What's wrong with CREATIVE?

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Brian48

Originally posted by: ViRGE
The short list:

1) They (ab)used legal manoeuvres based on false claims to drive Aureal(A3D) out of business at the turn of the century, knowing that Aureal didn't have the cash reserves to fight a protracted legal battle and continue to design sound technology. They then turned around and bought out Aureal's superior tech.

This is absolute bullsh*t perpetuated by all anti-Creative twits who completely ignore the facts of Aureal's demise.

With all due respect, look at the sites reporting it and the financial info. Aureal's legal costs ran them dry, all incurred fighting CL on a frivilous suit that Aureal won. Addtionally, see the notes of the trial and what has happened after it, it is very obvious what Creative's intentions were.

1b) They also bought out Sensaura's tech(which the nForce APU was based on). Both of these actions are anti-competitive.

Sensaura put itself up for sale. The price was dirtcheap (only 6+ million). Nobody else picked it (including nVidia), so Creative went a head and plunked down the bucks. So what? It's called BUSINESS, ever hear of that? It was a smart move that anyone here with a lick of sense would have done as well.

I never said that it wasn't a same business decision, only that it's anti-competitive. Creative didn't need the technology for their own stuff, it was a pure IP pickup. Frankly this should have been investigated by the FTC.

2) They patented the Carmack's Reverse technique for real-time lighting(created by id's John Carmack for the D3 engine), then used that patent to force id to integrate EAX technology in to the D3 engine(D3 had a custom sound engine), or else face a lawsuit over the patent.

First of all, Carmack cannot claim ownership or credit for creating the technique. He may have come up with the most perfect implementation of it, but he certainly didn't create it.

Second of all, IdSoftware went to Creative first and initiated the negotiation. Creative didn't even know about it let a lone "force" them to integrate EAX. It was a deal cut to save IdSoftware of any licensing fees and at the same give Creative a little extra marketing strength. Both sides made out as well as the end user. Don't like EAX? Guess what, you DON'T have to use it.

And third, the only idiots who ever even mentioned a lawsuit was same fore mention anti-Creative twits. Creative never threatened IdSoftware. IdSoftware stated that if it ever even got that far, they would have simply implemented an alternate option that would have worked just as well, albeit with a performance hit.

Carmack independantly created it, though NV's Sim Dietrich did realize it first. As for the rest, I'll point you to The Tech Report, they outline what Creative did, and why id settled with CL rather than pick the slower method, as to not hurt their own users. I'd also encourage you to take a look at what Creative settled for: EAX in the Doom 3 engine, no doubt in order to make themselves relivant in the face of id's pure software audio renderer.

3) They have stayed stagnant in the sound card market for years now, dragging on the same architecture since 1997(where the Live was released, even the current Audigy 4 is derived from the Live). Only now, 8 years later are they releasing a new sound card(the X-fi), and frankly we don't have enough info to make sure if it's not another rehash of some sort.

The WHOLE PC audio industry has stagnated. True, innovation has not been great, but to compare a SBLive to a Audidy 4 is just idiotic.

The A4 is based on an EMU10K design, it is inheriantly an arcitectual ancestor of the original EMU10K from the Live.

3b) They artificially end support of older sound cards in spite of the fact that they are the same in order to apparently drive the sale of new cards. Creative has stopped releasing drivers for the A1 even though it's exactly like the A2/A2ZS/A4, down to the point where the A2 drivers install and work just fine on the A1(Creative couldn't even be bothered to change the device ID).

This is perhaps the only area where I agree. There's no obligation for any manufacturer to continue support for legacy product, but in this case, I don't think it would be too difficult for at least compatibility updates if the software architect is not too difficult to adapt.

I'm glad we can agree on something.

 

[Matt2]

Originally posted by: sniperruff

Originally posted by: Matt2

Originally posted by: sniperruff
same thing as apple, dell and bestbuy.

I thought they didn't suck??

they don't at all. some people just like to hate on big companies.

oh add microsoft to that list.

Let's be serious. Those could be the 4 worst companies on the planet. Esp. now that Enron is gone.

 

[concernedsophist]

Virge, is it fair to complain about the audigy 4 being derived from the live? After all, couldn't we say that all current pc cpus are derived from the origional x86? Ancestry does not necessarily mean that current hardware is not better.

 

[Matt2]

Originally posted by: concernedsophist
Virge, is it fair to complain about the audigy 4 being derived from the live? After all, couldn't we say that all current pc cpus are derived from the origional x86? Ancestry does not necessarily mean that current hardware is not better.

GeForce vs. GeForce6

'Nuff said.

