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Jigar
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Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 11:41 am

I have been using X-fi Xtreme music card since past 8 years and i guess 2 years back i retired it because i was facing stability issues on windows 7. Well since then i have been using onboard (Realtek) audio without any complains. Although time again i felt the bass was not upto the mark and mid and high felt washed out, i thought may it was a placebo effect because i was habituated to creative's crystalizer sound effect. Anyway fast forward to last week, i order Philips SHL3300BK, got the delivery yesterday and tried to use to on my PC.

Sound was just not up-to the mark, i knew i needed headphones amp. Started looking for decent Amp on amazon but then i realized i have my Xfi-card lying around. Since there were stability issues, i thought may be cleaning the connecters might make it stable again. I cleaned the entire card with kerosene and Installed it in the system. System picked it up right away and i Installed the latest driver. Started the good old winamp, Boom the entire room went live with crystal clear sound. I have been living a lie thinking onboard sound is good enough. No its not, xfi just blows it away. Later i used the head phones and man am i glad that i purchased it. I am really very happy that i installed the card back and matched it with such good earphones. I thought i should share this experience with fellow Xfi owners, bring those cards back to life, they are far superior to your onboard chips.

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PS: Zero system hangs since i installed it :D
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 12:23 pm

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.
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Jigar
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 12:45 pm

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.


Absolutely but I am talking about my regular speakers here, even without the earphones the clarity was quiet evident. I think i will now stick with my sound card. :)
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Topinio
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 12:49 pm

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?
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 1:33 pm

I see someone is blocking ads for shame (I see the adblock plus icon :P.)
Glad to hear the X-Fi-xtreme music is working under Windows 10, to bad I swore off buying anything from Creative.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 2:18 pm

biffzinker wrote:
I see someone is blocking ads for shame (I see the adblock plus icon :P.)

Ack, thanks for reminding me to throw TR back on the whitelist. (I've been reinstalling the laptop/messing around as of late.) TR's got totally acceptable ads IMO (vs accuweather - it was basically unusable in Edge solely due to the lack of an adblocker, high CPU use, and ads at the top moving the page down after it was mostly loaded).

I'm curious though, do you guys usually install the dedicated sound driver? My desktop doesn't install it by default, and the generic one it uses seems good enough. But I worry about noise cancelling for mics on the laptop, yet the Realtek driver is a bit annoying (yeah, I know I just plugged in some headphones, you don't need to tell me that).
 
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 3:24 pm

Reinstalled teh chrome and forgot to disable the addblock ... disabled now :)
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 3:26 pm

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?


I am using MSI Z87 G43 and nope microsoft did not install the driver itself, i had to visit creative's website.
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LostCat
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 4:04 pm

ALC892 eh? I've long been curious how the ALC1150 compares. I don't think people actually do the sound hardware comparison thing anymore.
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DoomGuy64
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 5:58 pm

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.

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.
 
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 6:06 pm

I bought a refurb turtle beach Titanfall headset for like $35 around a year ago...hell of a discount, and best refurb I've ever owned.

Every Razer set I've owned bombed. They do make great sounding stuff, but....meh.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 6:21 pm

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.

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.

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.

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.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 6:42 pm

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.


I have the HD555's, they're great- and I got them refurbished years ago, and they've long since been replaced. I also have some now older Audio-Technica noise-cancelling cans, which are closed rather than the open Senns, and they sound great too. Picked them over the Bose for a 14-hour flight, which they worked well for, and have continued to use them for mobile computing.
 
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 7:55 pm

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.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 8:24 pm

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.

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.

That said, you can still get w10 drivers for the original x-fi, although nobody should be using a card that A: uses pci and B: doesn't support front panel audio. Looks like asus finally has a w10 driver too. Good on them, last I heard the only way to get support was through a 3rd party.
 
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 8:42 pm

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.

OK, first of all, that's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. GPU tech was advancing rapidly, while soundcard tech was largely stagnant. So people were (somewhat understandably) pissed off that a still perfectly good soundcard was no longer usable due to lack of driver support.

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.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Fri Apr 01, 2016 10:32 pm

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.

They also bought the company NVidia was relying on for sound tech on the nforce mobos.

I don't know if I can put that entirely on them or not, but I'm guessing they weren't going to play nice.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 12:30 am

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.

Aureal had plenty of its own issues like only supporting 4 speakers, and buggy drivers. Then Nvidia bought 3dfx, which nobody faults then for. Aureal wasn't what people were up in arms over. It was about the drivers and ddl support, which was only licensed to the newer models. 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.

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.

Meanwhile, the only interesting new product to hit the market seems to be AMDs audio chip, but it doesn't seem like they're interested in supporting it, let alone opening the API for competition. So that pretty much leaves soundcards relegated to analog headphone users, and not much more.

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.
 
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 3:22 am

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.

I thought they just absorbed it, not created it (possibly by hiring the only guy that cared about it...don't know.)

