Creative's PR blunder

Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Creative's PR blunder

Hi guys,

Didn't see this mentioned on this site yet, so I just wanted to give you all a heads up about the state of Creative's drivers for Vista.

Read this post:
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don't have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O'Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Now Im an owner of a Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty soundcard, and have had big problems trying to get everything to work with Windows Vista, and was blown away when I found this post.
So here I've been using official drivers from Creative which is deliberately crippled, to force us to upgrade to new hardware?!

David_K enabled features available in Windows XP, which Creative claimed couldn't be implemented in Vista, but actually just had shut off in the software.

My business decision: never buy anything Creative again, and actively tell others about this and how Creative treats its customers.

FlameDuck

My business decision: never buy anything Creative again, and actively tell others about this and how Creative treats its customers.

That's the conclusion I arrived to when they pulled the same stunt with my SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 and Windows 2000.

Leadwerks

The way I am reading this, it appears that older Creative sound cards (the ones that cost $30, not $100) have been intentionally crippled on Windows Vista.

Apparently these are the guys who patented stencil shadows and tried to sue id Software.

ashmantle

@Leadwerks - the Audigy cards are indeed crippled on Vista, but the X-Fi drivers they have officially distributed contained the Audigy drivers, they were just disabled.
However, many features of the X-Fi which is sold as "Vista ready" have been disabled aswell. Stuff that works on XP such as Digital output was turned on again by David_K in his revision of the driver, so it's not the ability of Creative which broke it, rather a business decision.

AdrianT

heh nice, do creative create linux drivers? Wonder what there stance is on there. I never liked Creative, even if the hardware might be ok, their drivers have always been troublesome.

I use the onboard sound these days as I don't really know enough about soundcards to pick a good one from another manufacturer.

puki

This ties in with the Asus v Creative war:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Asus-Creative-sound,news-27825.html

dawlane

I use the onboard sound these days

Me too.
I find that the on-board sound chips are just as good or better than any thing that comes on a plugin card. The only reason I can see for a use for expansion-sound cards is if you have a recording studio.

GfK

The last soundcard I bought was an AWE64 Gold, ten years ago.

I just use onboard sound now.

dawlane: I chose to put a Creative Audigy 1 in my desktop machine because the sound quality output was a lot better than cheaper cards available at the time.

I have my PC hooked up to an not-too-expensive amp and some fairly expensive speakers (nothing one of those geeky audiophiles would consider brilliant, but you get the picture). On-board sound via 3.5mm jack was rubbish. Sound from the Audigy via 3.5mm jack brings a whole lot of clarity.

My copy of Hotel California by The Eagles mastered at 192Khz 24-bit sounds supremely nice. Most on-board audio interfaces either can't play 192KHz, or use very cheap DAC's which don't do the audio any justice.

The DAC's in Creative cards may not be the best available, but they are good enough for my ears.

I'm never going to buy another Creative card because they are damn overpriced and the advertised features are aimed at gamers and average users who need something with a few more interface options (midi, optical ins etc). EAX doesn't interest me. Low-latency, high quality audio interests me.

There are a number of competing cards available which tick all my boxes. Most are the same money as an 'equivalent' Creative card, but the quality of components is superior.

dynaman

#10

> I just use onboard sound now.

Same here, I can't remember the last time I bought a seperate sound card.

AdrianT

#11

Perhaps vinylpusher could recommend some good quality low latency cards for those of us that want to veto Creative but want better sound than integrated solutions.

I do mostly play games, but don't really care much for EAX 5 or anything. I just want decent low latency sound to my fairly decent quality stereo amp and speakers.

FlameDuck

#12

I'm partial to Turtle Beach, but my card is a bit old and I'm not sure they have Vista drivers either.

Nilium

#13

I've been using Onboard sound for a while now. Last sound card I had was a "Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value" (I hated that name). I honestly think onboard sounds better than that, but it shouldn't surprise me considering the Live! Value is quite old and onboard sound has had a great deal of time to improve. To most people, I don't expect there's a vast amount of difference in sound quality between onboard and a stupidly expensive Creative card these days.

xlsior

#14

Back in the DOS days, having a name-brand soundcard was a big deal if you wanted to be able to actually use it in a game. (Even the '100% soundblaster compatible' cards often weren't, and wouldn't work with certain games)

all of that went out the window once Windows abstracted the sound card from the application/games, and took care of things for you.

