VC squatting winamp-ass energy.

also "the original creator" is buried by this point.

Anyone have any thoughts about the number pad + screen thing they're showing? Is that an existing device of theirs, or some kind of hint to the probably-lame product they are going to announce? I have a hard time picturing anything I would want that would be game-audio related that would have number buttons and a screen on it.

It's probably some late-to-the-party streaming control device.

Ironic to hear Creative Labs, the legendary Sound Blaster giant, going to Kickstarter to get support for making it's next card.

My guess is, the current CEO is not interested or not sure of the profitability in funding this project, and the old timers there decided to ask for funding from outside, and the CEO maybe okay with that.

Namrok wrote on 2025-09-16, 14:54:

There is something really ominous about a fallen 90's hardware brand using Kickstarter to fund a project. On top of the typical sketchiness hardware kickstarters usually suffer from.

Perhaps, but with the direction computer sound hardware has gone these days there is room for understanding the need to gauge potential demand in advance.

Looking up Creative Lab's financials over the past 5 years, they've been posting continual losses and bleeding cash in the process. At the rate they are going, they'll be out of cash in a few of years.

Doing a Kickstarter allows them to raise project funding while passing the financial risks to the consumer. No doubt CL doesn't have the appetite to take on those risks themselves.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-18, 17:57:

Looking up Creative Lab's financials over the past 5 years, they've been posting continual losses and bleeding cash in the process. At the rate they are going, they'll be out of cash in a few of years.

Doing a Kickstarter allows them to raise project funding while passing the financial risks to the consumer. No doubt CL doesn't have the appetite to take on those risks themselves.

That's pretty much my feeling as well, as I had previously mentioned. This smells a bit of desperation, TBH.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-18, 17:57:

Looking up Creative Lab's financials over the past 5 years, they've been posting continual losses and bleeding cash in the process. At the rate they are going, they'll be out of cash in a few of years.

Doing a Kickstarter allows them to raise project funding while passing the financial risks to the consumer. No doubt CL doesn't have the appetite to take on those risks themselves.

Creative Lab still produces and sells the Audigy RX, which is based on the CA10300-IAT chip, first introduced in the Audigy 2 Value 20 years ago.
The entire Recon3D/ZXR/AE line is based on the CA-113 chip(15year ago) , which cannot transmit clock rates higher than 96kHz over the digital interface (I2S).
If ESS hadn't released top-end SABRE DACs that don't use this signal pin, AE sound cards wouldn't exist. 😀

Given the level of inventory planning we have (they produce chips once every 20 years), I'm surprised they've lasted this long.

EAX may be old, but what else is there to have?

UCyborg wrote on Yesterday, 15:43:

EAX may be old, but what else is there to have?

A3D, Sensaura? But seriously: by the time Windows 7 rolled around serious gamers were expected to have their PCs hooked to surround sound setups, abolishing the demand for simulated spatial 3D. Real story is more likely Creative found it too inconvenient to support and looking for excuses to ditch it, but if that is so it is all the more likely EAX (and its competition Creative consumed alive) is dead and never coming back.

I think I meant to say it would be cool to have EAX effects and whatever 3D spatial sound solution, with latter needing a bit more attention.

UCyborg wrote on Yesterday, 15:43:

EAX may be old, but what else is there to have?

OpenAL has hardware support, that's how Creative translated old DirectSound games with EAX support on Vista+. Unfortunately Creative handled the standard poorly.

I think part of what killed a lot of these audio technologies that people didn't (and still don't) understand the differences between them, so once Creative owned the market we were given whatever they would provide (which wasn't much), and basically forgot about the rest.

Like, if I want immersive 3D audio, that could mean something totally different to someone else. Things that use surround sound, or simulated surround sound with something like CMSS-3D (or other applications of HRTF, like Sensaura's) mainly just exist so that you can tell what direction a sound is coming from, or maybe how far away it is. Some of these things are even built into USB headphone DACs or even gaming monitors that have headphone jacks.

None of these technologies take into account what the room\world\level is shaped like, what materials the walls\floor\objects are made of, how sound-permeable objects are or which sounds should penetrate further through things (like bassy explosions vs a deep voice). A3D 2.0 did a lot of this 27 years ago, and accelerated it in hardware. I think higher EAX versions advertised some of these but none of the EAX 5.0 games I've heard sounded much different than non-EAX. Sensaura, I believe has some implementation of A3D's features, but again, that was 20 years ago.

I'll admit, I don't really play AAA games these days, but just doing some searching online it seems like most games are still not doing most of this stuff. And, despite GPU companies providing some proof of concept of being able to accelerate these things using GPU hardware (Nvidia and AMD both, I believe), I don't believe any games currently do that.

Here is an example of a user-made Minecraft mod from 8+ years ago that simulated a lot of this stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOQNSZBzD9Q&t=390s

Just imagine what games would sound like if some amount of resources (both R&D and GPU resources...) had been put into this type of tech over the past 20 years. If Creative tried to turn things around now, they probably still have enough name recognition (thanks to the 80s\90s retro gaming boom of the past decade) to make some headway. Or it could be entirely too late and we're going to have another decade of individual devs (or modders) all having to implement this stuff in software for each game, while our RT hardware is screaming away pulling 400 watts to render a puddle reflection.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 20:09:

I think higher EAX versions advertised some of these but none of the EAX 5.0 games I've heard sounded much different than non-EAX.

