Creative has in my opinion worked harder than most to put me off their hardware.
Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile.
It felt like they’ve been coasting from their good reputation in 90’s for a long time now even though they don’t deserve it any more.
My friend in late 90’s got a Sound Blaster live or something. In the early 2000’s you could download driver updates off Creative’s website for their stuff, but if you lost the original driver CD you, you had to find drivers elsewhere.
There was a story of how some guy patched their binary driver to fix a long outstanding bug and at the same time discovered that it was trivial to upgrade the sound card by tweaking the driver and of course Creative got all hostile.
My brother had their WoW headphones and it had a bug where the mic would get progressively softer the longer he was using Ventrillo or Skype and he would have to periodically jump off and back onto the call.
Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves.
When Vista deprecated hardware accelerated audio in Windows and Creative labs moaned about it, I had zero sympathy.
> Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves.
I assume you made a typo and were thinking about mid 00s, as my memory tells me that motherboard audio was really rare thing in mid 90s.
It started to become common after Intel's AC97 standard. (I'd call that more late 90s... That is late 90s, early 00s possibly by the time it started to spread.
> Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile.
If I remember correctly it was a SB Live's drivers that kept on crashing playing Quake 3 on my dual Celeron 533 MHz setup (Abit BP6).
Had some mails going back and forth with the Creative support about this specific multi CPU setup and they rejected fixing their drivers because it totally was a niche back then. 18 year old me swore to never buy Creative again and I did so. Today I agree with the support's response but it quite upset me back then.
The moment average 16 bit DAC become cheap and games stopped using builtin synths/MIDI it was over, CPUs were fast enough that offloading audio was not a big deal any more and anyone could make good enough one. EAX was fun gimmick but exclusivity probably hurt the idea in the end
I had a coworker who was very loud about how most of the perceived instability of Windows was actually kernel panics caused be Creative’s godawful windows drivers.
My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.
I still remember the immersive positional audio from using a Soundblaster while playing Thief The Dark Project in the 90's. Nothing short of amazing! Kudos to the Looking Glass Studios for taking advantage of the technology to its full potential
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
Man! TextAssist was the very first thought I had when I opened the article. I occasionally search the web for it, and indeed, it seems in the process of becoming forgotten. Made me wonder if I was the only one spending many hours with it. Thanks for your comment!
I have and never will forgive Sound Blaster for using legal costs to destroy a competitor, Aureal.
Aureal made the most unbeliveably amazing sound card, which use ray-tracing for sound, in hardware, to produce 3D sound like you are actually there. The sound engine knew the geometry of the space you were in, in your game.
I played the original Half-Life using this, and it was peak gaming.
I've often wondered why audio in games never seemed to get back to this kind of realism.
Its shocking how primitive most game engines are with audio processing. You get linear/inverse square falloff on volume over distance and perhaps reverb in some places and that's about it.
Back when I was playing with my Aureal Vortex 2 card, locating enemies via sound was easy peasy through footsteps. That system (and card unfortunately) is now long gone. On my current day system, sound location doesn't work nearly as well, I can't tell if something is in front or behind me, I have to move my head (in-game) to figure that out. I really miss my Vortex 2 :-(.
I came here to say this. Creative did more to set back audio in video gaming than anyone other company. It boggles my mind that they killed Aureal through unsuccessful but costly-to-defend litigation, bought its assets in bankruptcy, and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with A3D.
This 1000x - Aureal and their A3D tech was amazing.
I remember ages ago when it was new, my brother and I were shoveling snow for people to get pocket money to upgrade our PC. We settled on a Turtle Beach Montego II and I adored the thing.
Of course, it was short lived since the update in Windows driver model, and the bankruptcy of Aureal, ended things.
I actually got into retro computing a few years ago and got another Montego II off Ebay cheap and I have to say, the magic is still there.
Frankly, playing something like the original Unreal is my favorite example of a vintage experience that I can't replicate any other way - 3DFX Glide has an aesthetic and responsiveness that's hard to match, analog ps/2 keyboard and mouse with no latency, VGA CRT monitor, Aureal A3D audio with some headphones.
It's a singular experience that is impossible to replicate today. And I love it.
I look back fondly to kid years when I took shots in the dark with IRQ and DMA settings on my boot diskette (so as not to mess with my dad’s settings) with autoexec.bat and config.sys (?), trying to balance out keeping enough available memory for the game but still keep the sound driver loaded. I don’t remember all the details, we’d guess a lot, but still learned.
Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.