The fact remains that the difference between Audigy1 vs. Audigy4 is pathetic and you're paying full price for an Audigy4

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Matt2

Originally posted by: concernedsophist
Virge, is it fair to complain about the audigy 4 being derived from the live? After all, couldn't we say that all current pc cpus are derived from the origional x86? Ancestry does not necessarily mean that current hardware is not better.

GeForce vs. GeForce6

'Nuff said.

The fact remains that the difference between Audigy1 vs. Audigy4 is pathetic and you're paying full price for an Audigy4

More like GeForce 3 vs. GeForce 4.

 

[concernedsophist]

I agree that they are charging an arm and a leg for the relative "improvment" of the audigy 4. I would have to sell a kidney to afford that thing.

 

[JBDan]

Originally posted by: Brian48

Originally posted by: JBDan
I've had bad luck with their cards and their drivers. Dont hate them at all... just will not buy one again. So tell me, what is an equal alternative which has excellent fidelity and good 5.1 spdif out. Is Chaintech's card an alternative. Anyone with experience w/ a viable alternative plz respond. Just a couple will be fine as I dont want to hijack this thread.

I've got the Chaintech. A great music card, but doesn't compare to the Audigy line when it comes to gaming. I've used almost every consumer level sound card on the market. The best alternative I've ever come across that also offered a decent balance between gaming and music was/is the Herc Fortissimo II/III. Almost as good for music as the Chaintech AV-710 and almost as good for gaming as the Audigy. Unfortunately, Herc doesn't produce this card any more as Cirrus Logic has stopped production on the chipset. I still have mine in a backup and will continue to use it so long as the drivers remain compatible.

TYVM Brian

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: concernedsophist
Virge, is it fair to complain about the audigy 4 being derived from the live? After all, couldn't we say that all current pc cpus are derived from the origional x86? Ancestry does not necessarily mean that current hardware is not better.

Actually, the P4 has almost nothing in common with the 8086 other than the fact that it supports the same instructions; all the underlying technology is different. In the case of the Audigy, the core chip is still a derivation of the EMU10K1 from the Live, I'd compare it to the Northwood P4 -> Prescott P4.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Not mentioned in ViRGE otherwise excellent list:

Creative still isn't offering Dolby encoding of game audio years after nforce2.

They're like fellow monopolist Microsoft, once they crushed their enemies and heard the lamentation of the women, they sat on their throne and got fat and lazy.

Just like MS abandoned real development of Internet Explorer for years, Creative just tossed out a series of "refinements" to the SB Live instead of adding useful upgrades like Dolby encoding that required real effort and/or paying licensing fees.

 

[MDE]

I'm sure it's been mentioned already but their software is bloated beyond belief. Why do I need 15 control panels to adjust my sound card?

 

[concernedsophist]

Actually, the P4 has almost nothing in common with the 8086 other than the fact that it supports the same instructions

OK, point taken. So to clarify, you are basically saying that the difference in technology and performance between the current audigys and live does not justify the price difference, or the (non)development time.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: concernedsophist

Actually, the P4 has almost nothing in common with the 8086 other than the fact that it supports the same instructions

OK, point taken. So to clarify, you are basically saying that the difference in technology and proformance between the current audigys and live does not justify the price difference, or the (non)development time.

Compare the features of a Live with an Audigy 2 ZS, supposedly "3 generations" newer. Pretty much the same except for newer drivers.

Compare an nvidia 5900 with a 7800, more than a fourfold improvement in performance.

Creative has been stagnant for years, not doing much more than changing the model name and pretending it is a new card.

 

[Brian48]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
With all due respect, look at the sites reporting it and the financial info. Aureal's legal costs ran them dry, all incurred fighting CL on a frivilous suit that Aureal won. Addtionally, see the notes of the trial and what has happened after it, it is very obvious what Creative's intentions were.

I HAVE looked at the financials and all the articles.

There's only one person who "marketed" the notion that it was completely Creative's fault for Aureal's failure, Pres/CEO Kip Kokinakis. You know. The guy who got FIRED. What would you have expected for him to say, "Oh yeah, I completely screwed it up and drove the company into the ground"?

Although the on-going lawsuit with Creative certainly didn't help, it was NOT the reason why Aureal went out of business.

In 1999, the year of the lawsuit, Aureal had a net loss of $26.9 million, of which $6.4 was attributed to legal expenses dealing with Creative and other normal operations. Excluding the expenses from the lawsuit, this is still a massive $20.5 million net loss, which in turn was even WORSE than the $18.5 million they lost for FY 1998. For FY 2000, Aureal was completely clear of the lawsuit (they had won, remember?), but reported sales were STILL down from previous quarters. The company was on the fast track for yet another year of financial losses, only this time, there was no Creative lawsuit to pin the blame on.

