Creative Labs not gaining any fans

Posted by Thomas Gribble in March 30th, 2008

Though advances by competitors have been made over the past couple of years, consumers looking for an alternative to enthusiast-grade sound cards from Creative Labs have had a pretty tough time. This search reached a fevered pitch when Microsoft released Windows Vista and Creative’s driver suite for the operating system was deemed universally as utter crap. There have been two main reverberations to these shortcomings by Creative: Increased volume and quality of competing products, and the appearance of hacked software to increase compatibility with the new operating system.

On the hardware end, ASUS in particular has been producing some strong competitors to Creative’s X-Fi SoundBlaster audio hardware with their Xonar line. The latest addition to ASUS’ audio products, the Xonar DX 5.0 offers a rich feature set and support for all of the latest sound technologies for just $89, extremely competitive with Creative products of similar capabilities (X-Fi XtremeGamer). About one week after this product was launched, Creative’s VP of Corporate Communications Phil O’Shaughnessy has issued a statement saying that ASUS’ claimed support of EAX 5.0, 4.0, and 3.0 was done through emulation and was not actually supported through hardware. ASUS’ response to this statement was to issue an update to their DirectSound 3D GX engine. With this update, ASUS claims that it supports the same capabilities as Creative’s ALchemy solution without the hassles of manual installation and non-free driver upgrades. In the wake of these events, it would seem that Creative’s statement was the result of the impending threat of the Xonar DX 5.0 to the High-Fidelity desktop sound market.

On the software end, Creative has upset a LOT of their customers by “ousting” the presence and efforts of a long-time member of the Creative forums, Daniel_K. After the hoopla generated by the launch of Windows Vista, Daniel_K began assisting owners of Creative sound cards “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”, according to a post by the same Phil O’Shaughnessy in the Creative forums. The problem Creative had with this was not that the packages were being released, but that Daniel_K was attempting to elicit donations to support his work modifying the drivers.

Obviously this got a lot of people pretty pissed off, and even prompted one Creative customer to snap his X-Fi in two. There are pages upon pages of forum threads from customers who are up in arms over this statement, as well as an online petition. The attention has garnered at least a tiny bit of retraction by Creative, who will be reinstating the “Audigy Support Pack” thread so that whole operation can continue.

Although we see how Creative has a very valid reason to halt Daniel_K’s activities, it is disturbing to note that the company has been seemingly unable to provide legitimate software support for their products to the point where an individual is inspired to do their own work for them. What do you guys think?

Source: DailyTech, X-bit Labs

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