost it. Bought another Creative mp3 player and it worked even better. I also bought a couple of cheapo Creative soundcards to install on Pentium 2 and 3 systems and they worked great. I'm in the process of getting the Creative Zen player.

    I have great experience with Creative products and I don't understand the hatred towards the company. Is all the hatred because of what they did to Aureal?
  • trelin - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    No, it's a combination of various things they've done (and continue to do). True, for some people like me Aureal alone was enough to begin boycotting the company, but a large portion of frustrated users (in the soundcard market at least) stem from product support (eg, driver quality issues) and exorbitant pricing due to their monopoly of the EAX standard. I'm not qualified to comment further on recent quality because a RivaTNT videocard was the last Creative product I've owned.

    A recent (some would say rather small) example was charging for Alchemy for the Audigy. I agree that it is within their rights to charge for additional software to work with Vista (they made no compatibility claims on the Audigy regarding EAX support in Vista), but charging people an extra $10 just to continue using a feature does no breed happy customers.

    As to your own experiences, I don't disagree on their other markets. I had an old Cambridge 5.1 system that worked just fine, and my friend had a Rio that I rather liked. My RivaTNT based Creative card was fantastic; I had terrific success using their Unified driver (a 3dfx wrapper).
  • yyrkoon - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I think the biggest part of their problem is that with the advent of multiple core CPUs, and onboard audio, people are starting to realize that discrete is not realy a must, not even for an enthusiast. Audiophiles would probably buy another brand already.

    It may behoove them to sink their future into chipset/onboard audio, with perhaps a discrete line as well, to placiate the people who just cant get it into their heads that discrete does not nessisarily mean better. Whatever money cow they find to keep themselves afloat, they better do it fast. Also, it sounds as though this company is led by 90 year old men, who think that change is *bad*, it would not hurt them to have a few people who thought 'outside of the box'.

    Anyone remember who 3DFx was ? . . . *besides* the people at HP . . .
  • Zoomer - Saturday, October 6, 2007 - link

    I hate to say this, but Realtek is hardly excellent.

    Trashy, perhaps. Try running games on it. It's totally broken.
  • Axbattler - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    What has the advent of multiple core CPU have to do with audio? If you are talking about system resource, then frankly speaking, the difference between discrete and onboard has been pretty insignificant long before the first dual core CPU.

    Personally, I do not like Creative much as a company (mainly due to the Aureal stunt - and I also think they've not put enough innovation over the years).

    But as an audio and computer enthusiast, I find that the Elite Pro is still a viable choice. First of all, onboard sound cards, as much improvement as they've made over the year, still sound bad on demanding headphones. The Beyerdynamic DT880 honestly sound like a cheap pair of headphones when plugged on an onboard sound card, and even an Audigy 2ZS (which is hardly audiophile grade) would make the listening more enjoyable. The X-Fi line fixes a number of issue with the Audigy 2, including the infamous re-sampling issue.

    The Audigy 4 Pro, Elite Pro (not sure about previous sound card in their Pro line) provide the DAC you'd find in entry level pro card (Elite Pro is pretty much an EMU-1212 with the DSP). The issue with Pro cards is that they often geared toward recording, so you end up paying for lots of inputs you might not use. Of course, audio enthusiast could always go for an external DAC if they want even better. But it cost more, takes more space and you lose the DSP unless you had a low end X-Fi as transport.

    That's twice I've mentioned the DSP. People may think that if you are serious about audio, then you should not care about any form of 'sound processing'. And yes, I am not keen on any form of 'processing' when listening to music. I could not care less about the 'Crystalizer'. But I simply can't say the same about CMSS when watching movies through a good pair of headphones. I've yet to find any software or hardware processing that has given me more satisfying surround sound on my AKG K701.

    On a side note, I am slightly surprised that neither Aureal nor E-MU was mentioned at all in this article.
  • Calin - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I remember them. My first real touch with 3DFx and Voodoo was in some game, a comparison between running on 3DFx Voodoo 2 and a Riva TNT PCI (on a top of the line Pentium II 300MHz). There was little difference in quality and speed.
    Guess I've lost the golden 3DFx years
  • Reflex - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Having worked with Creative in a professional capacity at multiple times in my career I have a few observations of my own:

    - Over the years Creative has refused to embrace new technolgies and trends. This includes PCI(had to buy Ensoniq to have a PCI product at all), PCI-E(offered poor excuses about latency to avoid having to release a new product), ACPI(poor driver and firmware support) and now UAA(Vista standard).

