Why did aureal die and get bought by creative?

[Holering]

I'm not kidding but there is a new Sound Blaster Audigy RX that has been released recently. According to folks, it is actually the same damn emu10k1 (Sound Blaster Live!) from 1997.

What does this have to do with Creative you may ask? Well the emu10k1 has a lot to do with Creative and soundfont "technology". It appears that soundfonts had a lot involved with Creative, and Creative developed Soundfont software (or at least something like that). Correct me if I'm wrong.

If you look at the emu10k1, it appears great on paper (1000 mips is like a Pentium III I think). But in the real world it is the most generic dried up terd. It uses EAX to supposedly enhance games, but it is a total 2D crock of a sound API, and merely a reverb engine. It is like Creative wants to make those FMV Sega CD games a reality today, just like back then (no offense to Sega but at least they pulled their dick out and didn't die). It's like they want to combine Hollywood with games, so games are film like with all those speakers you must buy.

I honestly hope AMD does well with their "True Audio" without dying. A3D for instance, was a real 3D sound API that properly calculated the 3D world for accurate 3D sound and special effects. Vortex2 despite having less MIPS (is that even true?), had a way better 3D sfx API and much more advanced drivers (VXD primarily and they warned you to use the primary pci slot so it could use system memory faster without hogging pci bus). It only needed 2 channels (stereo) audio for A3D, and you could literally hear stuff above and below your head, behind you, and accurate echo's and special effects, all in glorious 3D sound with only stereo headphones. It is like Aureal cared about gamers (like Interplay). They died off and were bought by Creative, and now the emu10k1 rules the world and you must buy 5.1-7.1 speakers too without hearing stuff above and below you! Yay (not)!

Also, why did Sony make the PS4 more powerful at the end, despite using the same hardware as the Xbox One? Are they showing off?

I wouldn't be surprised if Sony and Creative are deliberately milking money out of people. I personally am a Nintendo guy but I have no problem with PC (and I liked Sega in 20th century too, but Samus should've trained the blue creature and used him for bait or something).

What are your thoughts on this folks? Is Sony a big whore, or are we whores, or what? Is Aureal evil?

EDIT:
Sorry I misposted Sony as Creative... And thread title didn't make sense.

[Maes]

Neither did the rest.

[Gez]

Holering said:

Why did aureal die and get bought by creative?

Because life ain't fair.

[GreyGhost]

Probably nothing to do with their crappy legacy drivers for DOS.

[SuperflyJohnson]

My understanding was that Creative bought out Aureal so they could kill A3D, which allegedly mopped the floor with EAX.

This is secondhand hearsay of course; I actually have a couple of Aureal Vortex cards but damn if I have the time or money to put together a Win9x box right now to actually use them (there are no full-featured drivers for XP).

[Holering]

TBH I find the vortex card to be kind of cheap and gimmicky. I know how A3D sounds but it seems like the emu10k1 is better built everytime I go back to it, and Creative had a lot more drivers (call me crazy but I find the WDM drivers in 98/ME to be really stable: no clipping problems with SBPro emulation in 98/ME, and it does A3D without problems).

I take back what I said about emu10k1 being a generic dried up terd. It works great and Creative support is top notch. I also have problems with Vortex 2 with high HDD use: sound gets crackly and lowering pci latency helps but doesn't completely eliminate it. Live! doesn't give me those problems, and it seems pretty friendly regarding manual pci latency adjustment, even with 1.6+ gigabyte soundfonts in Linux.

I wonder if AMD will survive... It looks like they want to end up like 3DFX and Aureal with their Mantle and TrueAudio. Supposedly AMD did some lay-offs too. Kinda sucks. Does anyone here think AMD is dying?

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-cuts-710-jobs-after-disappointing-results.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-xbox-one-playstation-4-john-carmack,24434.html

[Blzut3]

Holering said:

It is like Creative wants to make those FMV Sega CD games a reality today, just like back then (no offense to Sega but at least they pulled their dick out and didn't die). It's like they want to combine Hollywood with games, so games are film like with all those speakers you must buy.

