Reply 20 of 104, by dionb
- Rank
- l33t++
carlostex wrote on 2020-02-05, 10:56:dionb wrote on 2020-02-04, 23:18:Sort of interesting interview, but totally uncritical interviewer. AdLib is mentioned only in passing, the PAS (almost certainly the driver behind SBPro and SB16) not at all. Still, the 'our customers didn't give a shit about feature X so it wasn't a priority to us' rings depressingly true.
Well ironically, believe it or not, both AdLib and Media Vision's demise owe a lot to Sim Wong Hoo.
It is probably something he doesn't want to talk about openly.
Of course I'm aware of that. Still interesting he's speaking from a business perspective but doesn't even mention the competition. Most CEOs I've met relish recounting how they beat the hell out of the other guys.
keropi wrote on 2020-02-05, 09:06:[...]
So from a business point of view he is correct - it was also a business decision not to care that much about audio quality IMHO (but ofcourse he can't say that) - people forget that back in the day most computer speakers were passive cones in a box 🤣
He comes very close to saying exactly that tbh.
It is easy to criticize them with 2010+ standards but people tend to forget they were gaming peripherals just like the bazillion crappy joysticks you could buy back in the day when "gaming" wasn't a term that would warrant double the prize.
Disagree. They marketed the hell out of their solutions as 'quality' in the day, even when they were blatantly worse than the competition (noise levels of early SB16 vs PAS16 is an obvious example). People did care, but in the days before widespread internet access and decent reviewing they just swallowed the bullshit and chose Creative as the "quality" vendor, to the point of insisting on a "real" Sound Blaster even when the alternative was not just cheaper, but quieter and less buggy too- not to mention the way the SB16 screwed up backwards compatibility with Creative's own SBPro2, the de-facto standard in most of the DOS era...
I still like Creative and use their modern cards in all my systems , onboard audio is just an office solution for me. I also did not had issues with live! cards and tend to stick to at least proper x-fi cards for the systems that matter. But I must admit I care very little for the AWE series, their early EMU wavetable tech and the crappy SB16 vibra cards. 😁
Their business practices put me off in a big way. As for the actual hardware, the original Sound Blaster was a seminal original product and deserves the credit it gets, the SBLive did set the benchmark in terms of audio fidelity (although with godawful driver hell) and the AWE/EMU8k things were at least original, if not truly great. Apart from that though, I consider their cards vastly overrated and definitely don't use them in modern systems - I prefer M-audio these days.