I have one old PCI SB Live value and a new SB live 24 bit external for laptop, what are the Pros & Cons about Creative products?

Their old cards (Live, some of the Audigys) had poor quality resamplers which caused quality issues. The new cards are better. They've never been the top choice for quality, but they do have a lot of features for 3D gaming (mostly because they sued various companies to ensure that they were the only game in town).

Besides of practical reasons, there are many "political" cons about creative. The manufacturer has made itself known for lying and cheating their customers, bad support and spreading misinformation. Or more simple: creative labs is not trustworthy.

- Lyx

Cons: Bad driver support - buggy drivers, slow to release new ones, sometimes they make you install off the original CD and only release patches for some reason. Bloated software suites. Those are my main complaints.

Pros: Hardware acceleration for games, best support for game features (EAX is theirs, after all).

Cons: Tends to lie about hardware capabilites, Low to Mid-grade hardware even when claiming it's "Hi-Grade!!!!111", have a habit of generally pissing off their customers.

Pros: Excellent Linux support through the ALSA drivers.

I own a SB Live! 5.1 OEM (eMicro). Sure, it's not the best card out there, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else, it just plain works.

Oh you're talking about the fancy CPU-like you get with ?
In euros, the cost difference between a Fortissimo IV and a X-Fi ExtremeMusic ? 65€. That's also :

• the cost of two Semprons 2800+
• the difference between a Athlon 64 3800+ and a Core2Duo E6300

The truth is if you put that money in your CPU instead, the power benefit will be a bit beyond comparison :-P , and that's generic power, not only dedicated to audio !

About EAX this is just another proprietary closed crap Creative doesn't license to other manufacturers while it's just an API, and spreaded it through the game editors- not developpers. IMHO for that reason it should not be considered ( EAX is also closely related to Creative DSP, it's not at all a generic and smart norm ) Some developpers such as iD Software made their own custom-built 3D sound engine, some other ones buy QSound, OpenAL will likely someday fit up itself with standardized extensions, Free Software grows up every day, the future may not be EAX. Have you seen how fast OpenAL conquered the industry whereas DirectSound 3D is much more open than EAX ? In a couple of years EAX may be just a bad souvenir replaced by a totally free alternative, who knows ?

EAX may be "propietary closed crap", and it may not be the future of audio, but right now you can't deny that probably 80% of games have some sort of "enable EAX" option in their audio settings.

Well the OSS + ALSA developers had to pay Creative money to get the basic hardware specs so they can write the drivers.

Also Creative are lying untrust-worthy morons.

Links (Non-audio related but this shows that Creative are abusing the crappy US Patent system):

http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/07/28/1529222.shtml

I prefer my M-Audio cards (Audiophile 2496, Revolution 5.1) for critical listening, but I bought a Creative Audigy 4 recently to obtain full, native DVD-Audio playback capabilities.

Pros: Creative now has Xmod.
Cons: I'm not sure about Creative Xmod's claim.

Yes, you are abosolutely right. Creative supports their own proprietary extension of OpenAL (forcefully) and many other soundcards can utilize OpenAL if it's installed seperatly like with the Revo 5.1. It's being used by computer game developers, like ID Software due to the fact that John Carmack was sued over small piece of code, which violated one of Creatives patents (ironically). One of the newer AL extensions supports lossy files like Ogg Vorbis too. It should be left up to the software library in terms of the doppler calculations, reverberations, etc. EAX as you stated is just an extension to DirectSound3D. They dominate the consumer electronics market and they just love to monopolize it.

newer creativecards has sucky linuxsupport afaik

Pros: Soundblaster PCI 128

Cons: Read this article on Betanews about the Xmod.

And I...

Bullshit! Ooo look at Creative, they can add 0's to the end of audio data and apply a software EQ. We should give them a f***ing Nobel Peace Prize or a cookie or somethin

LOL. Although I finally figured that using bit-matched playback works with foobar, i'm just happy

Is it a joke, or are you talking seriously?

"The X-Fi Crystalizer upconverts MP3 music by analysing and identifying which parts of the audio stream have been truncated or damaged during compression. It intelligently and selectively restores the highs and lows of instruments such as the snare drums, basses, cymbals crashes and guitar plucking that are damaged during the compression of MP3s."
[ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/95146/creative...ancing-kit.html ]

But, in fairness, I suspect this DSP may enhance the experience with low-fi equipment in distraction-full settings like midtown traffic.

Do you have any proof of this? As far as I know, the original EMU10k1 drivers (OSS) were released by creative themselves.
The X-Fi family is not fully functional yet, but the Live! and Audigy familty are very well supported by ALSA drivers.

The X-Fi series are the first Creative soundcards i can honestly recommend. They have nice features, good audio quality and the best EAX sound and support. The prices are high though. Linux support will come in Q2/2007.

I don't think he was joking. Some PCI 128 weren't any bad at all (but there are several variation of it under the same brand name, IIRC). I can make and post some RMAA tests, if you wish, as I still have one in my system right now.

Sergio

The SB128 are actually descent soundcards. This was before Creative went down the crapper.



Yeah soon... the only reason they are willing to support the open source community is so they can minimize the backlash against them. They have there own AL extensions. They are still overpriced too.

No, in fact a SoundBlaster 128 PCI is the one I'm using on my computer. But I never considered it as a good sound card, only something decent enough to fulfill my gaming needs (at that time, I didn't know anything about sound compression and sound quality and all that things that I care about now). If I recall correctly, I was given the option to buy a SoundBlaster Live!, but it was very expensive for my budget. Guess I did a good choice

Talking about overpriced, personally I do not think X-Fi is overpriced consider what it is offered.

