My Past, Present & Future with Creative Sound Blaster cards

Question

I wrote a small product review of a Z-series card i regrettably purchased and creative responded. I replied to them and copied+pasted it here. First and foremost please understand this is just an open letter talking about my love for and mostly positive experiences with the Sound Blaster line of cards since the mid-late 1990s.
Attached is an annotated picture of almost all the Creative hardware I've bought over the years.
Take a good long look at that picture. Think about how many songs have been played through those devices, think of how many movies have been heard through those devices, think of how many games made me jump out of my seat from sound effects heard through those devices, and lastly think how many thousands of hours this amounts to.
STOP READING and LOOK at that attached PICTURE.
I use the word 'almost' because it does not include the card I recently purchased off e-bay, which was listed as (and was) mint condition new, and cost me $250.... a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series card.
If the direction Creative is going to continue to go is the direction that it's been going over the past handful of years this will be the last Creative product myself or anyone i influence or make purchasing decisions for will ever buy. Being in my mid 30s I'd say you'll miss out on at least another 20-30+ years of future product purchases.
Below is my address of your reply to my review of your product in a piece by piece layout:
"Based on user feedback we've done the following:
- Take up less disk space"
I run two 128GB SSDs in a hardware based (LSI Logic 8704ELP) raid-0 array so the disk footprint of drivers and software is important to me but whatever space you reduced your driver to is trivial.
%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Creative\(ALchemy, AudioCS AutoMode Switcher, Console Launcher, Shared Files, ShareDLL,THX Console, Volume Panel)
in total take up about 100MB of space. reducing this means NOTHING because it does not allow for more hefty software (Games or Design/Drafting/3D-Modelling Software) to be installed. Now if say your driver and software had a 1GB footprint and you reduced it to 500MB that would be significant because 500MB is enough space to account for one or 2 of average installation footprints of the products in the Adobe Creative Suite. Reducing the size from 100MB to 25MB/50MB/75MB is moot.
"- Optimized controls for touch screens"
This point is amusing, why? because you are making the same mistake Microsoft made with Windows 8 & Metro. Most people who buy a creative sound card are putting it in a PC and do not have a touchscreen. I don't manage a lot of computers but the ~200 i am responsible for bypassed Windows 8 (maybe even Windows 9, we'll see) and either moved from Windows XP to Windows 7 or they will be staying with Windows 7 for the foreseeable future. The touch centric design of Windows 8 is a significant part of this decision despite all the things Microsoft did that i think are steps forward (like better native support for multiple display devices to name one example).
"- Streamlined the interface so it's easier to navigate (removed "modes" and have all controls available regardless what you want to use the card for)."
Dumbing-down a product to reach a greater audience is walking the fine line of Quality vs. Quantity. Why you've sacrificed significant Quality to increase Quantity i do not know. While I will agree making 1 interface instead of 3 can be a potential step forward you did more than streamlining the user interface- you removed prominent, useful, and important features.
"- Better tie in with the Windows audio sub-system."
Through out the decade the only problems I experienced with Windows and my Creative products i can count on one hand. The first would be when Microsoft abandoned DirectSound and moved to an UAA based audio stack in Vista forward and your company dropped the ball and Daniel_K picked it up and made working drivers for your products and you went after him... I was one of the people who used his working drivers to make your sound card work properly when you failed to do so. Second was the fact that you people charged for ALchemy when the move to Vista occurred... this was truly a sh*ty thing to do. The third was the X-RAM causing a BSOD (STOP 0x50 - PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA) in windows on a regular random basis because of your device drivers and the best working solution was to disable using the X-RAM on the card- a selling point of the cards to begin with (albeit in years prior).
Allow me to elaborate some more while I have time since it's sunday night and the family is busy with other things and will be off to bed thereafter.