As far as draining cash reserves, the company never really had any reserves to drain. They were running essentially on credit from their investors. The company TANKED because their creditors had had enough of supporting a company that was a consistent LOSER in terms of revenue and PULLED OUT. The BOTTOMLINE - Aureal just didn't SELL ENOUGH sound cards to dig themselves out of the hole that they were in.

Even if you ignore the glaring fact of the lack of cash flow, let's talk about the several bonehead business mistakes that they made to help bring themselves down.

1. They never built upon their relationship with their major brick & mortar distributors (ie. CircuitCity, BestBuy, CompUSA, etc..). e-Commerce was a great buzz word back in the late nineties, but the fact remains, it was a bust.

2. Similiar to 3dfx, they adopted an idea of vertical integration and invested A LOT of capital in producing their own sound cards when they should have been out wooing more 3rd party vendors.

3. Related to item#2, this put Aureal in direct competition with their two largest vendors, Diamond (who had problems of their own) and Turtle Beach (now Voyetra). Not exactly a smart thing to do when you have an issue with #1 (absolute stupidity). In fact, Kokinakis even accused some of their vendors of selling "crappy" A3D cards that give the company a bad name. A real great way to gain support here.

4. The Aureal was a GAMING card and it was marketed heavily as such. Unfortunately, the gaming community only makes up a very small segment of the overall PC market, which was even smaller back then. Creative, to their credit, marketed the SBLive to a very wide range of users. Anyway, this led to #5.

5. They spent WAY too much time going after the direct, retail customer when they should have been pursuing more OEM contracts. And when they did hook up with OEMs, they wasted more time and resources on lame projects like 3dfx's Brazo motherboard which never even saw the light of day.

6. Lack of gaming support for A3D 2.0. To this day, I can't think of 5 major games that supported A3D 2.0. A3D 2.0 (which was proprietary) was NOT adopted by many games no matter how superior it was over EAX 1.0. Quake3 doesn't count since it was so buggy, Carmack took it out in a later patch.

Don't get me wrong, I liked Aureal back in the day. They produced a great, gaming card, but it was not without it's problems. Drivers were just as buggy as Creative's, CPU overhead was VERY heavy, and It's OK to have a proprietary API if you're the dominate player in the field, but when you're not, it's the kiss of death. FYI, in case anyone was wondering, I was a MX300 owner. Aureal could have been a great thing, but they blew it. I'm more angry at them than Creative.

 

[SrGuapo]

The only creative producat I own is a Zen micro... Great player, but the software is sh1t. I ended up not installing any of the 500MB (driver, control panel, player), just changing to the "plays for sure" firmware and using WMP10. Also, my first two players both had to be RMAd. The first one's USB port was DOA. The second died after a week. I had the third for almost a month and it seems to be running fine...

 

[Varun]

There has been a lot of crap back and forth about the demise of Aureal, however in the end Creative did buy Aureal.

The reason I hate Creative is because they purchased A3D and put it in the trash.

If anyone here played one of the few games out with 4 speaker A3D then they know why I hate Creative. A3D was simply amazing positional sound. EAX is absolutely garbage compared to it.

Is it really a good buisness decision to purchase IP just to get rid of it?

Creative's stranglehold on the sound card market has hurt consumers. They feel no need to inovate since they are the only players out there.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Brian48

I'm not going to argue that Aureal was a company that wasn't in a good position regardless of their suit with Creative, but I beg to differ on the impact of things. First and foremost, their legal problems most certainly were not over, Creative went for an appeal which of course would generate continuous legal costs. Additionally, when they did acquire Aureal, they had this little snippet to say:

"We're pleased that the court has entered the order approving the sale to Creative," said Craig McHugh, president of Creative Labs, Inc. "Since Creative would not be able to recover significant damages given Aureal's bankruptcy, there was no upside in continuing this protracted litigation. As a result, we believe that this outcome is the best we could have expected.

With that in mind, I submit that regardless of Aureal's financial condition, Creative was attempting to use the legal system as a means to worsen it in an anti-competitive fashion, and as such falls under the list of despicable things they have done.

 

[jpeyton]

Monopolies stifle innovation. That is why we have about 10 derivatives of the Audigy2 line, and we have to settle for Creative's crappy positional audio instead of something more powerful.

Shame on nVidia for killing off SoundStorm; that had the potential to do some damage to Creative had they further developed it.

