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."

Ah, poor Creative

[Aladrin]

I'd still be their customer if the SB Audigy 2 I purchased didn't pop and click all the time. Apparently it's some kind of issue with nforce chipsets, but nobody can figure out exactly what, and the most common fix is to move it to a different slot. I ended up taking it out and using the on-board sound and it's just as good. It sits on top of my PC as a reminder that more expensive doesn't necessarily mean better.

Leader?

[Thaelon]

They're only the "leader" because they have no significant competition in the after-market add-on card market. Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.

Re:2 words for my business

[Joe U]

2 words that SHOULD make you go out and pick up a Creative card...

Stable Drivers

Creative drivers have a tendency to, um...putting it nicely, SUCK horribly.

Re:2 words for my business

[Ngarrang]

With the move by many motherboard makers to integrate EVERYTHING, I am surprised that Creative has last this long producing stand-alone cards. There will always be a need for high-end audio, though, so if Creative loses the low-end, they could continue to produce high-quality audio cards for the discerning gamer and audiophile.

As for Vista, maybe it is just me and lack of desire to ever want to touch it, but I don't see it as a deciding factor. At no point has a new M$ release 100% replaced the previous version. There are still DOS, Win3.1/95/98/ME/NT and 2K systems out in great numbers. Many of the newer integrated chipsets do not have drivers for the older OSes. BUT, thanks to the ubiquity of the SoundBlaster card, those older OSes can still have audio. I don't see this as a huge and growing market. No, it is a dying market, but the need still exists.

Live on, Creative!

Its about time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative would have to be one of, if not the most evil of PC hardware manufacturers.

They are driven purely by their marketing Joes, and not by customer demands, or innovative tech.
You only need to read up on the happenings with Aureal to see the lengths they will go to.
Even after Creative bought out Aureal, none of Aureal's the superior tech made it into Creative products.

The day Creative looses thier hold over the soundcard market, is the day real 3D soundcard innovation will start.

Re:2 words for my business

[Kenja]

Two words that make me not ever want to buy another Creative product....

Windows Drivers

Not sure why you would want to subject Linux to those resource hungry, crash causing, never working drivers. But what ever helps you make it through the day I guess.

Use to be that a Sound Blaster was a simple audio card that just worked. Then they started adding firewire and other crap that I dont need to it and the resources just started going away. If I need MIDI or digital audio I'll buy a pro level card. I just want to play the frikin game.

Stuff that worked...

[kabdib]

Drivers that worked would be nice. Hardware that didn't freeze would help. Finally, sound cards should be heard and not seen: They should ditch all the extra garbage they install. Look, I bought a stupid little sound card, it's not like that bit of phenolic and silicon is the centerpiece, the very *core* of my PC experience. Yet the bloatware certainly thinks it should be and insists on putting startup junk in my face, installing processes that God only knows what they do, and (I have vague memories of:) calling home to Mom to update itself.

I stopped buying Creative once it was clear they weren't going to support SMP systems anytime soon (heh, hyperthreading *forced* them to, finally), and that any improvements in their stuff was just going to involve shovelware on top of a bunch of creaky drivers that they were never going to fix any bugs in. Meh.

Re:2 words for my business

[paeanblack]

There are still DOS, Win3.1/95/98/ME/NT and 2K systems out in great numbers.

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?

Re:2 words for my business

[spaceyhackerlady]

My main Linux box has a Soundblaster PCI 128, formerly Ensoniq ES1371. It works just fine with both OSS and ALSA drivers.

I don't want all the surround junk. All I want is a decent quality analog to digital conversion. With the (long-obsolete, alas) PCI 128, I have it. But there just doesn't seem to be any market for a plain old sound card, just like it's impossible to buy a plain old cell phone.

...laura

Re:2 words for my business

[greg1104]

There will always be a need for high-end audio, though, so if Creative loses the low-end, they could continue to produce high-quality audio cards for the discerning gamer and audiophile.

Audiophiles moved on some time ago to using cards from companies like M-Audio instead of Creative, as they have better sound quality when doing playback of digital music like CD rips. The only market Creative has left are the gamers who care about 3D positioning of sound effects and similar complicated features. On-board sound ate the low-end, M-Audio and other pro market players ate the high-end of their customer base.

Onboard Audio is good enough for the non-pro

[RexRhino]

The need for a "high quality" consumer sound card doesn't exist anymore. Most of the super-cheap sound cards or audio embedded on the motherboard is comparable to your average consumer electronics (i.e. your Sony stereo system). Most computers have more than enough processing power to handle all the wavetable stuff.

And if you need high quality (you are an audiophile, or you are doing pro or wannabe-pro recording), you would jump up to professional recording hardware, which would cost you only marginally more than a Creative Labs product.