Now I have a vague idea of what IRQs and DMA are, but I still have no idea what port 220h was.
Don't forget that the Sound Blaster card had a MIDI port to which you could connect a controller or joystick.
That was also a nightmare to configure, with calibrations on all axes, button remapping, etc. We were really motivated for pre-teens.
Great era. I remember being unleashed on the family computer and then attempting to neaten the file structure of our various games (Commander Keen, etc) in DOS and copying EVERYTHING into one central directory. Botched graphics display for the games that continued to slightly work...
The good old days when games requires Sound Blaster to play probably. It is too bad Creative Technology failed to transform out of Sound Card market. I remember discussing this in the early 2000s with a friend of mine in UK who is a Singaporean. He said Creative used to be pride of Singapore.
>> I look back fondly to kid years when I took shots in the dark with IRQ and DMA settings on my boot diskette
I look back on this fondly. I got some weird brand of soundcard that claimed SB-compatibility but was clearly different. I felt so proud the first time I got sound out of a game and no crashes. The same card was supported very well by Windows 95 a few years later.
My dad had an office PC that I secretly put a sound card and graphics card in. He would have gone mad if he knew I had done that to his work machine! I had very little idea what I was doing, but firing up Carmageddon 2 and having it run buttery smooth is something that sticks in my mind still.
One of the major contributors to Soundblaster's decline was DirectX.
Before DirectX, games and multimedia applications were designed to support a handful of cards, such as Soundblaster, Borland, Turtle Beach, and Ultrasound.
There were no unified drivers, no standard interface, etc. A few middleware programs, such as Miles Audio, began to appear to manage multiple types of cards, but this was done at the application level.
With DirectX, integrated cards and various SB clones were supported out of the box as long as they had Windows drivers.
Very quickly, users realised that the built-in clones and cards were just enough for most uses.
Especially given the appalling quality of PC speakers at the time (I'll never forgive you Packard Bell).
I bought a _lot_ of Creative Labs products over my pre-teen and teen PC building years. Saving up to get the SB2 or the AWE32 or the AWE64 or SBLive... so that I could eventually get something that supported 4.1 for my Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 kit that I got... (mentioned elsewhere in the comments here).
This was really the primary way to get any sort of good sound. And when it came time to upgrade my computer late last year to an AM5 chipset, I realized that my Klipsch 5.1 system wasn't going to cleanly plug into the on-motherboard outputs. You have to split and use your front panel audio out in order to feed the rear channel, which is kludgy and stupid, so off I went again, and found I could still buy a Sound Blaster: this time, the AE-7. It's been pretty reliable, has a little volume knob/input guy for my headset, and the desktop software and drivers aren't as nightmarish as the internet had led me to believe they'd be, even on Windows 11.
It did lead me down this path of wondering how CL was doing nowadays, so it's funny to come across this piece outlining their history in detail and where they are today.
I have a very distinct memory of going to a local independent PC shop with my dad to buy a Sound Blaster 16 for my PC back in 1994. It's odd because I have a really poor memory and don't actually remember much from my childhood,but my brain decided buying a sound card was worth holding on to. I don't remember my dad installing it or what games I first experienced that glorious SB16 sound with, just buying the thing. That said it was probably Doom. I still have that SB16 in its box somewhere.
I first met Sim Wong Hoo as a teenager while working at Funan Center, just before he launched the Cubic 99 PC (a failed product, which later inspired the Sound Blaster).
A genuinely down-to-earth person. An engineer’s engineer, somewhat like the Woz. If he had only found his "Steve Jobs", someone who had the vision and marketing savvy, Creative would be have a been major tech player.
> Creative rose to dominate the sound card market at a time when there weren’t many options. They made an excellent product, marketed well, and made solid relationships with software makers.
Interesting angle. The product that actually made them mainstream (the Soundblaster) was everything but excellent - it had a single mono 8-bit DAC (compare this to the Amiga's 4 channel stereo sound, released four years prior!), and very noisy output as I recall. But it was supported by all software, so it won.
Also no mention of their very aggressive business practices, how they bankrupted Adlib by forcing Yamaha to not release a new sound chip for the upcoming Adlib Gold card - delayed until Creative were ready with their own product.
Today they are mostly irrelevant. Just skimmed their website and I can't find any reason why people would spend money on their products. In a competitive industry such as audio I would never purchase headphones or speakers from them. Audio cards, I don't know, today probably no, and not from them.
In the '90 they were renowned for many of their products (multimedia kits, anybody?). I remember having purchased a Sound Blaster Live and was kind of blown away at the time with its audio quality, maybe because what I had in my motherboard was really bad audio.
