Creative once again reaffirming my decision to never purchase anything they produce:
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CPU wars, graphics wars and now we also have sound wars. Despite the fact that audio features in modern PCs have become a commodity and have received little attention in recent years, the move to high-definition is now increasing the rivalry between sound card makers. Creative sent an email to several websites accusing Asus of misleading users by not supporting environmental audio extensions (EAX) - which have been used by Creative since 2001. As you might imagine, Asus has a different opinion.
It is the first time, at least as far as we can recall, that Creative is directly attacking Asus, interestingly just as the Xonar D2 and D2X cards are gaining market traction. The company is clearly upset that Asus is converting modern EAX APIs, including EAX 3, 4 and 5.
Oh no! Somebody is trying to innovate and compete in the marketplace. This is unacceptable. We must sue.
Seriously, the article doesn't mention a pending suit yet, but you can count on it happening. Creative has a long history of using the courts as a substitute for competitive advantage.
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One is listed right in the article - the Asus Xonar D2X. The Xonar DX is its sub-$100 counterpart. The other sub-$100 is the Auzentech Xplosion 7.1. Both are based on the same Oxygen HD audio chip.
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There's the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude. A very nice sound card that uses Creative's X-Fi chip, and therefore supports all the EAXs. It's probably the card I'd buy now if I was getting a sound card.
I've got the X-Plosion, and I'm happy enough with it. No connectors to connect the front panel mic and headphones ports though, which would have been useful. The Prelude does have them.
They've apparently threatened to take action against someone who was distributing modified driver packages that both made for better Vista stability than Creative's official drivers and removed artificial software restrictions on older hardware.
They've apparently threatened to take action against someone who was distributing modified driver packages that both made for better Vista stability than Creative's official drivers and removed artificial software restrictions on older hardware.
I am happy that I stopped buying their cards almost 6 years ago, just haven't needed one and I was unhappy with their bloatware as it was.
Their bloatware has gotten a lot better. Since the later revisions of the Audigy 2 drivers, Creative bundles a slim, non-skinned application called the Audio Console that gives you quick access to all the settings in a standard Windows preferences pane. It's a no-BS, no-crazy-theme, no-frills program that doesn't sit in the background. Their driver quality still leaves something to be desired though. (it also doesn't override the default Windows volume control, etc)
My next card is definitely going to not be a Creative though.
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I love their media players...but at least they did this:
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Update: It seems Creative has decided to allow Daniel_K to continue with one particular endeavor at least, noting that "as long as no intellectual property of Creative is distributed, [it] will have no problem with it." Thanks, Aaron!
Via Engadget. Hopefully they wise up. They just offered tech for so long that the average consumer couldn't get anywhere else.
Their bloatware has gotten a lot better. Since the later revisions of the Audigy 2 drivers, Creative bundles a slim, non-skinned application called the Audio Console that gives you quick access to all the settings in a standard Windows preferences pane. It's a no-BS, no-crazy-theme, no-frills program that doesn't sit in the background.
That's good, it's what I disliked the most about their drivers when I got my Audigy 2. That and the startup screen for it, seemed a bit much.
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I love their media players...but at least they did this:
Via Engadget. Hopefully they wise up. They just offered tech for so long that the average consumer couldn't get anywhere else.
The drivers are their 'IP' and Creative is pretty bad about abusing the patent system, as well, so even reimplementing some features independently is going to be off the table. That statement really doesn't mean much.
The drivers are their 'IP' and Creative is pretty bad about abusing the patent system, as well, so even reimplementing some features independently is going to be off the table. That statement really doesn't mean much.
Yeah, and that's too bad. Their Creative Zen is the best MP3 player out there.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not legal for doctors to kill their patients through medical/pharmeceutical errors. That's called medical malpractice, and it results in phat lootz.
Has anyone got one of these D2X cards? I am very tempted to get one, as the drivers for my on-board sound are crap.
