I haven't used it for over a year as I don't have a Creative card in my system any more. However, I really enjoyed it when I was using it. I should warn you that if you don't like the default setup it comes with, tweaking it is VERY complicated. To really tweak it, you have to open up a graphical representation of what's going on in the computer on the sound card and rewire its software components.

Here is a screenshot of a late iteration of my customized DSP setup in kX: http://www.geocities.com/mirat_beryn/hunterzdsp.html

It's probably one of the most complex setups anyone has made in kX though. I'd also do it differently now because my current speakers are 5.1 instead of the mismash 4.1 set I used to have.

Also, the kX drivers are primarily intended for music composers rather than gamers, so they have only basic DirectSound3D support and no EAX support. Basically, you'll get 3D sound in most games but probably no fancy reverb effects. I played lots of games and found that the ability to have simultaneous surround decoding of in-game music and movies combined with DirectSound3D positional sound more than made up for the loss of silly reverb effects. Of course, kX isn't set up to work that cool by default however.

Lastly, the web site is never updated (latest updates occur on the forum on driverheaven.net instead). There's a much newer version available from the driverheaven download system: http://www.driverheavendownloads.net/kXmain.htm

But kX will never have support for EAX3, will they?

There's no technical reason why it couldn't, but Eugene Gavrilov (the developer) isn't really interested in concentrating on gaming support.

EAX is stupid anyways. It is to sound cards what Glide was to video cards: a proprietary API whose sole purpose is to help a company maintain its hold on a hardware market. It's now rarely used directly by new games (except for a few whose developers were paid off by Creative to add explicit EAX support, or that were patched by Creative themselves) due to the recent acceptance of onboard sound hardware as a viable gaming solution. DirectSound3D has replaced EAX as the de-facto standard API for 3D sound in games, probably due in large part to SDKs such as Snover's much-derided Miles Sound System (MSS).

Again drawing similarities to Glide, it seems that DS3D is squeezing out EAX with wider hardware support in the same way Direct3D and OpenGL killed off Glide. Unfortunately it will be a longer battle this time, as Creative has diversified its product line and can afford to throw away a substantial amount of money on campaigns to keep EAX afloat by paying off publishers and developers to include EAX logos and support in their games.

EAX didn't originally have anything to do with 3d sound positioning. That was DS3D's avenue. However, I think the newer EAX 3-5 do more of the positioning. EAX though is mainly "Environmental Audio eXtensions". It's supposed to increase immersion by enhancing the environmental ambiance. Done right, it definitely does. There is a lot more to audio than just placing a sound source.

But yeah Creative is definitely trying to maintain a stranglehold. But can you blame them? It seems all of their competitors have died out for one reason or another. Even Creative is having a hard time convincing people to buy real audio hardware. I don't know about you guys but I DO NOT want to be limited to noisy onboard cheap audio codecs. Let Creative do what they must. You can only hope somebody else is creative enough (lol) to compete with them.

Great article: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/sound-tec … logy/index.html

Their competitors have not "died out". They were either bought out (Ensoniq) or muscled out (Aureal) by Creative.

On-board codecs aren't as bad as they were a couple years ago. In addition, Creative hasn't really added many new features to their cards in that time. People are starting to figure this out, which is why Creative has put feelers into the onboard sound market.

I hope nVidia or someone else makes a standalone card that supports realtime AC3 encoding of the card's output. My guess is that it only appeared on the short-lived SoundStorm-equipped line of nForce2 motherboards because it's probably expensive to license the technology from Dolby. This would also explain why Creative has opted for a proprietary triple-SPDIF solution for 5.1 digital speakers (with the added side-effect that it helps sell Creative-brand speakers).

Edit: Busy at work, so it will take a while to read that article. So far I'd like to mention that developers are actually spending LESS time on sound than they did 5 years ago. They're now using generic SDKs like MSS and FMOD to do generic 3D sound positioning, while ignoring reverb and other advanced effects completely. The other part of the problem is that many people only have 2.0 or 2.1 speaker systems attached to their PCs and don't really care about cool 3D sound effects in games, which discourages developers from spending time and money on that aspect of their games.

Edit 2: Interesting. It does seem that EAX is an extension to DS3D.

The article should have mentioned that A3D is dead (I guess it was still dying a couple years ago when the article was written). There is no support for it on any modern sound hardware unless you install some ancient software rendering A3D drivers that are floating around.

I've thought of looking into OpenAL as an alternative to DS3D, but this article mentions that developing for it is "a nightmare". The upshot is that it is cross-platform and is supported in hardware by some nVidia on-board sound implementations.