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Loading ...Creative Blabs
khenry
Just how badly can one big company screw up? We all know that the relationship between IP, Copyright or patent holders and the community that mods them can be fraught with legal action when the Goliath in question feels threatened. As we know, Creative just about got away with the token charge for Audigy 2 support in Vista due to its cheap price (a fiver), compared to a more Microsoft-style £20 which it demanded for Live! Drivers on CD for Windows XP seven years ago.
Who knows what possessed the company to openly threaten one of its driver modders at the end of last week? Just follow the thread to see the reaction. The company was already hit by the rise of the on-board sound chip which has enjoyed a rise in quality in the past few years. This has led many builders to decide to redress any potential peformance hit to FPS by overclocking instead, rather than spend out even £20-30 on a separate soundcard. Since Creative is the Intel of the soundcard market, it will be seen as an unfair abuse of power even if the company is legally justified.
Aside from Creative’s Godfather-style reaction to Daniel_K, the real problem is, soundcards tend to last nearly forever and so it’s only through software hinderances that you can truly discontinue them - not even a change of bus has really forced a mass uptake of the X-Fi range. I have Live! cards which have survived surges and lightning strikes and are still going strong. It doesn’t help Creative that musicians laugh at SB cards, while consumers at the other end are replacing less often. My current Audigy 2 was sent to me in the ordinary post using a jiffy bag and no antistatic packaging, then fell onto my mat from the letterbox. After that beating, I plugged it into not one but three motherboards and carried on using it in the last four years, where it runs my best CD player very close for music playback quality.
If I knew that my next motherboard wouldn’t contain multichannel integrated sound I would probably have ripped out my seemingly indestructible Audigy 2 and used it in the new board’s token PCI port. Personally, I’m keeping my old machine which passed its third birthday at Easter, together as a single unit. Looking at the way this company has treated someone whose modded drivers provided a service at the users’ own risk, it’s one case where I’ll be happy to save money and not bother with a Creative card for the forseeable future.
toally agree mate. I think they are making everyone fork out for new hardware. I too have an Audigy 2, I’ve had it for at least 4 years and it does everything I want it to. I tried to get it to run on vista last week and had a hell of a time even with the Alchemy drivers. Sound was aweful and functionality greatly reduced. I didn’t get chance to try Daniel_K’s drivers as I ditched Vista for various other reasons and went back to XP! So much for Vista SP! sorting everything out, did it bo**ox! I’ll be dual booting now as the new OS will probably come on song at some point just like XP did. But Creative certainly aren’t helping things. They were the main reason I haven’t touched Vista until now.
Good spot Ken - Ben is going to see what Creative has to say…
Damn Creative, I shalt be buying another creative card in the future. I like my Audigy card and when it does, onboard chips will have to do.
i thought microsoft came out with the drivers for audigy/live? i know at one point mine wasn’t working smooth then one day i just removed the driver and it auto connects to auto-update and updated with its relevant drivers.
now its working fine.