As to Microsoft, the XP audio systems were garbage. good riddance. IIRC they said over half of all bluescreens were audio related.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 5:16 am

Creative was involved in the early days of OpenAL, certainly, and IIRC had a hand in creating it along with Loki Games; the idea was an OpenGL-like cross-platform audio API to enable easier porting between Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS (9, maybe even 8).

Microsoft ceratinly squashed the audio ecosystem with Vista, possibly as a way to squash Creative while also "standardizing" and taking control, and IMO deserves something for that; Creative was also hopelessly anti-consumer too around that time, I remember buying one of its Cobra gamepads which became very quickly unsupported (I bought either the gameport or the USB version, can't remember, then they dropped support for whichever one I had while providing drivers for the other for a lot longer :evil: )
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 7:14 am

DoomGuy64 wrote:
Aureal had plenty of its own issues like only supporting 4 speakers, and buggy drivers.

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.

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.

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.

DoomGuy64 wrote:
As far as open source goes, creative made openal,

No, they didn't. They acquired the rights to the original Open Source implementation (which was developed by others), and switched later versions to a proprietary license. The community forked the last non-proprietary version of OpenAL to continue the Open Source branch of development independently of Creative. So now we have the official (proprietary) version from Creative, and a different (still Open Source) version from the community. IOW, Creative has made a complete mess of things.

DoomGuy64 wrote:
and has somewhat supported Linux. Not the best, but not the worst either.

If by "somewhat supported" you mean "for years refused to release the details of the hardware interface for their codecs to the driver developers", then I suppose. :roll: (Sure, there are companies that have done worse; but that's a *very* low bar...)

DoomGuy64 wrote:
If anyone actually deserves resentment, it should be Microsoft for destroying what was left of the ecosystem with vista, not creative.

Oh, I certainly don't let Microsoft off the hook either. It was definitely a synergistic (if unintentional on Creative's part) effort to destroy the ecosystem.

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.

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.

Their cards were adequate, and skillfully marketed.

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.
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Jigar
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 9:14 am

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.


Xonar is definitely better than onboard but not as good as Xfi IMO.

Also today is 3rd day, no driver/PC crash - played Starcraft 2 legacy of void & Tomb Raider (2013) for couple of hours. Looks like Windows 10 OEM drivers are stable :D
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 9:40 am

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).
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 10:02 am

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.

Well, gee. I certainly wish people would stick up for this principle in video cards as much as they do for sound cards. Nvidia screwed 3dfx, and have constantly screwed ati/amd with their tactics, including Gameworks which goes on to this day. Yet only a minority of people ever call them on it. I particularly don't like where gameworks is going with dx12. That has real potential to royally screw things up, being AMD can't easily support low level gameworks. It could be fine if the option is never made available to amd users, but I have a feeling it'll be a forced option that degrades performance and stability on the competition, and nobody will say anything outside of the usual minority.

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.

The live, and it's entire lineup had issues with the underlying hardware including poor re-sampling and a maximum of 16-bit quality when using hardware. The card also had a limited amount of supportable features, which is like dx9 compared to dx11 in video card terms. The series were just old and EOL. Creative didn't actually stop "supporting" them either. What actually happened was that they discontinued the bloatware for vista, and that's what people were pissed about. Driver support was less than the x-fi, but that's what happens to a legacy product. You get less updates than a modern product. It was a bunch of whining about nothing, and all for an extremely outdated card. Even the original x-fi is outdated by today's standards, as it had tons of problems due to motherboards having poor pci implementations. PCI soundcards just needed to die, if only to get off of a buggy standard that was never supported correctly outside of intel.

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.

By today's standards I doubt you can claim it as problematic. They're on par with everyone else today, if not better. It was an issue in 9x, mostly because of how poorly 9x was coded, and hd space mattered more. You could still do a custom install, and limit the bloat. Ironically, this bloat is what people actually wanted creative to support for Vista, because they were still releasing the basic drivers. That, and ddl/ALchemy support. Which was never an advertised feature for older cards meant for an older OS. People should have never upgraded to Vista expecting indefinite support of an EOL product. The basic driver still worked, so if you wanted more, upgrade the sound card like you did everything else. Hell, if you actually followed the history of the outrage, it all started over danielk modding creative's bloatware back into EOL products, which got him into trouble over his DDL/alchemy mod, which was licensed software and amounted to basic piracy. The lengths people went to keep those EOL products running was ridiculous.

just brew it! wrote:
Their cards were adequate, and skillfully marketed.

True, but IMO they didn't start making "good" cards until pci-express, and basic standards like front panel audio. Too many issues with pci, as many motherboards did a poor job of it. Even Aureal had problems with certain brands. Of course, if you won the motherboard lottery I can see why you would want continued support, but why anyone would continue using outdated sound hardware on a new pc is beyond me. It screams cheap, like being dragged kicking and screaming into using modern standards, which is ironic considering you had to upgrade something to use Vista. There was no point to Vista if you didn't have new hardware. It ran slower than XP, ate double/triple the ram, and was only necessary if you wanted to play dx10 games. Using an outdated soundcard in that setting was just stupid, and I never saw the logic in it since you had to upgrade everything else, not to mention the quality improvements of the newer models. The sblive was never high quality. It was merely adequate, like you said, and I bet you $50 that the onboard of a Vista compatible motherboard sounded better and did more than the sblive, especially if it was 24-bit.