I do not believe Creative is pushing hardware accelerated sound any more (Vista+ has a new sound stack which doesn't allow DirectSound to be accelerated). After the EMU20K (X-Fi) they have mostly been making dumb DACs just like those on your average motherboard. The Audigy Rx being the exception. My guess on why they brought that chip back is because their E-mu professional sound card brand had been using the chip for some time now. In other words, they already had working drivers.

Holering said:

It is like Aureal cared about gamers (like Interplay). They died off and were bought by Creative, and now the emu10k1 rules the world and you must buy 5.1-7.1 speakers too without hearing stuff above and below you! Yay (not)!

Creative sued Aureal over A3D. Creative of course lost as the case had basically no basis. However, Creative had a lot more money and were able to pay the legal fees. Aureal was not, so even though they won the case, they went bankrupt and Creative purchased their assets. One of the many reasons this country really needs a loser pays system. (For those into history, I believe this is a similar tactic to those used by Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Rockefeller.)

I do believe that Creative killed their own market trying to establish a monopoly. They also acquired Ensoniq and E-mu around the same time.

Holering said:

Also, why did Sony make the PS4 more powerful at the end, despite using the same hardware as the Xbox One? Are they showing off?

Sony simply put money into higher binned chips as opposed to developing the Kinect.

Holering said:

Is Aureal evil?

No, Creative was/is evil.

[S-Priest]

There is a lot to be said about Creative buying out Ensoniq and killing off their TS- line of synths. Which were marvellous (the TS-10 played the Hexen II/Heretic II soundtracks).

Holering: how do you get such huge Soundfonts to work with the Live at all? The Live could only hog 32 MBs of wave data at a time, and on Creative native drivers anything that went over the limit very quickly caused note dropouts and frozen samples. This was sort of half-solved in the newer NT 5.x drivers by killing off layers/voices if they went over the limit, but then that sounded uglier. Is there some sort of a miraculous Linux driver?

[Holering]

S-Priest said:

Holering: how do you get such huge Soundfonts to work with the Live at all? The Live could only hog 32 MBs of wave data at a time, and on Creative native drivers anything that went over the limit very quickly caused note dropouts and frozen samples. This was sort of half-solved in the newer NT 5.x drivers by killing off layers/voices if they went over the limit, but then that sounded uglier. Is there some sort of a miraculous Linux driver?

If you really must know I'm not using Windows, but Linux. There's a 2gb DMA patch; it limits DMA access to 2gb of space instead of four (I'm assuming it's the 32-bit address space for PCI devices). Emu10k1 has 31-bit access and patch allows soundfonts to work in 64-bit Linux this way, and fixes all its other problems in a 64-bit OS. More info here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/awesfx/+bug/183456.

Only problem I get is native midi access with SDL. I get "invalid file descriptor" and games hang until exiting ungracefully. I think this is a SDL problem.

I can use Evanessence and other huge soundfonts this way, but I do get notes sounding wrong on some (Evanessence not exactly made for older soundfont standard for emu10k1 I don't think). Sgm-v2.01 seems perfect ( it's 256mb and very high quality), and Airfont is good. No problems otherwise after about a year and some bootstraps with Slackware (compiling in 12gb of ram without ccache), and tons of HDD use simultaneously.

EDIT:
Live! works really well with SDL (besides midi problem). SDL allows DMA access for hardware mixers and I think all the sounds played are mixed in hardware (if true it's even better than DOS Doom 1.9). Have alsa buffer and period size to zero with hardware mixer, and no problems whatsoever with soundfont in use. Saves a lot of cpu cycles and Gzdoom, Zdoom, Eternity, and plenty of stuff use SDL too. Only problem I see is 48khz 16-bit limit; I think 48khz 32-bit float would be best but doesn't bother me.

EDIT2:
I actually stopped using Linux. I'm using Windows 7 now and no longer use the live!.