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Tuesday, April 1. 2008
Reason number 101 not to buy Creative Labs sound cards anymore
Of course, this is all my opinion, but it should be yours too. 
Although I understand the reasoning behind both sides of this story, I believe Creative should have treated the guy who helped make older sound cards work with Vista, a little bit better.
He was trying to help people make their hardware work and not be glorified $100 new age bookends. If anything, it exposes just how much Creative has not "innovated" since the original SoundBlaster Live, which itself did not follow PCI specifications properly and resulted in numerous compatibility problems. Most of the "cool" sound technology came from EMU, Ensoniq, and Aureal, which Creative swallowed up.
These days, most on-board sound chipsets are "good enough" for people, and for those that need cleaner sound for recording typically go for higher end solutions.
I was never "comfy" with the fact that there was no way to get around the resampling the EMU10k did on the SB Live and the fact that the rear speaker outputs were of higher quality than the front speaker outputs. It ended up being the last Creative card I bought, after owning Creative cards since the Sound Blaster 1.0, which had the extra CMS chips that were later removed in the 1.5 and 2.0 revisions. I even remember seeing and using real AdLib soundcards way back when.
I won't even get into the horrible driver issues I had with SMP workstations with the SB Live.
That SB Live card died a horrible death one day and took out a motherboard with it. Afterward, any motherboard you put the card into, that motherboard would no longer POST. It was the kiss of death for my love affair with Creative Labs.
Sorry for the rant, but this latest 'law threat' just brings back a lot of bad Creative memories for me.
Strangely enough, my two SLI'd Canopus 3DFX Voodoo 2 PCI cards still work just fine. 1024x768 Voodoo 2 goodness! For all your old school Glide needs!
Although I understand the reasoning behind both sides of this story, I believe Creative should have treated the guy who helped make older sound cards work with Vista, a little bit better.
He was trying to help people make their hardware work and not be glorified $100 new age bookends. If anything, it exposes just how much Creative has not "innovated" since the original SoundBlaster Live, which itself did not follow PCI specifications properly and resulted in numerous compatibility problems. Most of the "cool" sound technology came from EMU, Ensoniq, and Aureal, which Creative swallowed up.
These days, most on-board sound chipsets are "good enough" for people, and for those that need cleaner sound for recording typically go for higher end solutions.
I was never "comfy" with the fact that there was no way to get around the resampling the EMU10k did on the SB Live and the fact that the rear speaker outputs were of higher quality than the front speaker outputs. It ended up being the last Creative card I bought, after owning Creative cards since the Sound Blaster 1.0, which had the extra CMS chips that were later removed in the 1.5 and 2.0 revisions. I even remember seeing and using real AdLib soundcards way back when.
I won't even get into the horrible driver issues I had with SMP workstations with the SB Live.
That SB Live card died a horrible death one day and took out a motherboard with it. Afterward, any motherboard you put the card into, that motherboard would no longer POST. It was the kiss of death for my love affair with Creative Labs.
Sorry for the rant, but this latest 'law threat' just brings back a lot of bad Creative memories for me.
Strangely enough, my two SLI'd Canopus 3DFX Voodoo 2 PCI cards still work just fine. 1024x768 Voodoo 2 goodness! For all your old school Glide needs!
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