One of my siblings had a Creative Zen Vision for ages, it was rock solid to the point that he destroyed its case and audio jack and the thing still worked perfectly. It was possibly one of a few products I've seen that resisted so much and kept working.
I do understand that the market for audio players now are kind of niche/dead if you can run an audio player on your phone, but I would still buy a good quality and affordable audio player that is not polluted with android. Just put music and play it... Their audio players were nice, not the best in terms of software. I owned a Zen Pebble and a Zen Micro and at the time I was quite happy with them.
One thing that is not minor is that they never seemed to have any interest on supporting other OSes rather than Windows or MacOS (a sign that still reflects that they haven't adapted to today's open source movement). If it weren't for the OSS community their cards wouldn't work on Linux.
Another company that suffered a similar or worse fate is Turtle Beach. I remember that they sound cards were also renowed at the time. They now make headsets and joysticks. I guess both companies didn't learn to adapt to the unforgiving tech market and kind of perished.
I remember buying a Sound Blaster Pro. I remember being amazed by the talking parrot, and DR. SBAITSO - That's Sound Blaster Acting Intelligent Text-To-Speech Operator. It also had the proprietary Panasonic CD-ROM connector.
I remember when my dad either got or bought a used sound blaster from a fellow PC enthusiast, I vaguely recall it came with stuff like a speech synthesizer and the like. Spent much time listening to MOD music (and their pretty interfaces full of buttons and graphics)
> An hour of audio in 64MB would absolutely not be “CD-quality.”
At 128 kbps, you can fit a bit over an hour of audio into 64 MB. Which isn't great, especially not using a late-90s MP3 encoder, but it's perfectly listenable.
Yeah I remember it took sometime before LAME came along and became good, but then AAC-LC took over. These days we really should just default to 256Kbps. My only wish is that AAC-LC QuickTime encoder to be open source.
It's kind of bizarre to think about all the audio struggles from the past and "good" (not actually) things like SB, and today with my truly fantastic, ~$25 usb dongle that blows it all out of the water with ease (32 bit, 448khz). Some of y'all maybe don't realize what a golden age it is (am I old?).
Whenever I see the name Creative Technology or Sound Blaster, the first thing that comes to mind is gratitude for how my parents gave me such awesome childhood memories.
This. This this this this this this this. MaximumPC wrote up the FPS2000 kit and I, an obsessed 14 year-old, saved up as much money as I could to buy it. I _needed_ surround sound.
I was then similarly obsessed with 4.1 sound in, eg, Half-Life, and other games, but also the dumb helicopter demo. My friends loved it too: no one else had a 4.1 system, so this was a Big Deal.
Eventually, some component or another failed in the sub/amp, and I moved on to the vaunted Logitech Z-5500, which was a pretty solid choice, but a lot "boomier" and less even.
I then migrated my way to the Klipsch ProMedia 5.1, which I am _still using today_, having kept it on life support by finding some guy online who refurbishes the very testy "BASH" boards inside them, and, after several swaps, eventually ordered a rebuilt amp with a newly designed BASH board that he had printed up.
No one makes true PC audio 5.1 systems anymore, really. Logitech has their Z906, which I could get if I had to, but my understanding is my precious little Klipsch system still kicks its ass.
But it all harkens back to the FPS2000. Cambridge Soundworks put something _special_ together with that bit of kit.
I wish the article had gone into detail about SoundFonts. I had an AWE64 back in the day, and the SoundFonts were a relatively inexpensive way to do sampling. CPUs were generally too slow to do sampling without dedicated hardware. I still remember the day I got the memory daughterboard and was able to load bigger SoundFonts.
I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.
The first image which looks like some kind of music-making hardware ("instrument") looked a lot like the OP-1 by Teenage Engineering [1]. That would be an interesting partnership, right?
I don't think they ever stopped using the name. The wiki article has Sound Blaster audio devices listed as being released up to 2021 and a quick search on Amazon shows they're still selling them brand new.
[+] [-] jonathanlydall|6 months ago|reply
Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile.
It felt like they’ve been coasting from their good reputation in 90’s for a long time now even though they don’t deserve it any more.
My friend in late 90’s got a Sound Blaster live or something. In the early 2000’s you could download driver updates off Creative’s website for their stuff, but if you lost the original driver CD you, you had to find drivers elsewhere.
There was a story of how some guy patched their binary driver to fix a long outstanding bug and at the same time discovered that it was trivial to upgrade the sound card by tweaking the driver and of course Creative got all hostile.
