Creative – Nails in the coffin of its soundcards?

Ξ April 6th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ |

It has not been a good fortnight for Creative and things started badly when Asus reverse engineered the “EAX 5 Advanced HD” into a new, free driver update for its Xonar soundcards, updating the DS3D GX engine to version 2.0. Asus basically spoofs the game engine into thinking it’s EAX 5 capable and tells it to send it the audio data, then it works with it the best it can using software emulation to output the spatial surround audio.

It’s not perfect as Phil O’Shaughnessy, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Creative Labs was quick to point out;

“With its recent driver updates, Asus is misleading its customers by suggesting that its sound cards now support EAX 5. Asus sound cards do not support EAX 5, nor do they support EAX 3 or EAX 4. There are a small number of PC game titles that specifically query the audio device on the system to see if EAX 5 is available before they will attempt to render more than 64 3D simultaneous audio voices. The new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities in order to get these games to ouptut 3D audio on Asus sound cards.”

EAX 5 Advanced HD was the only jewel left in the X-Fi crown as far as many were concerned and now that the Xonar can emulate it (to what degree exactly is yet to be determined), in addition to pretty much every other Dolby and DTS option you can imagine, Creative must be seeing red.

This rush of blood to the head seems to have had an effect on some senior staff at Creative, who in a dash of sheer stupidity greed… stupidity (I can’t think of any other way to describe it) have stabbed in the back the lone knight they had working with them to develop drivers that actually work for their products.

To describe Creative’s driver support is legendary is an understatement – if the soundcard industry had been any less of a complete monopoly, Creative would have long been kicked into touch. While their hardware was always revolutionary at the time (the X-Fi is three years old this year) its drivers have been buggier than an article in “Entomology Today”.

The one man, Daniel Kawakami, (or Daniel_K,) making things right by fixing these drivers and adding functionality where Creative had purposely restricted it, was this week accused by Creative Labs’ Phil O’Shaughnessy (he’s had a stressful few weeks, it seems), as “stealing”;

“By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods.”

The post is still there, yet it has been edited somewhat since the prior release. The first reply to it by “TrooperTom” sums up everyone’s feeling perfectly;

“My god, you guys got some balls on you, either that or you’re all borderline mad. He offered a service you guys can’t/wont, and in so made a lot of YOUR customers happy about their product again. Now you wanna wipe him out and keep him silent by threatening about legal actions. This is a beyond retarded, shame on you, shame on you.”

Creative’s main gripe against Daniel_K was that he was accepting donations on his site, for which he has apoligised after quoting himself having made comments like “the more people donate, the faster I’ll release” – to Creative this meant Daniel was receiving a wage for Creative’s proprietary work. However, Daniel claims that he used the money to buy hardware, namely a Live! 5.1 and Audigy SE card which came to a significant $75, and to date he claims to have only made $146 from donations – hardly an earth shattering figure.

Considering the time and effort Daniel put in and the fact it’s not the same as charging for drivers – something Creative was happy to do to Audigy users who wanted Vista support through its OpenAL converting Alchemy software – most would argue common sense has shot straight out the Window.

The current message posted on the Creative forum reads a little differently – while Creative spends three quarters of it saying it wants to work with third parties to develop drivers, it then says it won’t allow unauthorised distribution of the companies property. This is quite understandable given that unofficial drivers could possibly ruin a system and Creative could get the blame or worse, a lawsuit – the company is only protecting its own back and the usual EULA says that fiddling with them is a no-no.

However, if you read between the lines you can see that Creative doesn’t want others developing extended support for features outside of what it currently offers for older hardware, even if the hardware can run it because this stops Creative from selling soundcards. On one hand it’s protecting its business like all successful business’ do, but on the other it just pisses off the community of users who have hardware already “capable” – it’s not like a graphics card or CPU which becomes superseded by faster hardware. In fact, Creative openly admits it cripples some cards,

“If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.”

And no doubt people have a right to shop elsewhere too.

The hacks/unlocks Daniel made were quite substantial:

• he enabled the software base X-Fi Crystaliser on Audigy cards,
• he unlocked the paid for Alchemy drivers to work on all cards,
• he unlocked the purposely disabled DTS and Dolby decoding feature on Audigy cards when Vista was detected
• he unlocked the purposely disabled CMSS2 and Stereo Surround on Audigy cards in Vista, when only CMSS was available
• He unlocked the Advanced EQ and Special FX presents on Audigy cards in Vista
• He unlocked the DVD Audio function on Audigy cards in Vista
• He wrote a small utility that gave the option of using the hardware MIDI Synth on Audigy cards in Vista
• He fixed some drivers bugs and created present saving within the Equaliser function on Audigy cards in Vista
• He also enabled or claims to have improved WaveRT, a Microsoft replacement for ASIO for both X-Fi and Audigy cards in Vista (although he admits it’s untested)
• He got Dolby Digital Live to work on X-Fi cards,
• He removed a “purposeful” bug where much older Live!/Live! 5.1 cards would distort sound in Vista.
• He added features and enabled Alchemy for Live! cards in Vista

The list goes on and on - you can read Daniel’s explanation of his work here.

What’s the biggest kicker? He claims to not even own an X-Fi! And if Creative didn’t charge for the Alchemy Audigy drivers from the outset, he would likely never have started these work arounds in the first place.

Asus is all too happy to take up the slack and with the recent release of the Xonar DX – a low profile, inexpensive PCI-Express x1 version of the full fat D2X that still supports all manner of Dolby and DTS features and still includes some high quality processing hardware on board at a claimed 116dB SNR. It should retail for under $90 States side, but we’re yet to hear of a UK price just yet although we expect it to compete directly with the Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer.

While Asus’ drivers were a little sketchy when we first looked at the Xonar in the middle of last year, by the time the PCI-Express D2X was released we didn’t have a single problem with stability or feature support – the only sour taste was from the appalling interface design.

If you’re still wanting some D-K drivers you can share them here or get what’s left directly from here. You can also read other emails from Daniel about the situation here.