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Creative has in my opinion worked harder than most to put me off their hardware. Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by l

Creative has in my opinion worked harder than most to put me off their hardware. Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile. It felt like they’ve been coasting from their good reputation in 90’s for a long time now even though they don’t deserve it any more. My friend in late 90’s got a Sound Blaster live or something. In the early 2000’s you could download driver updates off Creative’s website for their stuff, but if you lost the original driver CD you, you had to find drivers elsewhere. There was a story of how some guy patched their binary driver to fix a long outstanding bug and at the same time discovered that it was trivial to upgrade the sound card by tweaking the driver and of course Creative got all hostile. My brother had their WoW headphones and it had a bug where the mic would get progressively softer the longer he was using Ventrillo or Skype and he would have to periodically jump off and back onto the call. Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves. When Vista deprecated hardware accelerated audio in Windows and Creative labs moaned about it, I had zero sympathy.

fodkodrasz 1y ago
> Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves. I assume you made a typo and were thinking about mid 00s, as my memory tells me that motherboard audio was really rare thing in mid 90s. It started to become common after Intel's AC97 standard. (I'd call that more late 90s... That is late 90s, early 00s possibly by the time it started to spread.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  Soundblaster 16 was launched in 1992 and was the de-facto standard for several years, so I'd say it's a typo
- postexitus 1y ago
  I built 2 pc's with generic motherboard audio in 97 and 99; while this is anecdotal, the option was definitely there late 90's.
  - martijnvds 1y ago
    Motherboard audio started to become more common with the AC'97 spec/standard. So that makes sense.
  - mxfh 1y ago
    late 90s is a whole different thing than mid 90s. The 97 in AC'97 is there for a reason. Would still say that Audigy 2001 front panel was peak consumer audio experience. Good access for headphone out and ASIO support, so for anyone wnating to connect you a midi keyboard for first excursion into digital music creation everything was there for a reasonable price point. Even firewire for your DV imports. A digital media entry point like no others existed at the time at that price point.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  I agree that mid-90s is a bit early but I would say mid 00's is too late. I'm pretty sure it's a rapid change almost immediately after AC97. In 1998 it's cool if your new PC has built in CD quality audio. In 2000 that's a basic feature like colour graphics, if your PC doesn't then it sucks.
  - da_chicken 1y ago
    From my memory, AC97 was rough early on. It seemed to be consistently plagued with crosstalk and other interference issues as well as driver issues. By the time WinXP dropped these issues were mostly sorted out, though.
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      I don't remember too much interference, but then I've never had excellent hearing. Driver issues were definitely a thing but I think that same period around 2000 is when games are shifting from "(Most games work in DOS but) Some games need Windows" to "Some games still need DOS". AC97 was not great for DOS
      - tialaramex 1y ago
        Looks like my memory is wrong, all of the DOS games I was thinking of "from this era" are late 90s. Carmageddon for example was 1997. Quake 2 was never officially a DOS game. Nothing I bought new in 2000 was primarily or only a DOS game.
- jonathanlydall 1y ago
  Yes, I meant mid 00's, thank you.
PunchyHamster 1y ago
Well, it's only way they could stay afloat. The moment average 16 bit DAC become cheap and games stopped using builtin synths/MIDI it was over, CPUs were fast enough that offloading audio was not a big deal any more and anyone could make good enough one. EAX was fun gimmick but exclusivity probably hurt the idea in the end
FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
Turtle Beach cards were my go to back in the day...
luckys 1y ago
I still remember the immersive positional audio from using a Soundblaster while playing Thief The Dark Project in the 90's. Nothing short of amazing! Kudos to the Looking Glass Studios for taking advantage of the technology to its full potential
- Match451 1y ago
  Setting up the audio propagation in the Thief level editor is super tedious but it’s hard to argue with the results. You draw “Room brushes” (basically boxes) to encompass space and sound will propagate across where they intersect with each other. An Environmental audio setting is applied to a room brush and will be applied to all the audio heard by the player when inside the room brush.
  - wishinghand 1y ago
    Any docs or talks about this somewhere?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
junga 1y ago
> Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile. If I remember correctly it was a SB Live's drivers that kept on crashing playing Quake 3 on my dual Celeron 533 MHz setup (Abit BP6). Had some mails going back and forth with the Creative support about this specific multi CPU setup and they rejected fixing their drivers because it totally was a niche back then. 18 year old me swore to never buy Creative again and I did so. Today I agree with the support's response but it quite upset me back then.
hinkley 1y ago
I had a coworker who was very loud about how most of the perceived instability of Windows was actually kernel panics caused be Creative’s godawful windows drivers. My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.

