Creative Labs vs. Customers, Once Again

Filed under: Home Audio > Computer Audio > Sound Cards


- Image Source: Brute! Propoganda

Creative soundcards and their drivers have a rather "less than rosy" history. Some of their more infamous actions from the past include suing former rival Aureal out of business with a meritless patent infringement suit and then taking Aureal's superior A3D technology (Creative lost the suit, but the legal expenses forced Aureal into bankruptcy, and Creative then acquired all of their assets in bankruptcy court), using non-standard ports that only work with Creative speaker packages, taking months or even years to release buggy and massively bloated driver packages, and re-releasing the same sound processor over and over with new features locked out of earlier versions.

Much as Creative took ages to get the various Sound Blaster editions to (somewhat) function after the release of Windows XP, the same issue has cropped up for Live!, Audigy, and X-FI users with the now year and a half old Vista. According to modder Daniel Kawakami, "Creative purposely modified the Audigy drivers to disable some features when Vista is detected and also purposely introduced some bugs to prevent some XP utilities from running." Daniel modified the Audigy drivers and re-enabled a huge number of missing features, and released the drivers on the Creative user forums. He also released a number of fixes and missing features for the Live! and X-Fi cards.

Creative's response was to publicly threaten Daniel and demand that he remove all of his software. Creative's vice president of corporate communications, Phil O'Shaughnessy, wrote "...we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods." The response from the forum community was not positive for Creative, with boycott demands, and online petitions threatening of class-action lawsuits. Creative has since relented slightly and will allow Daniel to continue with his mods, except for enabling certain "forbidden" features on certain cards. This episode undoubtedly cost Creative customers they can't afford to lose, as the general shift from PC to console gaming and high quality onboard sound solutions have made Creative products increasingly irrelevant.