Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Captain Ned
ludi wrote:Headphone impedances can vary quite a bit, and some sets will handle a poor-quality output okay while others will just fall over. Sounds (ha!) like your set needed more current than what the onboard solution could deliver.
biffzinker wrote:I see someone is blocking ads for shame (I see the adblock plus icon .)
Topinio wrote:Interesting, and another validation of a fond belief in soundcards. Out of interest, which motherboard?
Did Windows 10 just install a Microsoft-provided driver, of did it go get the full set of driver, application and ALchemy from Creative?
biffzinker wrote:I swore off buying anything from Creative.
DoomGuy64 wrote:biffzinker wrote:I swore off buying anything from Creative.
Creative stopped making bad products since XP and PCI slots became obsolete. Nothing wrong with their products today aside from personal bias, and the competition has clearly proven itself incompetent in the driver dept. Nice thing about creative is that they sell cards to oems/dell, and you can pick up a used pci-express x-fi for $30 off ebay. Not a bad price for a major upgrade from onboard.
DoomGuy64 wrote:The real problem today isn't soundcards, it's headphones. Many headphone companies *cough* razer *cough* sell cheap flimsy junk as quality headsets, so you have to sift through tons of crap to find something decent. I currently use a turtle beach z11, which has pretty good quality, but the switch is always glitching out muting the left speaker. If it wasn't for that, I'd say it was the perfect set.
just brew it! wrote:Sennheiser. In my experience, they sound significantly better and are more durable than comparably priced headphones from other vendors.
Audio-Technica used to be decent back in the day too, but I haven't owned one lately so I don't know what their current lineup is like.
The key is to avoid the ones made by the mainstream computer peripheral and consumer electronics companies. Most of them sound like crap and/or fall apart within a year.
just brew it! wrote:My beef with them is more with their business practices than their products. Even the SB Live! which a lot of people loved to hate never gave me any serious grief.
biffzinker wrote:just brew it! wrote:My beef with them is more with their business practices than their products. Even the SB Live! which a lot of people loved to hate never gave me any serious grief.
What just brew it! said, I didn't have any hardware issues with the Audigy, it's the way Creative handled their driver situation at the time, and some other stuff.
DoomGuy64 wrote:The issue that people were ranting about was getting updates for the sblive and audigy cards, when they were clearly EOL. Nobody asks nvidia for TNT2 drivers, yet that's exactly what people were expecting from Creative. The sblive and audigy series were products released for 9x, got support for XP, and were extremely outdated by the time Vista rolled around. It's not good business to keep supporting outdated products indefinitely, yet that's exactly what creative was forced to do. AMD supported their dx11 VLIW cards less than creative supported the audigy series, and yet people complain. Ridiculous. Upgrade to a motherboard that has pci-express already, or stay with XP. The whole thing was blown out of proportion, and is a non-excuse that haters repeat to justify their illogical hatred. Well, good job. The soundcard industry is practically dead thanks to that, although there still are a few holdouts who understand the merits of owning a dedicated sound card.
just brew it! wrote:Secondly, those weren't even the "business practices" I was referring to. I was a lot more annoyed by their habit of competing with lawyers rather than based on technical merit (see: Aureal), and somewhat later on with their obstructionist practices towards the Open Source community.
just brew it! wrote:Secondly, those weren't even the "business practices" I was referring to. I was a lot more annoyed by their habit of competing with lawyers rather than based on technical merit (see: Aureal), and somewhat later on with their obstructionist practices towards the Open Source community.
It's all largely irrelevant now anyhow, given that the discrete soundcard market has shrunk to a small niche.
DoomGuy64 wrote:As far as open source goes, creative made openal, and has somewhat supported Linux. Not the best, but not the worst either.
If anyone actually deserves resentment, it should be Microsoft for destroying what was left of the ecosystem with vista, not creative.
DoomGuy64 wrote:Aureal had plenty of its own issues like only supporting 4 speakers, and buggy drivers.
DoomGuy64 wrote:Irrelevant is the right term today, because none of those old cards are worth using, especially with the hardware limitations of the older models. Onboard will sound better than a sblive.
DoomGuy64 wrote:As far as open source goes, creative made openal,
DoomGuy64 wrote:and has somewhat supported Linux. Not the best, but not the worst either.
DoomGuy64 wrote:If anyone actually deserves resentment, it should be Microsoft for destroying what was left of the ecosystem with vista, not creative.
DoomGuy64 wrote:Overall, creative makes a decent card. If you want one without directly "supporting" them, eBay it. Definitely worth the $30 if you use headphones. I have a xonar in my collection too, but I haven't felt the need to use it, and being as the general consensus is that creative has nicer drivers, I probably won't bother using it any time soon.
just brew it! wrote:
Edit: FWIW I'll be installing a Xonar in my desktop shortly. I've started to dabble a bit with DAW stuff, wanted something better than onboard, but didn't want to shell out for pro grade gear. Guess I get to find out how well the Xonar plays with Linux and the JACK audio stack.
just brew it! wrote:That still doesn't justify what Creative did to them. Compete on the merits of the product, not on who has the bigger legal team or deeper pockets.
just brew it! wrote:The Live was way better than onboard when it was introduced, and arguably remained better until after it was EOLed. Plus Realtek's drivers were a train wreck for years so that was another reason to want to continue using older Creative cards.
just brew it! wrote:Creative's ridiculous bloatware packages were also problematic. And all the horrible DSP effects... Crystalizer? Gimme a break. At least if you installed just the basic driver, the cards did their job.
just brew it! wrote:Their cards were adequate, and skillfully marketed.
just brew it! wrote:Edit: FWIW I'll be installing a Xonar in my desktop shortly. I've started to dabble a bit with DAW stuff, wanted something better than onboard, but didn't want to shell out for pro grade gear. Guess I get to find out how well the Xonar plays with Linux and the JACK audio stack.
just brew it! wrote:Edit: FWIW I'll be installing a Xonar in my desktop shortly. I've started to dabble a bit with DAW stuff, wanted something better than onboard, but didn't want to shell out for pro grade gear. Guess I get to find out how well the Xonar plays with Linux and the JACK audio stack.
DoomGuy64 wrote:True, but IMO they didn't start making "good" cards until pci-express, and basic standards like front panel audio.
[...]
but why anyone would continue using outdated sound hardware on a new pc is beyond me. It screams cheap
DoomGuy64 wrote:Anyways, the whole hate creative thing is manufactured outrage and misinformation. People who hate creative do it because they have an agenda, not because of facts.
Topinio wrote:Or maybe there are people who have more or different facts or take a different view of them, and don't necessarily hate Creative but don't like some things it has done?
Captain Ned wrote:Now if someone would just hack a 7/8.1/10 driver for the TBSC I still have in storage (for the day I finally go Linux).
TurtleBeach wrote:>95 dB signal to noise ratio with high resolution 18-bit analog to digital converters for recording and 20-bit digital to analog converters for playback.