The last soundcard I bought was another cheap no-name, and the only reason I even did that was because I wanted the 6 audio ports (my onboard sound only had three ports, which meant that I couldn't use surround sound output and leave my microphone plugged in at the same time)

After that, I just made sure that whatever motherboard I bought had the 6-output onboard sound capability, and that's it.

Dreamora

#15

Well if you have hardware that was cut on Vista even thought it was advertised the other way round, just contact them with this posting and clearly point out that you they have the choice between doing their job and implementing again on Vista what you payed for and paying the original price back as the broke the contract and you would like to get back to the state as if the contract never existed. And make sure that you clearly point out that you will make sure that the steps to do so will afterwards be posted to the well known boards.

Creative can afford a lot but not losing another set of users, they already lost a fair amount.

Creative is an EU based company and as such, Advertisement is legally binding for them and you have the right to get full refund if you life within EU, if they break it.

xlsior

#16

Supposedly the main reason for this issue is that Creative only licensed certain 3rd technologies specifically for the XP platform -- so Vista comes out, and there were obligated to either re-license, or disable the functionality in question.

Apparently they chose for disabling, and that's now coming back to bite them.

ashmantle

#17

It's reached consumerist.com
http://consumerist.com/373901/creative-sparks-customer-revolt-when-it-tries-to-silence-third+party-programmer

and special site set up
http://boycottcreative.com/BoycottCreative.html

Cygnus

#18

I never liked Creative, even if the hardware might be ok, their drivers have always been troublesome.

I dislike Creative too, Their cards are of high latency (the ones i've tried at least.) and are generally only ever as good as an average third party card.

I had a talk about EAX recently, EAX5? yeah sure, but EAX2 which can be found in many more places than just the latest creative devices, sounds just as darn good. So what if the reverb is calculated in a less realistic way, it still sounds good anyway!

Now, I had a turtle beach and the sound quality was WONDERFUL however, the card also has high latency. It would run at 2ms, but the hardware itself would introduce more latency for its effects and other stuff.

My new system, an EVGA Nvidia 680i board, manages 1MS!!! Latency where my old system managed 10ms. That's ONBOARD sound, realtek.

Does a wonderful job!

Sadly the best card I ever owned, an Aureon fun 7.1, wore out a month or so ago, plain card, high quality, low latency, but no longer supported. The memory chips/A>D converter got dodgy and all we got was noise on one channel :-(

If you can find one of these cards Evak, and are using XP (I am not sure there are vista drivers...) I would reccomend it.

Turt

EdzUp[SD]

#19

I use a SBLive Value with Vista Ultimate :D

Cygnus

#20

And what's your latency/ASIO latency? :-P

Those cards were cool, Quite happy to see them working in Vista, although I am not sure they are "quick".

CS_TBL

#21

There was a time when soundcards made your sound, bad soundcard -> bad ROM samples -> bad midifiles. (before mp3 we were listening midi files and mod'ish files) These days, one needs a D/A connector, and some people may need an A/D connector, perhaps some people want a real digital output, but that's it then. The days a soundcard was like a consumer keyboard without keys, with the same technological status, have gone. As long as onboard solutions keep improving, the urge to have a separate soundcard decreases. This is the future of about any cheap/consumer soundcard. There may be a niche left for the more serious music/sound people, they may go for -say- a Terratec. But how long will this niche continue to rely on special soundcards when onboard solutions will eventually become as good?

As with every development: new developments will suck-up others. Supermarkets suck up the local grocery, email sucks up snailmail, wiki/internet sucks up traditional encyclopedia(-books), p2p sucks up traditional record industry models, digital cams suck up traditional cams (including printing costs of your film).

And so, all-in-one motherboards will eventually suck-up manufacturers of 'add-ons for bare mainboards'. At least for sound I think, dunno about videocards tho.