Let me show you something:
These are the boxes of all the sound cards I’ve owned so far. Now what do you think I would answer if you asked me to recommend a sound card?
Anything not from Creative Labs would be my answer.
The reasons for that?
Well, let’s start by taking a look at some of this week’s topics in Creative Labs’ Vista forum:
- Thanks for everything folks, its time for me to go…
- Don’t put up with it, ask for a refund.
- How hard is it to code audio drivers? (Vista)
- Alternative Vista Sound Cards to the XFI
- Creative fails with Vista drivers.
- Why cant Creative provide….
- X-Fi on Vista is a joke, goodbye Creative!!!
- Packing my bags
So, what has happened?
Windows Vista features a completely rewritten audio kernel that provides better accuracy and improves sound quality, but ultimately cripples DirectSound 3D (more info) by seeing the sound card as a lightweight signal converter, making EAX and advanced hardware 3D audio nearly impossible.
You can’t blame Creative Labs for that. They are in fact providing hardware support by means of OpenAL (an alternative non-Microsoft audio library) and they’re working on a wrapper named ALchemy that redirects DirectSound to OpenAL, thereby reenabling EAX for Windows Vista games.
The problem with Creative Labs, plain and simple, is their drivers. All I’m asking for are drivers that:
- do not cause my ears to ring from the bad mixing quality
- do not produce crazy chirps and scratches
- do not make my Vista OS randomly BSOD twice a day
In more than one year of development time, Creative Labs has not managed to produce a proper Windows Vista driver for any of the sound cards. What little development happens seems to be directed towards the X-Fi series, Audigy owners are left out in the cold.
A statement made by a Creative Labs employee (see here) even suggests that their drivers were faulty all the time and Windows Vista’s increased demands merely exposed bugs that didn’t surface in Windows XP.
The latest driver available for my Audigy 2 has been released in March 2007. Creative Labs actually is in possession of slightly newer and better drivers, but does not release them, not even as beta drivers. One brave user has discovered the newer Audigy drivers hidden within the X-Fi drivers. He is providing them for download in his blog “No More Goat Soup“.
And that’s my rant about Creative Labs…
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