I see no reason why a $150 XBox can encode Dolby Digital 5.1 audio on the fly, which can be output via a standard optical cable to any decoder we choose, yet Creative's entire line of sound cards can only decode DD5.1 audio. That is why SoundStorm was such a great idea. If it caught on, we could finally move our PC speakers from the stone-age of analog mini-jacks to a single digital bitstream via a optical or SPDIF cable.

 

[BFG10K]

Compare the features of a Live with an Audigy 2 ZS, supposedly "3 generations" newer. Pretty much the same except for newer drivers.

That's just plain wrong. A quick snippet from Creative's website:

The design of Audigy was a major improvement over the Live! with a 2x increase in the dedicated effects processing unit, major optimization of the overall effects processing architecture and added 24-bit ADVANCED HD? capabilities. The 2x increase in the dedicated effects and tank processing unit and the major optimization in the architecture yielded a 4x improvement in overall effects processing capabilities without a huge increase in required MIPs processing. These changes provided the ability to run 4 simultaneous effects (3 high quality reverbs and 1 other high quality effect) that delivered the EAX ADVANCED HD 4.0 standard versus just 1 effect on the Live! (1 high quality reverb) that delivered the EAX 2.0 standard. The other addition of the 24-bit ADVANCED HD engine allowed 24-bit playback and recording versus 16-bit with the Live!.

Just because your MP3s don't magically sound better it doesn't mean the cards haven't changed.

 

[svi]

The Live! and Audigy 2 are not effectively the same. They are similar, but still different cards. The Live! and Audigy 1 are effectively the same, the Audigy 2 has an updated core (EMU10K2 vs. EMU10K1). All of them use different DACs, which is why there is an actual SQ difference between the Live! and Audigy 2. The core design has not changed much, but the hardware differences are there.

BFG10K, first, what in the world made you think that you could cite text on Creative's website as some kind of evidence? It's a corporate website, anything on there has gone through marketing. Creative's site is also one of the most BS-filled around, ranking up there with Apple's. Just look at the X-Fi page to see what I mean. Second, the Audigy 2 WILL "magically" make mp3s sound better. It has much better DACs than the Live!, so audio is less degraded during the transition to analog.

 

[fr]

The drivers are a mess.

 

[mettleh3d]

You can't hate Creative for their sound cards coz...they are the only manufacturer in existence that still make sound cards.
Technically the only company that MATTERS.

 

[Brian48]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: Brian48

I'm not going to argue that Aureal was a company that wasn't in a good position regardless of their suit with Creative, but I beg to differ on the impact of things. First and foremost, their legal problems most certainly were not over, Creative went for an appeal which of course would generate continuous legal costs. Additionally, when they did acquire Aureal, they had this little snippet to say:

"We're pleased that the court has entered the order approving the sale to Creative," said Craig McHugh, president of Creative Labs, Inc. "Since Creative would not be able to recover significant damages given Aureal's bankruptcy, there was no upside in continuing this protracted litigation. As a result, we believe that this outcome is the best we could have expected.

Buying Aureal after the fact is a separate issue altogether that has nothing to do with the company going out of business in the first place. They simply made the highest bid.

With that in mind, I submit that regardless of Aureal's financial condition, Creative was attempting to use the legal system as a means to worsen it in an anti-competitive fashion, and as such falls under the list of despicable things they have done.

Being that as it may, that was STILL not the reason why the company TANKed. Re-read the financials, the disclosures, investor reports, etc.. The company would have folded with or without Creative. Their investors were not worried about the litegations. They cared about making a profit and clearly, this company didn't know how to do that.

 

[svi]

You can't hate Creative for their sound cards coz...they are the only manufacturer in existence that still make sound cards.

Uhh.. actually, there are still several other manufacturers that make sound cards. Most of their products are aimed at the desktop recording market, but they're still sound cards. There are also tons of cheapish VIA Envy24 cards out there, like the popular Chaintech AV-710.

 

[PerfeK]

They don't make great sound cards. They just pressure those in the game industry to include "Creative exclusive features" like EAX. Chaintech has a much better DAC.

 

[Continuity27]

It's not really about how good or bad Creative's cards are right now. It's about how much better cards COULD be if Creative weren't a monopoly.

For all we know, we could be using sound cards 20 times as good right now, for half the price. But because Creative has no incentive to innovate, because they are a monopoly, progress comes very slowly in this market.

We just don't know the possibilities. It would be exactly like if AMD were never competitive, and Intel were still making Pentium 2s today. We would be sitting here going "Yeah but the Pentium 2 ZS Platinum is leaps and bounds better than the Pentium 2 Live! and for only $300 more!" In the grand scheme of things, sound cards we could be using right now may fit this fake comparison.