What happened to aureal is they were driven into bankruptcy by frivalious lawsuits brought against them by Creative Labs. By the time they actually won out in court it was too late. The cost of defending themselves agaisnt these lawsuits drained them dry. Then after Creative labs sued them out of busines with lawsuits that were unfounded they bought up the right to the technology and buried it. Sometimes the company with the best technology and most innovation doesn't win out in the end. Sometimes the company with the biggest bank account and largest army of crooked lawyers wins out.
I have an aureal sq2500 and it's a great sound card. It's much better than the sound crapper live junk, but we have to face the reality of the situation. Aureal is dead and future driver support is nonexistant. That makes it difficult to actually recommend an Aureal card to anyone looking for a new soundcard. There are working win9x drivers for the Aureal cards. So, if you run win9x then an Aureal card might still be an okay choice for you. However, on the win2k side of things it's not quite so good. Aureal had not yet developed a really good working win2k driver that worked on all system when they went under. There are some beta drivers out there, but they aren't exactly perfect and on some systems (VIA chipsets) they have major problems. So, if your running win2k on an Intel chipset you may get the win2k beta driver to work okay for the most part, but if your using a VIA system things might not be so good. For more details check out the forums over at
www.vortexofsound.com and the Aureal forum over at
www.3dsoundsurge.com . I have heard some claim that they have been able to make the win2k drivers work on VIA chipset boards by altering some chipset registers with wpcredit, but I don't know the specific details nor do I know exactly how effective this fix really is. I'm using a 440BX board. So, the win2k drivers seem to work okay for the most part for me.
