The Future of Creative and the Sound Card Market 351
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."
2 words for my business (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux Drivers
-Rick
Biased (Score:5, Interesting)
No future with me (Score:4, Interesting)
I've wondered about Creative for a while (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would I ever buy another sound card? Would anyone but an audiophile care? I have all the surround sound I need right now.
I know the latest round have onboard ram to "speed up gameing 2 da xtreme", but the numbers dont bear that out - IIRC, only Quake 4 took advantage of it when I checked, and hardly showed any noticable performance gain.
Really, what can they offer me, besides gimmicky stuff?
Dwindling customer base (Score:5, Interesting)
Does no one buy the add-on cards anymore? Well, no, the super high end has amazing 12-way hardware RAID cards that would make the freebie RAID weep.
But, freebie RAID is good enough for most users. I suspect it's the same for sound cards.
Motherboard sound isn't that great, but who has really great computer speakers anyway? What ordinary user even swapped his speakers from the craptastic freebies that came with his Dell?
There will always be a market for sound cards. While they may whine and kick and scream about it because of how hard it is to please the professional audio crowd, that's where it's heading.
Re:Hope they go bankrupt (Score:2, Interesting)
He had this bright idea to turn Cambridge SoundWorks stores into "Creative" stores kind of like "Sony" has their stores. That failed miserabley. All but 2 of th 20 something CSW stores are now closed because of his poor judgement.
I hope they die (Score:4, Interesting)
Ran fiber optics from Tivo and DVD player into it for full digital sound against Logitech digital surrounds in my office. Fantastic sound, tons of controls.
Multimedia machine now dual boots Vista........
Audigy 4 Pro reduced to steaming pile of garbage. If you touch the mixer, raise or lower volume, sound goes away and doesnt come back without a reboot. Fiber inputs no longer work, nor does digital coax input. Surround, what do you think? GONE, bitches.
Every boot into Vista comes with the suspense of whether there will be sound or not.
Creative had YEARS to work on Vista drivers. I will never buy another product from them.
Problems in Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
DSP Coprocessors (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, they don't even release driver source for Linux coders/users to fully exploit the soundcards we already paid for, so I doubt they'll wake up.
audio = commodity device (Score:3, Interesting)
Jump to today: Audigy cards are overpriced bloatware with cheap hardware components in them. Each new Audgy "revision" adds more useless features. The only way I would pay the prices they want for their recent sound cards if that they were decent for semi-pro use, which, unfortunately they aren't. That and on-mobo sound systems work, for the most part, pretty damn decently these days (esp. for basic audio playback). The only reason I would want any external or PCI-card based solution is to get some real clean inputs for vocal recording or other sound inputs, and for that, there are better solutions than creative.
Ok.. Ok... E-Mu has good inputs on them and is a "Creative-owned" brand. Honestly, tho, if Creative went under, could E-Mu just move somewhere else?
Also, at least in the US, they suck as an employer. Not because of the environemtn, their web-dev/customer-service facility in Stillwater, OK was a FUN place to work at - the corporate disparacy (and IT struggles) between the OK and CA offices were enough to make your head spin, and their compensation is HORRIBLE (Java devs with 2-3 years of experience getting maybe 30-32K???? Even with the small amount of experience they shoul dbe getting 40-50 in OK)
Re:Leader? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it hasn't. Most chipsets still sound unbelievably crappy, even with cheap speakers.
It's ironic. The fact that you think Creative is the Monster Cable of soundcards suggests YOU (ironically) "exclusively patronize Best Buy."
You can find Audigys for $30, and SB Live!s for $15. Sure, Best Buy sells them for $200 with a bunch of "pro" audio software when they brand new, but that's not what they really cost to halfway intelligent consumers, and OEMs alike.
I'd say, from the moment the "SB Live! Value" card came out (about 5 years ago?), the competition was dead. Now the dull-sounding and feature-bare (but better-than-onboard) $20 sound cards from other companies are practically gone.
Integration is, without a doubt, the next step. With smaller form-factors, SPDIF digital outputs on even dirt-cheap onboard audio, and the like, PCI audio is sure to go away soon enough. If companies like VIA/SIS/etc. could inexpensively make sound chips that weren't crap, it would already have happened.
