Has there been any word about the other outstanding line of Creative cards to get Audio Console? I have an Audigy 2 ZS that still has no subwoofer function in Vista.

is creative still doing this?:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=36336
(installing the driver in the windows temp folder)

Survey says about 12% of Steam users use creative sound products.

Considering that steam users are actually gamers, the general populace probably has even less use for a dedicated soundcard. Also many of the listed card are older cards stemming from a time when on board audio was very bad to non-existent.

I purchased Creative SB products in the past when it was a necessity but no more. Since my Nforce 1 with soundstorm I never looked back.

As onboard sound gets better and better, creatives market shrinks and shrinks. Of new PC's today it is probably less than 5%.

I will cheer when Creative goes bankrupt like they deserve. Creative that threatened iD with dubious patents, Creative that bought or sued competitors into oblivion to get a near monopoly on gaming sound cards.

Right now I think the only markets for soundcards is:

A: near pro usage like running some kind of serious audiophile recording with your PC.
B: Diehard EAX fans that insist only Creative EAX matters.

Otherwise for the vast majority, the analog outs of integrated sound is most likely sufficient to drive all but the most expensive speakers. My Gigaworks T20s can detect no flaws in my integrated sound.

If you really want great sound you need to go digital out to a 5.1 receiver and that is what I do for movies/music/serious gaming sessions. The best sound available and no separate card needed.

Honestly, I don't know why people still buy Creative's products.

Take for example the Sound Blaster Audigy 4 (which has been the top of the line for a while). You download the drivers released on March (nothing else since then) and you find the known issues, as reported on their website:

* Applications from the original Sound Blaster Audigy CD will not work with this download.
* This driver does not support the following:
o Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS™ signals
o DVD-Audio
o DirectSound®-based EAX games
o Gameports
o 6.1 speaker mode.
* SPDIF passthrough is supported on Vista 32-bit only.

Nothing else to say...

Yeah, too bad the full-featured and newer Audigy 2 is still stuck with "basic" driver support.

"basic audio support and control options for sampling rate and speakers only." Yup, that's it.

Now that Creative is switching from their own proprietary EAX to the OpenAL standard and now that audio drivers for Vista, unlike previous Windows versions, can be written in user mode rather than kernel mode (which is much, much more difficult to program for), perhaps we'll start to see some real competition for hardware environmental effects from the other players in the audio game.

I certainly hope so, because between the universally crummy Creative software/drivers, almost total lack of support for Vista after literally YEARS of prep time, and the total abandonment of support for everything but vanilla stereo playback in Vista for everything but their newest X-Fi cards, I'm finally fed up with Creative for good. Never again will I buy their hardware only to have problem after problem with their software, ultimately to be abandoned by them altogether.

I KNOW the drivers for their older chipsets could be updated to work with OpenAL/ALchemy. But they aren't going to do this because they think it'll boost their X-Fi sales.

You hear me, Creative? You guys SUCK. No more money for you. Not yours.

If the long delay was for the fact that Creative did some super bang-up job and ground-up rewrite of their drivers then good for them. If not then, crummy.

I'm no fan of Creative, but I'm impressed that they're still supporting these cards after all these years. The SB Live came out almost 10 years ago!