My brother had their WoW headphones and it had a bug where the mic would get progressively softer the longer he was using Ventrillo or Skype and he would have to periodically jump off and back onto the call.
Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves.
When Vista deprecated hardware accelerated audio in Windows and Creative labs moaned about it, I had zero sympathy.
[+] [-] fodkodrasz|6 months ago|reply
I assume you made a typo and were thinking about mid 00s, as my memory tells me that motherboard audio was really rare thing in mid 90s.
It started to become common after Intel's AC97 standard. (I'd call that more late 90s... That is late 90s, early 00s possibly by the time it started to spread.
[+] [-] junga|6 months ago|reply
If I remember correctly it was a SB Live's drivers that kept on crashing playing Quake 3 on my dual Celeron 533 MHz setup (Abit BP6). Had some mails going back and forth with the Creative support about this specific multi CPU setup and they rejected fixing their drivers because it totally was a niche back then. 18 year old me swore to never buy Creative again and I did so. Today I agree with the support's response but it quite upset me back then.
[+] [-] PunchyHamster|6 months ago|reply
The moment average 16 bit DAC become cheap and games stopped using builtin synths/MIDI it was over, CPUs were fast enough that offloading audio was not a big deal any more and anyone could make good enough one. EAX was fun gimmick but exclusivity probably hurt the idea in the end
[+] [-] hinkley|6 months ago|reply
My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.
[+] [-] luckys|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FuriouslyAdrift|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] exikyut|6 months ago|reply
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
[+] [-] rollulus|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] casenmgreen|6 months ago|reply
Aureal made the most unbeliveably amazing sound card, which use ray-tracing for sound, in hardware, to produce 3D sound like you are actually there. The sound engine knew the geometry of the space you were in, in your game.
I played the original Half-Life using this, and it was peak gaming.
[+] [-] amiga-workbench|6 months ago|reply
Its shocking how primitive most game engines are with audio processing. You get linear/inverse square falloff on volume over distance and perhaps reverb in some places and that's about it.
[+] [-] RedShift1|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FuriouslyAdrift|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] D13Fd|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rvba|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Bluecobra|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thawkth|6 months ago|reply
I remember ages ago when it was new, my brother and I were shoveling snow for people to get pocket money to upgrade our PC. We settled on a Turtle Beach Montego II and I adored the thing.
Of course, it was short lived since the update in Windows driver model, and the bankruptcy of Aureal, ended things.
I actually got into retro computing a few years ago and got another Montego II off Ebay cheap and I have to say, the magic is still there.
Frankly, playing something like the original Unreal is my favorite example of a vintage experience that I can't replicate any other way - 3DFX Glide has an aesthetic and responsiveness that's hard to match, analog ps/2 keyboard and mouse with no latency, VGA CRT monitor, Aureal A3D audio with some headphones.
It's a singular experience that is impossible to replicate today. And I love it.
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|6 months ago|reply
Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.
[+] [-] Beretta_Vexee|6 months ago|reply
Now I have a vague idea of what IRQs and DMA are, but I still have no idea what port 220h was. Don't forget that the Sound Blaster card had a MIDI port to which you could connect a controller or joystick. That was also a nightmare to configure, with calibrations on all axes, button remapping, etc. We were really motivated for pre-teens.
[+] [-] prawn|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zerkten|6 months ago|reply
I look back on this fondly. I got some weird brand of soundcard that claimed SB-compatibility but was clearly different. I felt so proud the first time I got sound out of a game and no crashes. The same card was supported very well by Windows 95 a few years later.
[+] [-] jabl|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] j00pY|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Beretta_Vexee|6 months ago|reply
Before DirectX, games and multimedia applications were designed to support a handful of cards, such as Soundblaster, Borland, Turtle Beach, and Ultrasound. There were no unified drivers, no standard interface, etc. A few middleware programs, such as Miles Audio, began to appear to manage multiple types of cards, but this was done at the application level.
With DirectX, integrated cards and various SB clones were supported out of the box as long as they had Windows drivers.
Very quickly, users realised that the built-in clones and cards were just enough for most uses.
Especially given the appalling quality of PC speakers at the time (I'll never forgive you Packard Bell).
[+] [-] throwaway_20357|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] disillusioned|6 months ago|reply
This was really the primary way to get any sort of good sound. And when it came time to upgrade my computer late last year to an AM5 chipset, I realized that my Klipsch 5.1 system wasn't going to cleanly plug into the on-motherboard outputs. You have to split and use your front panel audio out in order to feed the rear channel, which is kludgy and stupid, so off I went again, and found I could still buy a Sound Blaster: this time, the AE-7. It's been pretty reliable, has a little volume knob/input guy for my headset, and the desktop software and drivers aren't as nightmarish as the internet had led me to believe they'd be, even on Windows 11.