    - Along those lines they have also refused to move into areas that are seemingly obvious for fear of cannibalizing their add-in board market. There is little reason that Realtek is ruling the on-board sound market, that could just have easily been Creative considering their background. Instead they chose to put on blinders and pretend that on-board audio could never compete with an add-in card. They may be correct in the absolute sense, but the average user does not give a damn. Back when it would have mattered, a Creative branded AC'97 solution with some enhanced drivers would have gone a long way, now no one would care.

    - Absurd 'fanboy' attitude towards certain companies. The CEO of Creative has a passionate hatred for Microsoft. This is why MS had to develop its own drivers for Windows 2000/XP for the SBLive, and why there are no drivers for their products in Vista. Likewise, they have repeatedly had poor dealings with other manufacturers, and have treated competitors in ways that were they not a Singapore based business they would have been prosecuted in the US or EU for(Aureal is the obvious example, but they did the same to numerous smaller companies in other markets). Business is dispassionate, you do not refuse to be part of a standard(UAA) simply because you dislike the standard bearer when they hold 95% of your target market. You do not foster bad feelings among the larger market, making it unlikely that others will work with you, at some point you may need some allies.

    As far as I and many in the industry are concerned, Creative is reaping what they have sown. They were lucky enough to set a standard and they rode that single success for years based on their brand name alone. Even now there are plenty of oppurtunities in their original market for them to revitalize thier success(UAA, for instance, can be paired with a powerful DSP and it will use it for accelleration), but it is doubtful that Creative will capitalize on those oppurtunities, they would rather go out of business than do things in any way other than their own.

    So long Creative, I'll always remember you as the guys who gave me great sound in Doom, but I won't shed a tear for your passing. In the long run, Creative will perform its greatest service by serving as an object lesson for other companies on how not to do business.
  • maverick85wd - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Excellently put.

    I will also not be displeased to see them go, I have a Zen media player that had a screen die after four months of use. After trying to make me pay $20 for tech support (which I avoided by telling them I had already troubleshot the problem) they tried to make me pay another $20 for fixing my barely used defective player AFTER they had returned it to me. The whole situation was laughable. Either way, I will never purchase anything from them again.
  • Scorpion - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Yeah you summed up a lot of it.

    Creative's Motto for over the past decade: (which I coined for them)

    "We don't innovate, we regurgitate"

    I boycotted Creative back in 1998 with the last soundcard of theirs I purchased. A nightmare situation for drivers. Their drivers were terrible! And it was such a headache to even figure out the right drivers that you needed back then. With Aureal, and everything else... Just look at the PC sound market. Now look at the PC graphics market. Creative's undeserved monopoly on the market stiffled innovation for so long. We could have a rich PC sound industry right now I honestly believe if it weren't for Creative. Aureal was trying to make that happen. Creative didn't feel like competing, so they litigated them out of the market.

    I hope you burn in hell Creative. Now I can stop looking at your ugly call center here in Stillwater, OK.
  • BitJunkie - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Great article, and good summary. Could list at least 10 reasons to be annoyed with Creative but the most illustrative is that:

    You can't plug an AC'97 based front connector in to their X-Fi add-in boards. So EVEN IF someone wanted to use one of their boards rather than the excellent Realtek integrated solutions you automatically gimp the functionality of your chassis unless you buy their intel based front panel and clog up a 3" drive bay. They are using standards to force people to buy their own products. I paid for an add-in board, discovered this and threw the thing away. That's the last cent they get from me.

    RIP Creative.
  • The Jedi - Saturday, October 6, 2007 - link

    It turns out Intel is the one who changed up the front audio panel header from the AC'97 standard to the HD Audio standard. Creative supports the newer HD Audio front ports, but most PC cases have the older AC'97 ports. I've run into this myself and it looks like I only get headphones in the front. It looks like Auzentech actually supports the AC'97 standard ports on their cards FWIW.
  • BitJunkie - Sunday, October 7, 2007 - link

    That's my point. Creative resist the HD Audio standard when it comes to the implementation of their add-in cards, but rather cynically use it for their front panel connector. So for the majority of people who have an AC'97 front panels built in to their chassis, they are forced to buy the Creative front panel to have that front panel functionality.