Well in the UK it costs 95 pounds for the cheapest version. If you discount all the spurious sound "enchancement" features and if you don't need EAX for games then it's massively overpriced.

The only possible reason to buy a Creative card is that it is the only way to play DVD-Audio disks on a PC.

Me personally I have one good reason for buying a creative card, or any sound card for that matter. My reason is that I make music with FLStudio, and I find that the motherboard's integrated sound solution just doesn't make the cut. With the motherboard's sound, no matter how I set it, I can't find a good buffer zone, it always clips, on the other hand, with a real separate sound car, I can find a good setting and work normally, without any clipping from the latency.

Another "pro" for a creative product, game companies deals with them by the ton.

For the cons:
The first con is personal, I hate creative for making me pay over 290$CA for the SoundBlaster Audigy, when now I will soon get the SoundBlaster Audigy 4 for about 55$CA, of course brand spanking new.

The low price is the result of Creative being terrified by the fact that motherboard's integrates sound in their boards. Before it wasn't the case, but nowadays, motherboard's sound solution is getting closer and closer to the sound card quality. To the point where Creative can only state a 15% greater performance than the motherboard integrated solution. It's not me who says it, it's written in their website.

The other cons for creative, in part it's the same a Jebus posted a few post above. Minus the bloated software suites, I do not and will never install those software's from them.

(Damn these smilies are ugly, the winking one seems to be having a cramp instead of winking)

I too still use a 7-year-old SB PCI 128. The reason it remains one of Creative's better cards is that it was originally by Ensoniq, and Creative acquired this model with the company years ago.

For laughs, dropping jaws, etc (depending on whose side you're on), from just this week:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2024340,00.asp
From the horse's mouth (i.e. the Creative CEO's): "There are more than 100 million people who listen to MP3, WMA or AAC music on their PCs, Macs or iPod or ZEN players, but the quality of this compressed music is highly compromised. The Creative Xmod enables them to listen to their music with audio that sounds even better than CDs."

I even detect a smidgen of disbelief on the part of the reporter? Well, if your CEO talks like that, I don't see how it is possible at all for a company to foster any spirit of excellence. Hard to believe there don't seem to be as many critics of Creative as there are those of Microsoft out there...

I've had overall better performance with my old Creative cards using the kX Project drivers.

Even my Audigy card with the infamous 'Audigy-bug' which I couldn't use anymore with the official drivers, worked again with those drivers.

http://kxproject.lugosoft.com

CEO isn't lying, you know, modified audio may sound better on sound systems with limited capabilities (compressing, equalising etc.). Creative makes products with satisfying characteristics for a very low price. The (quality+marketing+support)/price ratio is out of competition for the majority of other PC audio manufacturers. And Creative also creates newer, better and cheaper products. So you see few critics despite it isn't an excellent company.

This is in a way true... People who buy expensive gear dismiss Sound Blasters as poor.
But most people do listen to 128kbs CBR mp3 using onboard audio which usually sucks goats bollocks.
I'd say many of the Creative products are not meant for audiophiles, nonetheless value for many is usually very good.

Live, Audigy, X-Fi, none is a good value for money

There are several models in the series you named, and surely live!24bit, Audigy SE and Audigy 4 OEM are good for their price. X-Fi is a good higher-priced all-in-one solution for HTPC systems. There will be always complaints about bundled bloatware, but it's developing costs money and mass-market manufacturer simply cannot omit this thing.

And btw I'm talking about feature set, not the CPU-like thing. You cannot get features by getting more powerful CPU.

It is depending on individuals I would say.

But still I do not think it is overpriced. You are looking for the DVD-A playback capability, some prefered its EAX support or DTS/AC3 decoding quality. It is a one fine multimedia soundcard considering what it is offered.

That remains to be seen. The only reason they can create cheaper products is, because they dominate the consumer electronics market. When have you walked into a store and seen anything other then Creative products in the Audio section? where is the competition? I know I certaintly haven't seen any other companies. The only reason I could see getting one would be for DVD-A support. Why would you do business with a company when you know you can go to another company that's actually concerned with consumer needs? you might as well just stick with onboard audio if this is of no concern. That's my two cents.

I've had a couple of Audigy cards, the last one being an Audigy 2 Platinum & have had nothing but problems with the sound quality. Intermittent crackle / noise with EAX enabled, problems the drivers in games (only played the odd one, but experienced pops, crackles etc all the time) glitches in Foobar no matter what output selected.. So have just purchased an Emu 404..Well i've just installed it this afternoon & it's got Creative's bl**dy logo all over it[color=#000000] Argh.. If I get any problems with this i'll probably snap

What's Creative's relationship with Emu?

Creative bought EMU and use their DSP chips for their consumer cards (Live!, Audigy series, X-Fi series). Fortunately I've experienced none of the issues you have, but maybe that's because the only Creative cards I've owned are the Sound Blaster PCI 128 (which is actually a rebadged Ensoniq), and the Audigy 4.

Cheers for the reply Acid8000. Fingers crossed this 404 card will be ok.

Should be. I keep reading good comments about EMU cards. Wouldn't mind an 0404 eventually as a second card.

The following is from the EULA presented by Creative prior to dowloading their Audigy drivers:


Why would they be concerned about liabilities resulting from malicious code? I can think of only one reason...

That's something you will see in many software EULAs. It's for just in case they accidentally ship a cd or whatever with a virus on it, which has been done dozens of times by even the most reputable companies (Apple shipped ipods with a windows virus on them). It's one of those unpreventable things where one guy in the manufacturing chain is an idiot and nobody catches his mistake...

Unless you were making some sort of subtle joke?