I need help sorting out the sound card market. is something big and shiny supposed to come out soon or should I be looking at the x-fi market? Also, is the x-fi bug prone in vista? I basically need a sound card that does what it's supposed to do in vista and potentially windows 7.
As much as I don't want to buy creative, the xonar was ruled out. I may be interested in auzentech, though.
Thoughts? Suggestions? I need a good sound card, and while I'd love to PCI-express I'm open minded.
I need to be convinced that my A2ZS is in need of being upgraded, so help me out here. I'm looking for customer experiences with X-fi's, etc. Tell me about your sound card, what it does for you, and how good the sound quality is. Tell me everything!
Backstory is optional read for my more information on my dillemma...
Backstory:
A few months back I swore to myself that I would never again buy a creative product. After the scandal over the Audigy 2 series products and vista compatibility, I can't find a good reason to even consider it.
For those of you who are not affected, or are and are not aware of a resolution to it, do a google search for "daniel_k". Things will begin to make more sense, but I'll try and sum up what I do know:
The sound card market is a dead one, with no real tangible room for improvement. We've seen this in many ways,we've pretty much reached the end of development on audio processors, both on the supply and demand side. Developers usually don't use the software past what was already available, in fact, the list of eax 2.0 games compared to the list of eax hd or eax 5.0 games is staggeringly high, making it almost pointless to upgrade from a great sound like the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum that I was at one point, a proud owner of.
Things began to change, one I migrated over to Windows Vista. Due to the new driver model, creative was able to start from scratch in creating thier drivers, and realized that they didn't really want to keep supporting old cards. They'd much prefer to sell new cards. I want to make it perfectly clear that sunsetting a project does not disturb me. I can understand when a company decides that the resources required to maintain an older project that no longer provides revenue is an unneccessary burden. That's fine and dandy, but what really gets me is creative's official Audigy 2 ZS drivers for windows vista...
Let's get to the nitty gritty of it. Creative screwed me, and everybody else that paid for such a nice sound card not even 3 years ago. I recall paying somewhere in the range of 160$ for my sound card package, and I loved every minute of using that amazing device. It made games run better, sound better, and pardon me, but feel better. Games became experiences. Then I switched over to vista only to find that it did not support any of the features I was so used to. In fact, CMSS 2 was half the awesomeness of my sound card, but it was not a feature available to me any longer.
After doing some research into which driver was best for my card, I learned of the daniel_k scandal. Apparently joe the plumber released some driver package that enabled not only CMSS 2, but also several other features that I may not have ever used, but it sounded too good to be true. well, I was wrong. The stuff worked! According to this guy, all he did was cobble together a bunch of required files and it just worked. He didn't write any code, he just attached working files, working libraries... apparently some from xp, some from vista. And it just worked.
Tell me why existing files from an XP driver set can enrich drivers for Vista? Can anybody? that simply doesn't even make sense. but it does work. here's where creative got really slimy. Apparently, they went after daniel_k for distributing these drivers. Wait, what? Creative, the company that at one point contributed to open source linux drivers for my sound card, which had amazing software support and the best product in the market did this?
So not only did creative ruin a working product, but they tried to cover it up and keep it that way. They tried to silence daniel_k at one point by offering him an x-fi. The whole thing started when I could no longer get my sound card to run UT 3 without my computer blue screening (the funny thing is, it'll make funny noises while I play, and bsod when i shut the game down). Well, daniel_k's drivers fixed this too. Interesting even more so... oh, and daniel_k's drivers actually remember my speaker settings. With my audigy I had to set this back up every time my Pc rebooted. I'm sorry, but some guy can cobble together some of creative's old files into a cohesive working package that works better, but creative tells us it can't be done. That gets more and more suspicious every day.
Anyway, the issue has returned, and I'm pretty tired of dealing w ith it, and while I not want nothing less than to buy a creative sound card again, i know it's really my only choice. It's bad that I have to upgrade my product simply because creative can't make it freaking work, and that doesn't inspire much faith that future products won't have a similar problem.
