Since almost day 1, Creative Labs products have been misrepresented, miss-advertised, and worst of all, broke.  I have owned many of the early Sound Blaster cards, and I am going to break down what issues I have had with each of them.

·         Sound Blaster Pro

o    Ok, I will admit, this card is awesome.  I still have mine in my “retro-486” computer, built to 1992 specs.

·         Sound Blaster 16

o    I was into MIDI at the time and it did not really work well, stuck notes, wrong notes, timing issues, and  other such errors.

·         Sound Blaster AWE32

o    I bought this because my SB16 died, but when you see things like SB16 being 16bit, you would think the AWE32 would be 32bit.  Nope, they just lied to us.  It was the same 16 bit card as the SB16, but with RAM this time…  Go figure.

·         SoundBlaster Live!

o    It had some sampling issues, and a good amount of noise when used with four speakers, but otherwise was a solid card.

o    If you want EAX support on Vista, you have to pay $9.99 to Creative.

·         Sound Blaster Audigy

o    Had static and pops from about day 90 of its life.

o    The drivers killed my computer on a weekly basis

o    CTHelper.exe would sit at 100% CPU when playing games or starting the computer. 

o    It would BSOD my computer (back when using XP) during shutdown (every time).

o    They advertised it as supporting 24bit sound, but it really only supported 16bit.  They were sued in a class action lawsuit and lost, if you bought one, they owe you $62.

o    Huge amounts of distortion due do the hardware re-sampling (unless the input was 48kHz, 16 bit).

o    If you want EAX support on Vista, you have to pay $9.99 to Creative.

·         Sound Blaster X-Fi Ti (PCI-E version)

o    The installation took me about five hours to complete.  The correct way to upgrade (I found out) is the following:

§  Uninstall old card software

§  Remove old card, restart computer

§  Find all references in the registry and delete them (you need to do this by hand)

§  Find all files on your computer and delete them

§  Install the new drivers

§  Restart

§  Shut down (don’t do this during the restart above)

§  Install new card

§  Restart

§  Re-install drivers (so it fixes the “High Definition Audio Device” issue)

§  Restart

§  Use the web update tool to get the newest version of the drivers

§  Restart (forced)

o    The computer will randomly change the speaker “positioning”.  For example, YouTube videos will play out of just the center speaker and then all of the sudden it starts playing on all of the speaker, but all of them are distorted.  Like if you have a home 5.1 setup and unplug the center speaker while watching a movie, but in this case the center is still working.

 

The company itself upsets me too:

·         In 1998, Creative sued Aureal because Creative believed they owned a patent on the idea of making a sound card for PCI slots.  Result, they lose, but then buy Aureal for $32,000,000

·         In 2008, Creative attacks Daniel_K for making their products work on Vista (yes, I am over-simplifying).

As a good note though, they do seem to be going out of business.  In 2006 they lost $188 million.  2007 was profitable, but only because Apple gave them $100 million.  In 2008, they sold their headquarters for $181.4 million.  For their FY2009, Q1, there revenues are down 24%, and they lost $32.2 million.  Sadly, it seems like they still have $600 million left, which means I will only have to put up with their products for another 5 years of so.