    Guess what Creative do? they bundle the front panel with their more expensive add-in cards, forcing you to pay more than you want just to get some basic functionality you should have anyway. Idiots.
  • DaveLessnau - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    I'd bump your rating up one, but it's already maxed out. This is EXACTLY why Creative's going bankrupt and everyone is glad its happening. Excellent post.
  • bigpow - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I second that.
    It was all good and fun, while it lasted.

    But it's time to move on and the end of an era is here.

    IT industry don't have mercy for those who are slow or lame.
    Only the fastest/most flexible ones can survive.

    Compare that to the auto industry (if that's the case, the big 3 would be dead a long time ago)
  • n7 - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Nice summary.

    Good article too, thanx.
  • trelin - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I've always kept a spot of sincere hatred for Creative for the way they sued Aureal into declaring bankruptcy, then purchasing the Aureal IP afterwards.

    Aureal eventually won the lawsuit, but legal defense costs tied up funding for the AU8830. By the time it was done they simply did not have the funds to bulk produce the virtually completed chip/reference-card design and had to scrap the project.

    I don't begrudge Creative for making an inferior product, but for their deplorable tactics I do hope they die and are forced sell their IP for a fraction of their development costs.
  • takumsawsherman - Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - link

    Yes, this was total manipulation of the legal system by Creative for illicit destruction of a competitor. Having always used Sound Blaster cards for add-in situations, I was skeptical when my distributor sales guy told me to try some Aureal Vortex 2 SuperQuads. But, seeing as the Creative equivalent was $100 at the time, and the Superquads were $50 retail, I figured I would give them a shot.

    The sound quality was amazing, and while the drivers weren't perfect, this was the beginning of Creatives "horrible overstuffed driver" stage. $50 got the machine amazing 3D sound with A3D which Creative tried to "me too" with EAX. Except that A3D was really great, and EAX sounded like garbage. I was a convert, and was able to cheaply add great sound to the systems I was building.

    Unfortunately, instead of rising to the challenge, Creative used it's tried and true "sue them into submission" strategy. Years later, I come across many SB cards with horrible crackling noises, pain in the butt driver installs, and my brain has me convinced that those old SuperQuads still sound better. Aureal was a fantastic company with fantastic technology, and Creative's big bankroll was the only thing that enabled them to drain Aureal's.

    So, I totally agree with your last sentence, except I will add that I hope the Aureal people raise money to buy the IP and then make the moves that will revitalize the market.
  • sc3252 - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    "Creative's problems are further compounded by Microsoft at #4, who is more than happy to lose money on the media player market for now" Golden! Microsoft seems to love losing money, as long as they have a chance next round.
  • ricleo2 - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Another great article here on Anandtech. This is one of the few articles here I fully understand. When I company in this shape starts spending more on R and D, look for a rebound. Otherwise look for bankruptcy or a buyout.
  • calyth - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I thought Creative made some great soundcards, until I've suffered from an improperly grounded SB Live (then their flagship sound card). Their mounting bracket was not grounded properly, resulting in one dead SB Live card, one dead SCSI controller, and a non-functional PSU.

    I found that the Aureal 3D support on the Hercules Fortissimo II gave a much better directional sound in EAX, and had it not been the lack of hardware mixing in Linux for the Hercules sound cards, I wouldn't have gone back to the Audigy 2.

    To this day, their support for non-Windows OS is kinda spotty - they release their manuals in .chm, the only computing hardware manufacturer that I know that uses this format instead of PDF. Their flagship X-Fi has only recently got a lousy driver for Linux 64bit. Their MP3 players are nothing to write home about.

    I personally can't wait until they're gone.
  • 0roo0roo - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link

    yup, i'm glad ms sunk them. they've always been on the wrong side, i used to buy aureal cards which had better technology but sadly they went down. i refused to pay premium for a monopoly on gaming audio, and frankly i didn't really miss out. their technology has been stagnant while they milked gamers with high prices, well the gravy train is at an end. we have cores to spare for audio that can be improved without paying for a new card. win win.
  • sheh - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    CHM documentation? That's the first good thing I hear about Creative in a while.

    PDF = for printing.
    CHM = for active reading or searching.

    Try http://xchm.sourceforge.net/">http://xchm.sourceforge.net/ (never used it, but I think it should do).

  • Missing Ghost - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    I agreed. I really wish that Creative will die, we don't want them.
  • Jodiuh - Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - link

    Die Creative. Die. And I've got an X-Fi. :D

    Wo/ it, my GPU would be cooler tho.

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