fodkodrasz 1y ago

> Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves. I assume you made a typo and were thinking about mid 00s, as my memory tells me that motherboard audio was really rare thing in mid 90s. It started to become common after Intel's AC97 standard. (I'd call that more late 90s... That is late 90s, early 00s possibly by the time it started to spread.

rickdeckard 1y ago
Soundblaster 16 was launched in 1992 and was the de-facto standard for several years, so I'd say it's a typo
postexitus 1y ago
I built 2 pc's with generic motherboard audio in 97 and 99; while this is anecdotal, the option was definitely there late 90's.
- martijnvds 1y ago
  Motherboard audio started to become more common with the AC'97 spec/standard. So that makes sense.
- mxfh 1y ago
  late 90s is a whole different thing than mid 90s. The 97 in AC'97 is there for a reason. Would still say that Audigy 2001 front panel was peak consumer audio experience. Good access for headphone out and ASIO support, so for anyone wnating to connect you a midi keyboard for first excursion into digital music creation everything was there for a reasonable price point. Even firewire for your DV imports. A digital media entry point like no others existed at the time at that price point.
tialaramex 1y ago
I agree that mid-90s is a bit early but I would say mid 00's is too late. I'm pretty sure it's a rapid change almost immediately after AC97. In 1998 it's cool if your new PC has built in CD quality audio. In 2000 that's a basic feature like colour graphics, if your PC doesn't then it sucks.
- da_chicken 1y ago
  From my memory, AC97 was rough early on. It seemed to be consistently plagued with crosstalk and other interference issues as well as driver issues. By the time WinXP dropped these issues were mostly sorted out, though.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    I don't remember too much interference, but then I've never had excellent hearing. Driver issues were definitely a thing but I think that same period around 2000 is when games are shifting from "(Most games work in DOS but) Some games need Windows" to "Some games still need DOS". AC97 was not great for DOS
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      Looks like my memory is wrong, all of the DOS games I was thinking of "from this era" are late 90s. Carmageddon for example was 1997. Quake 2 was never officially a DOS game. Nothing I bought new in 2000 was primarily or only a DOS game.
jonathanlydall 1y ago
Yes, I meant mid 00's, thank you.

PunchyHamster 1y ago

Well, it's only way they could stay afloat. The moment average 16 bit DAC become cheap and games stopped using builtin synths/MIDI it was over, CPUs were fast enough that offloading audio was not a big deal any more and anyone could make good enough one. EAX was fun gimmick but exclusivity probably hurt the idea in the end

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago

Turtle Beach cards were my go to back in the day...

luckys 1y ago

I still remember the immersive positional audio from using a Soundblaster while playing Thief The Dark Project in the 90's. Nothing short of amazing! Kudos to the Looking Glass Studios for taking advantage of the technology to its full potential

Match451 1y ago
Setting up the audio propagation in the Thief level editor is super tedious but it’s hard to argue with the results. You draw “Room brushes” (basically boxes) to encompass space and sound will propagate across where they intersect with each other. An Environmental audio setting is applied to a room brush and will be applied to all the audio heard by the player when inside the room brush.
- wishinghand 1y ago
  Any docs or talks about this somewhere?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

junga 1y ago

> Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile. If I remember correctly it was a SB Live's drivers that kept on crashing playing Quake 3 on my dual Celeron 533 MHz setup (Abit BP6). Had some mails going back and forth with the Creative support about this specific multi CPU setup and they rejected fixing their drivers because it totally was a niche back then. 18 year old me swore to never buy Creative again and I did so. Today I agree with the support's response but it quite upset me back then.

hinkley 1y ago

I had a coworker who was very loud about how most of the perceived instability of Windows was actually kernel panics caused be Creative’s godawful windows drivers. My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.