New Creative Sound Chip

Creative is just now putting A3D stuff into their sound cards...that's just horrible. Read all of those "new" features...real time environment reverb and reflection...oh, I haven't heard that anywhere else..."Creative" Labs and all they've created in a year is porting all the A3D stuff that was so much superior to the SB Live! to EAX. Good job creative, guess we'll be stuck with more A3D quality stuff for the next 4 years or whenever they decide to finally upgrade from this chip.

mmmmmm.. Sennheiser headphones.... 5.1 whaaaa...???

Creative Lab sucks. When I got my SBLive Value it was a step down, Half-Life and other games sounded better on my MX300 using A3D, digital output or not. Actually that digital output has been a pain in the ass, every now and then the sound starts crackling, I have to wiggle the cord to fix it. The only improvement is that I can put my headphones in the analog out at the same time, so I can have both the headphones and the speakers plugged in at the same time.

EAX isn't as good as A3D was, especially there's one CS map, cs_siege, where the EAX effect is stuck on this "tunnel" effect even when you're outside, it's really stupid. A3D didn't have any problem like that because the sound effect didn't use presets, it was all in real-time.

The only good thing about this SBLive is that I can get new drivers now since the company didn't go bankrupt. Creative Labs really sucks ass, I hope they get their asses kicked by nVidia when the nForce comes out. The nForce will have Dolby 5.1 decoding and encoding, and Doom will support Dolby 5.1 so it's perfect. Creative Labs doesn't have anything like that right now, I bet they're really happy seeing that nVidia's first sound chip is better than anything Creative Labs has ever done.

I remember having flame wars with Vantage about MX300 vs. SBLive. Back then I was an MX300 owner and I took what he said at face value, that supposedly the Live sounds better and EAX is almost as good. Now as an SBLive owner I can say without hesitation that the MX300 was a much more powerful card, the sound quality wasn't any worse, and A3D was MUCH better than crappy EAX. Eat shit you Creative Labs groupies.

hey, im an audiophile. i listened to jm lab utopias before.

"The newly dubbed Audigy processor combined with EAX Advanced HD software will provide enhanced audio playback while securing digital copyrights."

"Creative's EAX software includes functionality such as the ability provide background noise reduction, realistic sound effects, enhanced surround sound, and also includes support for converting audio files into the popular MP3 file format. However, the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials will be policed by a technology called ContentPass."

Why not just get a better quality soundcard that DOESN'T try to "police" your files?

Sorry, but I've had it with Creative Labs.

Phillips is the one I think?

Creative still hasn't shown a good application of EAX without resulting in a heavy performance dip (Unreal Tournament and Tribes2 both have processor-intensive EAX-processing routines, both of which result in a framerate loss of at least 8 fps and a total loss of graphic equalizer settings). I believe that the future lies in true, hardware-based 5.1 sound, like what will be in the new DOOM.

However, I won't care much; I don't even have a proper system of four speakers, and I just discovered headphone gaming, which has pretty good positioning on its own. And if Creative screws up royally with this one much like they did with SBLive, I'm simply going to laugh as their public image goes down the toilet.

You mean I have to upgrade this Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! back in the Quake II days? I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS! ;)

Of course, to run it you'll need to install a bunch of horrible software and buggy drivers....

Whew, at least I can mention the damn thing now. Have had one in my grubby hands, but haven't put it through the ringer yet.

When's this come out?

is this thing going to have hardware 5.1?

what do they mean multi enviornment