For me, Quake 4, Prey and Battlefield 2 demonstrate EAX 5.0 features really well. I can definitively hear a difference between EAX on/off in those games.

This is especially noticeable when using headphones with X-Fi CMSS-3D enabled. But it also works well on 5.1 surround speakers.

How about a Kickstart for the SB16 DSP source code so someone can fix it? They'll never release that, they'll take it to the grave with them and burn it before anyone can get their hands on it.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on Yesterday, 20:29:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 20:09:

I think higher EAX versions advertised some of these but none of the EAX 5.0 games I've heard sounded much different than non-EAX.

For me, Quake 4, Prey and Battlefield 2 demonstrate EAX 5.0 features really well. I can definitively hear a difference between EAX on/off in those games.

This is especially noticeable when using headphones with X-Fi CMSS-3D enabled. But it also works well on 5.1 surround speakers.

I will admit, I last played Quake 4 and BF2 20 years ago so my memory is foggy. I just don't remember hearing much of a difference on my Logitech Z-5500 system at the time. I remember specifically getting an X-Fi XtremeMusic and those two games to hear the EAX 5.0 effects though, so I feel like it should have really stuck with me if it had sounded great.

The core of my point seems to have been missed. I love simulated spatial 3D myself (A3D being my favorite), but acknowledge it was a product of a time only the most boutique gaming PC setups had more than 2 speakers [and/or a pair of stereo headphones]. I am thankful Creative bothered supporting EAX for as long as they did, but by 5.0's heyday it was clear the need for such a thing had grown long in the tooth.

A3D 2.0 did a lot of this 27 years ago, and accelerated it in hardware.

I very much doubt that A3D 2.0 worked fully in hardware. The chip was simply not powerful enough to pull off sound wavetracing at decent speed.

The Serpent Rider wrote on Yesterday, 21:06:

A3D 2.0 did a lot of this 27 years ago, and accelerated it in hardware.

I very much doubt that A3D 2.0 worked fully in hardware. The chip was simply not powerful enough to pull off sound wavetracing at decent speed.

Honestly, I have no idea how much of it was done in hardware. I guess I should have added the word "some". It accelerated some part of the process in hardware. There is a discussion of the performance impact of A3D in this thread and ZanQuance goes into a little bit of detail about it in the last post.
Aureal Vortex II AU8830 rev. A2 and B0 benchmarks

BaronSFel001 wrote on Yesterday, 21:04:

The core of my point seems to have been missed. I love simulated spatial 3D myself (A3D being my favorite), but acknowledge it was a product of a time only the most boutique gaming PC setups had more than 2 speakers [and/or a pair of stereo headphones]. I am thankful Creative bothered supporting EAX for as long as they did, but by 5.0's heyday it was clear the need for such a thing had grown long in the tooth.

It's just a shame that we also lost all of the environmental effects (occlusion, reflections, etc.) along with the basic 3D-sound placement. 25 years after Aureal's demise we shouldn't still be surprised when a game bothers to calculate somewhat realistic occlusion and reflections. It should just be how all games work at this point. If any company could have made this as standard as Vertex Shaders or (later) Ray Tracing, it would have been Creative.

Or maybe Nvidia? Nope.

Or AMD? Well... I guess they tried something... but they don't seem to have ever pushed for it to be used for anything interesting.

What I think would probably be their best bet is if it's a dedicated ray tracing sound card. It'd be niche, of course, as literally any sound card nowadays would be (even if I want one myself), but for the people with motherboards that have both a x16 and x4 or x8 slot (I myself have a pretty cheap Micro ATX board that has a x16 and a x16(x4), alongside a PCI), it would be nice to offload audio RT (which is picking up in popularity as of late) to a dedicated card so they can dedicate all of their RT cores to graphics RT, seeing as some games can drop under 60 with ray tracing enabled even at relatively """""low""""" resolutions like 1080 or 1440. Bonus is they wouldn't need to court any developers if they use Vulkan or whatever other non-CUDA ray tracing API is being used right now for it, since that would be a feature in most engines already, they'd just need to expose their card as an RT device capable of doing the sound calculations. Plus, having a dedicated card means that you can have stuff like TOSLINK/S/PDIF, RCA, and 2.5/4.4mm outputs, so you can hook up to an actual monitor setup or balanced headphones instead of just having speakers either embedded in your display or plugged into it via 3.5mm.

Of course, given they're doing a Kickstarter, I kind of doubt it, but that's their path to relevance. Either that, or a card with hardware audio synthesis for musicians to use as an instrument.

mockingbird wrote on Yesterday, 20:48:

How about a Kickstart for the SB16 DSP source code so someone can fix it? They'll never release that, they'll take it to the grave with them and burn it before anyone can get their hands on it.

You may be right, but if/when they are cash strapped enough AND if there happens to be enough money in play, I would not be surprised if even something like that would not be utterly impossible.

That being said, nobody knows what such an amount might be (now or in the future) AND I'm going to guess it's safe to assume that this would be much too niche to gather anything close to whatever amount would be necessary through crowdsourcing. If a billionaire offered them a couple dozen million dollars for it, I suspect they would bite, even now, but let's not dream about a ludicrously improbable scenario.

There is also the distinct possibility that the source code for the DSP has been lost anyway, possibly with plenty of other 28+ year-old things that the community here might find really useful.

EDIT: Finally, with the code having been dumped, decompiled and already improved to a point, this might become a moot point some day if more things are patched or maybe if someone eventually rewrites it from scratch.