You better look at products not made by companies in general because all companies operate like that. 😀 Creative was just dumb for announcing it to a public forum. Crowd mentality will thus ensue. Big time.

Their driver support is not that bad. Really. Just what other 10 year old sound card besides SBLive! offers full hardware acceleration across 5 operating systems? (95,98,Me,2k,XP)

Just off the top of my head I can tell you that NVIDIA's support is much worse. The "soundstorm" audio that everyone thinks was the best-thing-evar! was dropped 2 years into its life, basically. Those drivers are riddled with issues. Their mobo chipsets, NF4 in particular, have quite a few unsolved problems that were quietly buried. Their support for video cards older than a year is basically non-existent.

Creative just churned out basically the same card throughout the years and didn't have to do much with the drivers because all of the OS's were basically the same.

95/98/ME (The same OS driver-wise except for the introduction of WDM drivers with Windows 98 )
2000/2003/XP (Same drivers can be used for all)
Vista (MS changed the driver model so of course Creative is screwed since now they actually have to you know...do some work on their drivers)

Comparing NVIDIA to Creative isn't fair:
NVIDIA has actually evolved their technology over time releasing new hardware.
Creative just releases the same card over and over with a few new features tacked on.
NVIDIA has to support a broader variety of video hardware tech.
Creative only has to support basically the same card. (Not factoring in all of the other hardware Creative releases of course)

Onboard audio has always sucked. The only reason NVIDIA got more of a bad rap than other motherboard with onboard sound is because their motherboards are targeted to gamers. Onboard audio still sucks but because it's just sound people don't give a shit.

NVIDIA or AMD should just buy out Creative then mabye something decent could be done with the tech.

DosFreak wrote:

Onboard audio has always sucked. The only reason NVIDIA got more of a bad rap than other motherboard with onboard sound is because their motherboards are targeted to gamers. Onboard audio still sucks but because it's just sound people don't give a shit.

The thing is, NV's NVAPU in NF2 MCP-T (I think it was) was just as capable as anything prior to X-Fi. They just stopped developing for it after 2004. They gave up on support for it entirely. Part of that is that mobos are supposed to be cheap as hell, and a audio DSP isn't ever going to be as cheap as Realtek trash, so mobo makers didn't want to use it. And so it didn't do the volume, yada yada, and with NF3 they dropped it entirely.

The question may be, just how much volume does Creative move and is it really worth their time to sell sound cards at all anymore? They aren't going to pour millions of $$ into continued support if almost no one uses their hardware. And, of course, the fact that no other companies have interest in trying to develop gaming sound cards, there is no competition and no motivation to be more than the minimum. This is not a mind set that is exclusive to "evil Creative".

There are tangible differences between the Audigy models. And honestly almost all of them are superior to everything else out there for games so, again, they are doing the minimum due to no reason to do more. X-Fi was a major release, is some amazing audio hardware, but I think it still kinda bombed from a sales standpoint. The company is hurting big time, financially. I'm sure they're only around today because of how much they've diversified.

If you haven't yet, check out ASUS's new card, the Xonar. It looks like it'll be a serious competitor. It's nice to see someone trying to shake things up. It's the only non-Creative card to support EAX 5.0. And, the sound quality is better than what you get out of Creative's kit. Woo!

What you guys think about M-Audio?

I don't know just yet. I do know that your link doesn t work (left off the L), and that that ProFire 2626 looks absolutely insane, and not insane like "I could do so much with that," insane like "Who would need that many inputs?"

DosFreak wrote:

Onboard audio still sucks but because it's just sound people don't give a shit.

yes, I think that's the root of it, but really, isn't any modern sound hardware going to do the job and not completely suck? I may have a different skew on it because it was so long before I had decent sound from a computer, before that it was "PC Speaker", and even that didn't always work right, so I guess I'm just happy to have any sound, let alone CD-quality
anyway, people mainly interact with computers visually, so if the sound sucks, you can just turn it off, but if the video sucks, you might not be able to see what you're doing

also, is there a way to put apostrophes in links on here?

Yeah, as someone who also say PC sound go from nothing to what it is today (ie PC speaker -> Tandy 1000 -> SBPro -> Ensoniq Soundscape -> AudioPCI -> SBLive! -> Audigy 2) , I think the wannabe-audiophile PC users kinda miss the point. 😀

I want a card that does what I need, which happens to include MIDI because I'm a DOSBOX user. How many cards do passable MIDI these days? Creative is just about it. It's nice to be able to use the large number of soundfonts out there. Heck, I even like EAX when it gets used.

It sure is a shame how they treat us customers though. I suppose it's a good thing I only buy these cards then they get cheap, or buy them used off of eBay.