It did lead me down this path of wondering how CL was doing nowadays, so it's funny to come across this piece outlining their history in detail and where they are today.
[+] [-] Podrod|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jnaina|6 months ago|reply
A genuinely down-to-earth person. An engineer’s engineer, somewhat like the Woz. If he had only found his "Steve Jobs", someone who had the vision and marketing savvy, Creative would be have a been major tech player.
[+] [-] haspok|6 months ago|reply
Interesting angle. The product that actually made them mainstream (the Soundblaster) was everything but excellent - it had a single mono 8-bit DAC (compare this to the Amiga's 4 channel stereo sound, released four years prior!), and very noisy output as I recall. But it was supported by all software, so it won.
Also no mention of their very aggressive business practices, how they bankrupted Adlib by forcing Yamaha to not release a new sound chip for the upcoming Adlib Gold card - delayed until Creative were ready with their own product.
[+] [-] sohkamyung|6 months ago|reply
I was also one of the people who worked on the Nomad II MP3 player.
[+] [-] Daneel_|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] liendolucas|6 months ago|reply
In the '90 they were renowned for many of their products (multimedia kits, anybody?). I remember having purchased a Sound Blaster Live and was kind of blown away at the time with its audio quality, maybe because what I had in my motherboard was really bad audio.
One of my siblings had a Creative Zen Vision for ages, it was rock solid to the point that he destroyed its case and audio jack and the thing still worked perfectly. It was possibly one of a few products I've seen that resisted so much and kept working.
I do understand that the market for audio players now are kind of niche/dead if you can run an audio player on your phone, but I would still buy a good quality and affordable audio player that is not polluted with android. Just put music and play it... Their audio players were nice, not the best in terms of software. I owned a Zen Pebble and a Zen Micro and at the time I was quite happy with them.
One thing that is not minor is that they never seemed to have any interest on supporting other OSes rather than Windows or MacOS (a sign that still reflects that they haven't adapted to today's open source movement). If it weren't for the OSS community their cards wouldn't work on Linux.
Another company that suffered a similar or worse fate is Turtle Beach. I remember that they sound cards were also renowed at the time. They now make headsets and joysticks. I guess both companies didn't learn to adapt to the unforgiving tech market and kind of perished.
[+] [-] sillywalk|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bananaboy|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] duskwuff|6 months ago|reply
At 128 kbps, you can fit a bit over an hour of audio into 64 MB. Which isn't great, especially not using a late-90s MP3 encoder, but it's perfectly listenable.
[+] [-] ksec|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arnejenssen|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] temp0826|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sakesun|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lif|6 months ago|reply
(iykyk)
[+] [-] bananaboy|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] disillusioned|6 months ago|reply
I was then similarly obsessed with 4.1 sound in, eg, Half-Life, and other games, but also the dumb helicopter demo. My friends loved it too: no one else had a 4.1 system, so this was a Big Deal.
Eventually, some component or another failed in the sub/amp, and I moved on to the vaunted Logitech Z-5500, which was a pretty solid choice, but a lot "boomier" and less even.
I then migrated my way to the Klipsch ProMedia 5.1, which I am _still using today_, having kept it on life support by finding some guy online who refurbishes the very testy "BASH" boards inside them, and, after several swaps, eventually ordered a rebuilt amp with a newly designed BASH board that he had printed up.
No one makes true PC audio 5.1 systems anymore, really. Logitech has their Z906, which I could get if I had to, but my understanding is my precious little Klipsch system still kicks its ass.
But it all harkens back to the FPS2000. Cambridge Soundworks put something _special_ together with that bit of kit.
[+] [-] patwolf|6 months ago|reply
I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.
[+] [-] hed|6 months ago|reply
How did Creative end up with offices there? Was there some kind of research going on at Oklahoma State University?
[+] [-] Mistletoe|6 months ago|reply
https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...
[+] [-] unwind|6 months ago|reply
The first image which looks like some kind of music-making hardware ("instrument") looked a lot like the OP-1 by Teenage Engineering [1]. That would be an interesting partnership, right?
[1]: https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1
[+] [-] Podrod|6 months ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster
Guessing the kickstarter is for some retro thing judging by the image of their old talking parrot on that announcement page.