Via/M-Audio/Chaintech has better sound quality (Score:5, Interesting)
From a gaming perspective maybe true 3D positional audio like Aureal produced with their A3D [wikipedia.org] Vortex chips in the late 90s before Creative sued them out of existence in a lawsuit involving...you guessed it, patent infringement. A lawsuit which Creative lost. Creative was not so interested at the time in using positional 3D cues. They were highly successful however if their goal was to prevent anyone else from pursuing accurate positional 3D audio in computer games. Have they finally caught up in terms of 3D audio to where Aureal was a decade ago? This is a particularly telling example of how useful patents can be at keeping smaller, more innovative companies to a minimum. They don't even need to win the lawsuit, just outspend the smaller company in lawyer fees.
I have not bought a Creative product since 1999 (Score:4, Interesting)
Like ATI I avoid them, because they did not care about customer support issues once it endangered their bottom line. I also do not sell or recommend them to clients.
Some of the PCI Audigy sound cards have looked fantastic, and they are more Linux compatible than my Game Theater, but I am too attached to the convenience of the external breakout box to give that card up. Are their products so good that I should give Creative a second chance? Have their policies changed for the better?
Create Labs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Biased (Score:2, Interesting)
Would it have killed them to fucking put a sticker on the box that says "this board revision sucks your grandmas cunt and only has 8-bit DMA channels because that's how your grandma likes it?"
OK, rant over. I'm still mad about it and it's been about 11 years. I want my fucking 50 bucks back.
Re:Creative Labs has a "professional" sound divisi (Score:3, Interesting)
But the open ones are good (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows (Creative's Driver): Soundcard caused freeze-ups and crashes
Moved to linux (open source drivers): No more freeze-ups (switched to Cedega for my gaming needs)
so then I tried
Windows (Open Source Driver): Again, worked very nicely, without freeze-ups (although in general I still stay mostly in linux nowadays)
Now as far as linux goes, I love my old SBLive 5.1 cards. They're cheap, and do hardware mixing so I can happily use ALSA/OSS apps alongside KDE/arts or Esound without having the card tied up. On my other machines (laptops etc) that don't have hardware mixing, I generally go with esound but unfortunately not every application supports it (some are OSS/Alsa only).
I'll happily buy creative cards that have good OSS drivers. I won't buy the others because, no matter how good the card might be, my experience with Creative's drivers have not been good.
Outside of the soundcard realm, I remember that their "Creative Webcam Go" actually came with a driver CD that did not work. Yes, the drivers would not install from the accompanying CD (I know other people with the same camera, same problem), so you needed an internet connection to download the updated drivers. Way to go, Creative.
Re:2 words for my business (Score:2, Interesting)
No need for esound (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't had a sound daemon running in over a year. It's only the last six months or so that it Just Works, but with a recent kernel and ALSA libs everything from Flash to Totem to Gaim is mixed in software just fine.
Re:But the open ones are good (Score:4, Interesting)
Secondly although I will not defend Creative's drivers very heavily (although I do think they are better than most give them credit for), their hardware is far from crap. The only bad hardware I have ever seen them produce were some of their mice which had flaws in the hardware itself (this was later fixed).
You might be surprised to learn that Creative won several customer service awards due to their quick adoption of support Knowledge Bases and their phone services. I do feel that service has gone down lately (from my sources this is mostly a result of triming costs) but they still remain one of the few tech companies that does not outsource customer service (US service is in the US, Europe in Europe, and Asia in Asia).
I assume you are refering to Aureal when you say they "squash" competition. There were bad steps taken on both sides of the issue, but it was all started when Aureal began selling their products based on EAX support. Creative took them to court over it and rather than making the correct business decision and settling out of court, they chose to fight it out. This bankrupted the company and Creative purchased their assets. I don't see where Creative was "squashing" them rather than giving them enough rope.
Audiophiles & Musicians (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, there are a number of companies serving the professional musician market for sound cards and other DAW gear, but there's not really a lot of choices for the high-end audiophile. I'd like to see some first rate PCIe sound cards that can handle high bitrates and depths and digital I/O and all that other good stuff. It seems like a natural in an age of integration of the PC into the entertainment system.
When someone orders a Dell, where's the choice for a really good Sound Card? Not just something for the gamer, but something for music.
Re:Onboard audio processors ??! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:2 words for my business (Score:3, Interesting)
Really, I've always been surprised at the low quality of Creative's drivers. I've had many systems with very standard hardware that have been unstable when I put a Creative card in it. I've had many Creative cards that wouldn't be recognized by their own driver installation programs. (i.e. I install a SB Live!, download SB Live! drivers from the site, run the install, and it says no SB Live! is installed. I find out later it's some OEM version of the card that, in spite of having the same serial number, requires specialized drivers.)
It's just crazy to me. It's worse than either Nvidia or ATI, and I feel like sound cards can't be harder than video cards, can they?
Re:But the open ones are good (Score:2, Interesting)