The trick is to find out the manufacturer of your card and the chipset #. Realtek makes the majority of onboard sound cards but there are a few others. Once you got that info, look up the manufacturer's reference drivers. 99% chance they'll work. (if you've done this and they suck, well... )
Regardless, I can only find a review here. There's also Bit-Tech's here. Seems like a solid card.
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LiquidRain thanks for the response, I should have clarified tho, I am having driver issues on vista :-/ Still, I have done what you have said and they are the drivers I am using. Intel Sound Max just has crappy driver support from what I can tell. There have been no updates for a long time.
Anyway, don't mean to hijack the thread, just curious about actual user reports on this card. It does look like a nice card, and creative are not exactly known for their drivers... so would be nice to avoid them.
I have hated them on and off for years. The last GOOD product they put out was SB16.
I really loved them when I was sucked into buying a Live card and when I installed the drivers and rebooted I was greeted by the sound of thunder coming from my speakers at half volume at 2am... Almost shit myself. To this day I have come up with no explanation why they would do that to their customers.
Oh no! Somebody is trying to innovate and compete in the marketplace. This is unacceptable. We must sue.
I found this topic while stumbling yesterday. The only sound hardware I own is Line 6 TonePort so I've got no axe to grind here but the whole thing looks just like another internet bandwagon that's being jumped on for no other reason than to to have a go.
For a start, they're not suing ASUS, they're just telling them off for making false claims about their hardware. What's the problem with that? Secondly, that huge thread on their forum full of idiot one-posters is a polite warning to one person who is distributing software that Creative had to license themselves without making payments to Creative or the original licensor, and asking for money for himself. You don't think that deserves a polite "please don't do this" message?
/edit - anyone who truly "hates" companies that they feel have slighted them personally really needs to get a life.
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DangerousDaze: The heart of the matter is Creative said "Vista Ready", and purposely disabled functions on cards that people spent money on for Vista. This guy made Creative's own customers happy by hacking the drivers, and now Creative is asking him to stop. They're asking a guy to stop making their own customers happy.
Yes, there's legal ground upon which Creative stands. It might even be pressure from the company Creative licensed the tech from. That doesn't stop it from pissing people off.
As for the hate for Creative, it's because they have a long, long, LONG track record of horribly buggy drivers and bad customer support. It dates way back to the SB Live! not being PCI compliant and simply not working with a lot of motherboards, while generating static on others, and just a whole other bunch of issues that were nasty. They followed up that boondoggle with false-advertised hardware - the SB Audigy 1 simply did NOT do what it was advertised. 96KHz audio streams were actually downsampled to 44KHz for processing, then re-sampled back to 96KHz, with no option for pass-through. This is while the drivers forgot your settings for line in volume and mute every single boot, amongst other things. Oh, it still had a lot of problems on motherboards and static issues with some of them, too! The Audigy 2 ZS was their best effort, it did what the Audigy 1 advertised and fixed the bugs in the Audigy 1 driver.
It took Creative three products and over 4 years to deliver on a soundcard that actually performed in the majority of PCs and without issues. And you could have been suckered into buying each iteration.
For the present day, the X-Fi exhibits static randomly on a lot of machines. On my PC, on my friends' PCs, it seems completely random and nobody knows why. That's even past the first wave of intial hardware problems. nVidia had to release a BIOS fix (through motherboard manufacturers, of course) for their motherboards chipsets to work around X-Fi hardware problems, since Creative was not fixing them in drivers. And that's on XP. For a long time X-Fi had practically nothing for Vista support and only problems.
The only reason people buy Creative hardware is that they are still the only hardware-accelerated soundcard on the market. It used to be nVidia did as well on their old nForce2 motherboards, but Creative bought out the company that nVidia bought the technology license from. With many games not using hardware accelerated audio (Source in particular) and Vista doing all mixing in software, this is fast becoming a moot issue though.
This has just been the final nail in the coffin for many people. It's obvious now that Creative's not just incompetent, they've been purposely ignoring and now actively stopping customers getting the right kind of support for the hardware they bought.
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