Apparently creative's feeling the recession too, and needs to create demand amongst thier customer base for new business.
As much as I don't want to buy creative, the xonar was ruled out. I may be interested in auzentech, though.
Thoughts? Suggestions? I need a good sound card, and while I'd love to PCI-express I'm open minded.
I need to be convinced that my A2ZS is in need of being upgraded, so help me out here. I'm looking for customer experiences with X-fi's, etc. Tell me about your sound card, what it does for you, and how good the sound quality is. Tell me everything!
Backstory is optional read for my more information on my dillemma...
Backstory:
A few months back I swore to myself that I would never again buy a creative product. After the scandal over the Audigy 2 series products and vista compatibility, I can't find a good reason to even consider it.
For those of you who are not affected, or are and are not aware of a resolution to it, do a google search for "daniel_k". Things will begin to make more sense, but I'll try and sum up what I do know:
The sound card market is a dead one, with no real tangible room for improvement. We've seen this in many ways,we've pretty much reached the end of development on audio processors, both on the supply and demand side. Developers usually don't use the software past what was already available, in fact, the list of eax 2.0 games compared to the list of eax hd or eax 5.0 games is staggeringly high, making it almost pointless to upgrade from a great sound like the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum that I was at one point, a proud owner of.
Things began to change, one I migrated over to Windows Vista. Due to the new driver model, creative was able to start from scratch in creating thier drivers, and realized that they didn't really want to keep supporting old cards. They'd much prefer to sell new cards. I want to make it perfectly clear that sunsetting a project does not disturb me. I can understand when a company decides that the resources required to maintain an older project that no longer provides revenue is an unneccessary burden. That's fine and dandy, but what really gets me is creative's official Audigy 2 ZS drivers for windows vista...
Let's get to the nitty gritty of it. Creative screwed me, and everybody else that paid for such a nice sound card not even 3 years ago. I recall paying somewhere in the range of 160$ for my sound card package, and I loved every minute of using that amazing device. It made games run better, sound better, and pardon me, but feel better. Games became experiences. Then I switched over to vista only to find that it did not support any of the features I was so used to. In fact, CMSS 2 was half the awesomeness of my sound card, but it was not a feature available to me any longer.
After doing some research into which driver was best for my card, I learned of the daniel_k scandal. Apparently joe the plumber released some driver package that enabled not only CMSS 2, but also several other features that I may not have ever used, but it sounded too good to be true. well, I was wrong. The stuff worked! According to this guy, all he did was cobble together a bunch of required files and it just worked. He didn't write any code, he just attached working files, working libraries... apparently some from xp, some from vista. And it just worked.
Tell me why existing files from an XP driver set can enrich drivers for Vista? Can anybody? that simply doesn't even make sense. but it does work. here's where creative got really slimy. Apparently, they went after daniel_k for distributing these drivers. Wait, what? Creative, the company that at one point contributed to open source linux drivers for my sound card, which had amazing software support and the best product in the market did this?
So not only did creative ruin a working product, but they tried to cover it up and keep it that way. They tried to silence daniel_k at one point by offering him an x-fi. The whole thing started when I could no longer get my sound card to run UT 3 without my computer blue screening (the funny thing is, it'll make funny noises while I play, and bsod when i shut the game down). Well, daniel_k's drivers fixed this too. Interesting even more so... oh, and daniel_k's drivers actually remember my speaker settings. With my audigy I had to set this back up every time my Pc rebooted. I'm sorry, but some guy can cobble together some of creative's old files into a cohesive working package that works better, but creative tells us it can't be done. That gets more and more suspicious every day.
Anyway, the issue has returned, and I'm pretty tired of dealing w ith it, and while I not want nothing less than to buy a creative sound card again, i know it's really my only choice. It's bad that I have to upgrade my product simply because creative can't make it freaking work, and that doesn't inspire much faith that future products won't have a similar problem.
Apparently creative's feeling the recession too, and needs to create demand amongst thier customer base for new business.
