The Future of Creative and the Sound Card Market

Hanners writes "Elite Bastards investigates the future of Creative Labs, and in particular their PC sound card business, which is facing a number of big challenges during 2007. Windows Vista has seen some large changes to the driver model required by audio devices, the abilities of on-board solutions have improved somewhat, and the amount of competition in the market place has ballooned. So what does all of this mean for the traditional leader of this market? As well as outlining all of these issues, they speculate as to what measures Creative may need to take to thrive once more in this changing market."

Re:2 words for my business

[brouski]

Hell, I'd be happy with Vista drivers.

Re:Leader?

[ToxikFetus]

Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.

Roland and Ensoniq?
 
Whoa, sorry. Just had a flashback to 1991.

Re:I've wondered about Creative for a while

[Anonymous Coward]

Actully, no true audiophile worth their $8000 1m interconnects is going to accept a signal from somthing that comes from as EM noisy a place as a computer. Only the purest analog recording on 4 inch wide ceramic unobtainium coated yak intestine based tape will provide the true soundstage and brightly warm, but not colored, sound that they require for critical listeninig.

Computers. Hah!

Re:Leader?

[BecomingLumberg]

If you want cookies, start using IE.

Re:2 words for my business

[basscomm]

Do you really think anyone still running DOS/Win3.1/95/98/ME/NT is the type of user that buys aftermarket add-on cards to install in their computer?

Absolutely. Then they'll call me to install it for them, since I apparently "know computers".

Re:Dwindling customer base

[grommit]

While they may whine and kick and scream about it because of how hard it is to please the professional audio crowd

It's not really that hard to please the audiophile crowd. Just coat all the connectors in gold, add a bit of shielding here and there and charge insane prices for your products. It works for Monster Cable after all.

Re:Dwindling customer base

[Moofie]

It's especially important to make sure the optical connectors have gold plating.

(I had a good laugh when I saw that at the local Best Buy.)

Re:Leader?

[nuzak]

> Wouldn't cheap speakers make it worse?

Overall, but you don't know it's from the card. Good speakers faithfully reproduce all the noise from the crappy consumer card.

Me, I just play games, and my hearing sucks anyway, so I don't much care. I'll probably have to do something about the fan hum if I ever use my PC as a tivo, but otherwise it doesn't bug me.

Wolf3d was really great with a soundblaster tho. I never figured out what the guards were saying. Something like "Luftwaffe" ... while makes no sense to go running around saying the name of the wehrmacht air force, it was so muffled that you can't really tell. My roommate swore they were saying "Moosewaffles", so whenever one of us said something the other didn't understand, we would always reply "moosewaffles?"

Re:Creative Labs has a "professional" sound divisi

[glindsey]

If you remember back to the 1980s, the thing that allowed them to gain a foothold was their inclusion of FM synthesis at a reasonable price.

This isn't entirely true. The thing that really clinched the foothold for them was the fact that they produced a card with Adlib-compatible FM synthesis as well as an 8-bit DAC for digital sound, at a price that was half the cost of the Adlib at the time. The DAC, combined with perfect backwards compatibility with Adlib cards, is what really let them take off, since games didn't have to change their music routines one bit -- all they had to do was add the routine for pumping sound effects out through the DAC.

SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1