Re: Creative launching ANOTHER card!

I'll never buy a Creative Labs product again. The *** they have pulled to
dominate the soundcard market is inexcusable. They've come to dominate by
every shady tactic in the book. They ARE the soundcard market now.
Creative's last move in crushing Nvidia's Soundstorm was the last straw for
me.

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"Magnulus" <magnulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xo4Fe.28492$xn.12694@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Hey, I like Creative's cards, especially the Audigy 2... but this is
> getting a bit ridiculous for Creative to have a refresh of a soundcard
> every other year. We are talking about soundcards after all, not graphics
> cards or CPU's. Reading on Tomshardware, they make it sound like the
> feature set for this card is entirely revolutionary:
>
> Hype says: headphone sounds like 5.1 speakers
> I say: Didn't the Live do that? And heck, Aureal started it all. They
> make it sound like a frickin' revolution when this is old technology.
>
> Hype says: enhance compressed audio
> I say: Umm... readme latest patch for Doom 3: id used a compressed
> audio format to save bandwith when they wrote their own custom sound
> engine, but when they added EAX/OpenAL support, they got creative to write
> an "enhancement" for Audigy cards that upgrades the sound (a little).
>
> Now, the transistor count on the new X-fi looks impressive (over 50
> million transistors vs. 5 million on the Audigy 2), and Creative claims it
> does about 24 times the instructions of the old Audigy cards (10 billion
> instructions per second, 10,000 mips, up from about 500 mips). But still,
> the Audigy 2 cards seems to be sufficient right now for PC audio- more
> than sufficient. Audigy 4 can support 4 environments interacting with
> each othe, environment panning, morphing, reflections. I honestly don't
> see what more you could need. About the only thing that truely appears to
> be different is the potential performance gains: 24 bit audio support.
> Now, I'm not sure the average person could hear the difference between 16
> and 24 bit audio, but the digital to analog converters in the cards will
> definitely be a limiting factor, and the "budget" cards are going to have
> to ship with cheaper DAC's. Also, possibly in games: creative claims
> there's an increase in performanec when using over 120 voices in Unreal
> Tournament 2004. Being as most games are unlikely to be qualitatively
> improved by having 120 voices running at once, I'm not exactly impressed.
> Perhaps the incresaed horsepower will lead to some better audio filters
> for headphones, or sound quality that borders on sublime... but this is
> starting to remind me of the guy in Radio Shack who chided me for wanting
> a regular 2 dollar RCA female plug (which they did not have) when I could
> get a gold plated plug instead: "It will sound better". Yeah, right.
> It'll sound better going into the cash register for you, buddy.
>
> The only place I see this card being really successful is maybe for the
> amateur/professional audio technician. Having that increased audio
> fidelity would be useful, for instance, for restorting old LP recordings.
> Currently, there are real limitations when using comb filters to remove
> things like pops and hiss, and more processing power could always be
> useful there. Or perhaps it would be good for mastering or mixing music
> tracks. But only time will tell if the increased power of the audio
> processor will be really useful for games.
>
>
>


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