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.

The Xonar will likely give you a decent linux experience being a c-media chip, although you're obviously in the minority since most people use windows. I will say that SteamOS is probably the best thing to happen to linux for gaming though, so it's not like there isn't a need for good linux support today. It was pretty pointless a couple years back though.

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.
 
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 1:01 pm

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.

Some Xonars (inc. my DGX) don't play particularly nice with ALSA, ALSA's list even says to use PulseAudio ... JACK doesn't play nice with PulseAudio, see http://jackaudio.org/faq/pulseaudio_and_jack.html
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 1:27 pm

Can't believe I'm biting/feeding here, even went away before doing so, but

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

Not everyone is so loaded or reckless that they want to throw out perfectly good add-in cards and buy new replacements of similar spec when putting together a new build.

Also, are you actually of the belief that every single Creative soundcard on the ISA and PCI buses, from the CMS and SB in ?1988-89 through to the Xtremes in 2005-06 were sub-"good"?

If so, how was the X-Fi Titanium range so much better than the rest were compared to the competition in their time?

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.

:roll:

Sure.

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?
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 2:02 pm

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?

Thanks Topinio :wink:
The last Creative Labs soundcard I owned was from the Audigy 2 range (high end), I've had 4 Creative soundcards going back to starting with a ISA card.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 2:11 pm

It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 6:25 pm

Personally speaking I find a few of the viewpoint here odd.

1. The implication the SBLive! should have kept getting drivers.

The SBLive! architecture debuted in 1998. Making it to the Vista era before losing official support is pretty good. It so happened this product debuted along side a new OS with a new audio stack (Windows 98 WDM) and died with the introduction of a new OS that disposed of that stack (Vista UAA). If you really want to damn Creative or Microsoft to hell for doing that, more power to you. Doesn't seem particularly rational. Yeah the card might have been "perfectly good," but since when does any vendor support something forever? What is a good cut off for a company to end support? Why wasn't eight years good enough? Should the Live! had fifteen years of software support? Where does one draw the line? Can we even find a fifteen year old non-class PCI product with Windows 10 drivers? How about a ten year old PCI non-class product that has Windows 10 drivers?

The GeForce 8 getting ten years of driver support is the longest lived example of a vendor supported PCIe product I know of. As far as I know that stands as a crazy unique example in this industry. It technically could continue to be used with the class VGA driver so long as you only need 2D.

Strikes me the only "reasonable" option Creative had would have been to just MIT, BSD, LGPL, or GPL license the drivers and let the community continue support on Windows if they really that desperately wanted it. Plenty of debate open on that line of reasoning too.

2. The implication that the Windows 98 sound system was superior to the Vista one.

The Windows sound system was a mess.

The Windows 3.1 audio stack was used for every Microsoft OS until Windows 98.

Windows 98 introduced a new audio stack (WDM) and that sound system stayed with us until Vista. Many of the UI elements of that sound system apparently still tied back to the original Windows 3.1 design.

Larry Osterman shovels out the dirt.

The Vista stack is a win from all sides. More stable, greater internal precision and quality, overhauled UI elements, and even a class driver (UAA) that would actually fix the problem mentioned in point #1.

UAA compliant sound cards works even without vendor drivers and will keep working after vendor driver support disappears. Yay? Microsoft is the bad guy for doing this?

I'd note that some of the last of the X-Fi models (such as the Titanium) and the current SB-Z models are all UAA compliant. No drivers needed to work, even when Creative drops support the "perfectly good" card keeps working.

3. The implication that Microsoft somehow killed hardware acceleration.

DirectSound/DirectSound3D is dead, sure, but the Vista stack does still allow for acceleration.

That acceleration has effectively gone nowhere/stagnated, sure, but that isn't exactly Microsoft's fault.

The Steam Hardware Survey doesn't even bother to display sound card data. The only relevant sound metric shown is... Microphone. So as you can see, developers are just burning with desire to implement fancy audio.

The Unreal 3 engine had an OpenAL component built in, but best I can tell only a few developer bothered to do anything special with it other than deliver stereo sound. Mass Effect comes to mind as one of many direct examples of that.

Other reasons include:

Onboard solutions that lacked acceleration being considered good enough by the majority.
Audio features/positional audio, just wasn't all that special to begin with.
OpenAL never forming an architecture board and Creative taking it closed source.
Social gaming: The rise of VoIP, headsets, and streaming (where the audio often gets drowned out any way).
All of the above.

Sure though, Microsoft killed it.
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Re: Reinstalled X-Fi-xtreme music in Windows 10

Sat Apr 02, 2016 7:00 pm

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).


Let it go, it's deeply outclassed by modern standards, even onboard sound at this point.

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.


Doesn't even get into the fact PCI slots are dead, Jim.
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