[IceFire]

Question for some of the audiophiles out there...I knew there were a few issues with Creative sound cards under Vista and I had just started looking into the possibility of disabling my onboard sound and going for a dedicated card but apparently there is a huge uprising of Creative soundcard users against Creative and their Vista support.

Saw it on their forums: http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332

How is the X-Fi under Vista (or XP) these days?  Have the pop/click issues been resolved?

Might consider one of those new Asus Xonar cards instead.

[Davros]

ive just got a xfi and its fine under xp
cant comment on vista
but i beleive if you want eax in vista the xfi is your only choice

[Kosh]

Speaking of creative sound cards, while everyone knows creative drivers suck there was one guy who tried to make them better (and actually make disabled features work on vista).......only now creative is trying to shut him down.

Now creative sucks even more than normal.

[achtung]

I do believe that had a lot more to do with Creative not wanting to be sued by Dolby than it did with the fact that he was working on his driver.

From what I've gathered, Creative hadn't licensed some Dolby Surround technology, or something, for use in Vista, so they had to disable the feature.  This guy pops up and releases his driver on the Creative forums, and to avoid any possibility of a law suit from Dolby, they shut him up.

[DeepSpace9er]

I am running my Creative Audigy 2 under vista and it works just fine. Thats like circa 2004 stuff too.. hey it works and all I use are headphones.

[Davros]

no it doesnt
you have no eax support under vista unless you pay for alchemy
its only free for x-fi users

[Flipside]

True, but since the major formats for both the digital and physical distribution of music don't support EAX or surround anyway, I've never really worried about the fact my soundcard only has stereo outputs.

Though, admittedly, it does handle a heck of a lot of other stuff, being an E-MU

[Kosh]

Btw, are there any good alternatives to Creative cards or have they pretty much cornered the market?

[Davros]

for gaming creative has the market sewn up
except for a card using the x-fi chip (its a beast) but not made by them the auzentec prelude

also
for music or home theatre there are other good cards

terretec
asus xonar
trust do really cheap but decent cards

[Mika]

I checked out what's the all the fuss, and it seems that Creative has actually done something quite goofy. Bear with me, the problem sounds quite unreal.

The whole problem seems to be that some part of the Audigy cards (EAX?) do not seem to work in Vista. But they do work in XP. Creative has stated that it will not work in Vista, but have sold them as Vista capable or what ever the hell it is called. Unfortunately, this one guy wrote a driver that actually enables the usage of the (EAX?) functionality in Vista, and now it seems that the reason Creative originally prevented is that they have licensed the technique separatively for each operating system, and in Audigy's case Vista was not included.

Now, most of the people shouting loud see that as a way to force people to upgrade an otherwise working sound card when (up/down)grading to Vista. And on top of that, people have started to think about further compatibity of newer Creative's cards and the support those cards will get. Since the company willingly castrates a sound card they have bought, what would stop them from doing it again? And, from people's point of view, Creative has willingly sold them a defective product that could be a reason for a class action suit. Add that on top of the vendors who have sold Creative's soundcards to customers that use Vista by using those very drivers since Creative's own do not work and you have a quite good problem at your hands.

To me this sounds like Creative has gone down since SB16 and AWE32 & AWE64 days. In the words of the guy who wrote the drivers, it is strange that Creative reacts much more faster to legal "infringements" rather than writes working drivers.

Mika

[Kosh]

Uh, I already posted about that Mika.

Speaking of creative sound cards, while everyone knows creative drivers suck there was one guy who tried to make them better (and actually make disabled features work on vista).......only now creative is trying to shut him down.

Now creative sucks even more than normal.

[Davros]

Creative originally prevented is that they have licensed the technique separatively for each operating system, and in Audigy's case Vista was not included.

no they havnt licensed any technique they created eax for them its free its theirs
what has happened is they have decided not to support older cards in vista as a way of persuading people to buy x-fi's

[Triple Ace]

I have an X-fi card running on Vista with 5.1 speakers and I have no problems with it at all.

[Kosh]

Good news everyone, Creative finally has a competitor in gaming sound cards

"Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its X-Fi audio processor for more than two and a half years. Now the SoundBlaster has a new challenger in the form of Asus' $90 Xonar DX, which delivers much better sound quality than the X-Fi, PCI Express connectivity, and support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding. The Xonar can even emulate the latest EAX positional audio effects, providing the most complete competition to the X-Fi available on the market."