My SoundBlaster card was a lot of fun back in the day though. At that time, sampled sound playback was still somewhat of a novelty, and the soundblaster was pretty damn cool.

Re:Biased

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

as an ex-employee I hope the competition eats them up and they go away.

As an ex-customer, so do I.

Creative has been anything BUT creative with their sound card product line, unless you count creative ways to eff up your computer. I think they are the classic example of product quality stagnating in a monopoly market.

Re:No future with me

[ajs318]

No, it's Creative's problem.

If they feel that they have to disguise the source code of the drivers, that invariably means their product is crap. More specifically, it means their marketing is mendacious and if anyone could see the source code to the drivers they'd know at once (cf. those digital cameras with the proprietary, secret RAW formats; the RAW format necessarily exposes the actual number of pixels in the sensor, not the up-interpolated resolution of the JPEG encoder. Or nVidia's graphics cards, where you could make a £30 one do the job of a £300 one by changing one bit in one byte ..... if you only knew which bit in which byte).

Re:2 words for my business

[nuzak]

My AC97 (which does EAX2 and DirectSound3d just fine thanks) has perfectly solid linux drivers. Until you want to do something crazy, like, oh, support headphones and s/pdif out at the same time. I'm not even talking about both signals at the same time (which would be nice), I'm talking about having to edit some crazy alsa config file just to make the other one work at all.

But I can't expect much, it's only the most common onboard sound chip on any PC.

Re:I hope they die

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth is no one willing to point out the obvious here: the problem is not Creative (or "insert company name here"). The problem is VISTA.

Creative is hardly the only company struggling to support this ungodly pig of an operating system. Vista hasn't just made the end-user experience a nightmare, it has made development even WORSE.

Were this any other company, Vista would be very quickly relegated to the trash bin where it belongs. Vista's ham-fisted "security" breaks equipment that has worked for YEARS prior to it's unwelcome arrival. Who is the newcomer here? It's Vista that needs to change, not the other way around. Especially since Vista's questionable "security" features are really only designed to enforce DRM for the media cartels anyway.

Microsoft does not care about the initial bad reactions to Vista. They are banking on what they have ALWAYS banked on to cement their monopoly: the preloads. Vista may taste like Buckley's cold medicine but guess what--you will have no choice. Microsoft has easily closed the obvious back-door of people sticking with XP...working with their sycophants in the PC making biz, it will soon be Vista or nothing. And failing that, XP will just be end-of-lined, no more service packs or bug fixes.

But by all means, keep on pointing the finger of blame at everyone else. Microsoft has given us the most user-hostile experience to date and people still cover it in whipped cream and call it gold.

Re:2 words for my business

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

>>> 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? Ever felt the urge to get some classic gaming on a old physical system? Say hello to the SB16, SB AWE32, WaveBlaster I/II, etc. ;)

Re:Leader?

[devilspgd]

Well, there is that little "Intel" startup, I wonder if AC97 will go anywhere.

I won't embarass you by mentioning Turtle Beach, M-Audio, Turtle Beach, E-MU, Roland or Ensoniq either.

Re:2 words for my business

[Cadallin]

Creative don't compete in the high end. They never did. The true "high end" is currently dominated by Mixers with integrated Firewire or USB 2.0 audio interfaces, and multi-in-out audio break-out boxes by companies like MOTU (Mark of the Unicorn), Mackie, and Apogee, with the "upper mid-range" being budget equipment by people like Edirol. They're for computer based audio production work. That's the real "high end." (Caveat, in reality most of the companies I just mentioned are mid-range audio production equipment companies, although Mackie competes in the multi-hundred thousand to multimillion dollar music production field as well) The only presence creative has left in that space is the mouldering remains of E-MU, who now produce a bunch of poorly regarded cheap crap.

No, in reality Creative missed the boat. Digital audio players are the future for computer based audio. Of course, Creative have competed in that space for quite a while, but by "miss the boat" I mean, they didn't make the iPod. Their digital audio players didn't inspire the same kind of mass market fervor that pushed the iPod into the mainstream. That was the end of creative.

Re:But the open ones are good

[Branko]

...when Aureal began selling their products based on EAX support...

I don't see where Creative was "squashing" them rather than giving them enough rope.

Well, EAX is basically an API, and patenting API is evil. Imagine Karl Benz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Benz [wikipedia.org]) patenting the steering wheel (which is, in essence, an API for a car)!

Beside Aureal, another example of squishing competition is the fate of nVidia SoundStorm. Although technically capable of supporting higher EAX levels (it's a DSP driven by software), it was stuck at EAX2 (if memory serves me right), because of legal concerns over Creative's parents.