Did Creative lie to me?

[Berean]

I'm very disgusted with Creative right now in terms of their support and current line of cards.

I also have a Creative Modem Blaster that I THOUGHT would be able to use for telephone/speakerphone purposes. Since Im hearing impaired, having an extremely high quality audio card and voice modem is a priority for me. I thought with the combo of the Audigy and Modem Blaster line, I would have it made, right? Wrong....

For the life of me, I could not get the two to work together so I could get speakerphone capability. Then I upgraded to WinXP and that was the end. I was basically told by Creative "tough, we never said we'd support WinXP" But then they release an XP driver after all which might as well have been a virus for all the good it did. You have not lived till you see a a poorly designed Creative driver rip your poor system to pieces like it did mine.

I hate it when i find out after I buy a product that it wont play nice with a component on my system, even when I spend so much time researching just to ensure Id avoid any possible conflicts. After buying the AIW Radeon 8500DV, which is in my opinion a fabulous product in its own right, I cant use time shifting or volume control because of the way Creative threw together the line in signals, rendering the MMC software of ATI incapable of controlling the audio. Creative refuses to address the issue, blaming ATI. ATI blames Creative, and I believe they are right, because this issue repeats itself on almost every other TV card Ive seen.

I bought Creative with the presumption that their audio line was tops in the industry but now Im beginning to wonder if its all hype, and that I stupidly bought into it. I think Creative's time has passed. Am I wrong?

 

[funnyperson1]

i agree their drivers are crap....right now im using the C-Media chip on my mobo and i see no difference whatsoever between it and my Sound Blaster PCI 512...Creative will eventually learn that drivers are important kind of like Ati did....wait were losing sales because of crappy drivers was what happened with the Rage 128 Pros and Ati fixed the drivers when the radeons came out and then they pushed it way up after the 8500 came out....hopefully someone like Santa Cruz will get Creative in a tight spot and theyll realize that *maybe* their customers matter.....

 

[deez]

Used to build systems with the creative modem blaster but about 1 of every 8 was bad right off the shelf so it became a pain since we didn't test the modems before the systems went out. They showed up working properly in the device manager.

Switched to Aopen modems and not one problem.

As far as creative soundcards I had a SB16 ISA card till I upgraded to a mobo with no ISA slots so I bought a SB16 PCI to replace it. I dont see the point in spending a ton of money on a soundcard. I have a 3pc Altec Lansing speaker system and to me it sounds just fine on the SB16

 

[CrystalMethod]

When you start REALLY looking into buying a voice modem and sound card, you should alway look to what is the best on the market. The Audigy is an exellent sound card. The Modem Blaster™ leaves much to be desired. Check around for an alternative modem that would serve you needs better.

 

[Berean]

When you start REALLY looking into buying a voice modem and sound card, you should alway look to what is the best on the market. The Audigy is an exellent sound card. The Modem Blaster™ leaves much to be desired. Check around for an alternative modem that would serve you needs better.

The modem blaster was one of the very few cards with functional speakerphone capability (e.g. being able to use the PC as a virtual phone) You'd be surprised how very few modems are able to offer this feature without any serious issues. I understand the modem works fine with the drivers for the Win9x line, but for 2000/XP the drivers are horrendous.

I am no longer convinced the Audigy is the best on the market. I've heard of audio experts doing extensive testing on those cards and finding that they appeared to be merely hacked versions of the Soundblaster Live! cards (which had problems of their own) There did not appear to be any revolutionary or even evolutionary design progress with Creative. There much touted advances have been debunked and scoffed at by some of the audiophile purists I know. I've never seen hardware provoke such emotion the way Creative's Audigy cards have. I thought ATI was bad


I've tried using a AWE64 Gold in comparison with the Audigy card, and could not tell any difference. In some cases the AWE sounded BETTER (more clarity). The only reason i ditched it was because of lack of dolby surround (5.1) support. I recently realized the onboard C-Media on my mobo supports 5.1 so Im going to give it a whirl. Even though Im expecting good results, Ill still be shocked if the C-Media can ditch out sounds that approach or surpass the quality of the Audigy. If it does Im ditching the card on eBay And Creative loses another customer....

 

[Maximus Nickus]

I never install there drivers, if I do it takes Windoze XP 6mins to boot
Just let XP install its own ones.

Creative not only have bad driver support but you cannot seem to be able to update the firmware on any of there products.
As a plus though when you get there products working they are immense.


M_N