Creative's device drivers and software has always been a point of contention. You don't make the install discs available for download on your website for starters. This is a fascist move on your part. Your driver installation procedure and reliability is hit or miss. I personally have not had a lot of trouble with the drivers (only a few hiccups here and there) but i have read on the forums where all sorts of other people have (I'm not in disagreeing that their problems are partially their fault, but that's the price of running Windows instead of buying a Mac). My experience with your driver software suites over the years have been mostly (A) "When it works as expected it's sheer aural bliss beyond that of any other sound card in existence! THIS is why 'Sound Blaster Compatible' was what other companies put on their products, because Creative set the standard for everyone else to meet." but also sometimes (B) "everything installed and worked fine but now something is corrupt and not all the speakers have sound coming from them or the sound is all screwed up and the driver won't uninstall/reinstall/update correctly because it's corrupt and it's not deleting the driver files because windows has the files locked and safe mode isn't helping so now i have to physically remove the card from the PC and try to completely clean out my system of the Creative software. I can't believe they went after Daniel_K the way they did, i wish he'd come back and fix their drivers. Now which box did i put that install cd in...."
There are 2 reasons I've bought Creative sound cards for over a decade now. CMSS 3D when listening to music while working throughout the day and EAX in videogames at night.
I remember the moment when I experienced EAX for the very first time. I was in college and over at a friend's place. He had just got a new game called Thief: The Dark Project. I remember him telling me about something new called EAX and that only Creative cards had it and that it was supposed to be awesome. About an hour later after watching and HEARING him play Thief I was hooked. Creative had secured a place for it's hardware in my budget for every PC i built from that day forward.
Being that I've worked from home for about a decade now I will listen to music while I work and get in an hour or so of gaming at night as time allows. Straight off the bat the first time i ticked that box for CMSS 3D long long ago and heard music coming from every speaker in my home office i was amazed and overwhelmed. Then when you introduced the ability to set the individual speaker distance and volume from the listening position it was the icing on the cake. I was surround by sound. It was SHEER AURAL BLISS. This feature called CMSS 3D would become the second reason I purchased and recommended Creative sound cards for the decade to come.
As i stated in my review, the only reason i bought a new sound card was because the motherboard I was purchasing had no PCI slots (I remember when motherboards stopped having ISA slots as well...). Before making my purchase I read. I read a lot. I read about the changes you made with the X-Fi Titanium HD and then the Recon3D, and the more i read the more a feeling of apprehension began to take hold. Then i got to reading about the Z-series and read about some of the positive changes between it and the Recon3D line of cards and I became a bit more hopeful.
Sadly my apprehension was spot on... Listening to music was a worse experience when compared to my X-Fi Platinum (or even my old Audigy 2)... and did not even come close to justifying the purchase of the card compared to just using the integrated sound capabilities of my motherboard, an ASRock Z87 OC Formula/ac. But none the less I still had EAX to fall back on right? wrong... I installed a couple games, some new and some old, some with EAX and some without, and for about 2 weeks i played a bit of each one to see how the card handled new and old games. Sadly EAX compatibility didn't even matter because it was overshadowed by poor directional audio reproduction... that same front center speaker that was overbearing when listening to music was noticeable when gaming to the point that it was negatively affecting my gaming experience. I tweaked and toggled every setting i could and even uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers and software to try to mitigate this but to my dismay i could not. It was at this point I went weighing my options... and looking for an X-Fi Titanium (NON-HD!) and suffered the capitalist price gouging that occurs in such supply & demand situations... at least i talked the guy down from his original asking price of $300. I bit the bullet on this because chances are this is going to be the last Creative card i ever own...
I've had my Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series installed for just over a week now. Everything sounds precise and as it should when you have a quality piece of hardware paired with quality software. Directional audio in games comes from all speakers appropriately and not excessively from the front center speaker unless it's supposed to. Ambient music floats through the air all through out the day creating that familiar feeling of sheer aural bliss as it did before. The only downside is I'm getting to experience the problems other people have with this card (strange loud static-like warble EMI type noise coming from speakers, unaffected by windows volume control) but I have found a work around that I'm using on the rare occasion this happens (disable the device in device manager, re-enable device in device manager).
Chances are what i've written above is perhaps an opening soliloquy of the requiem for the Creative Sound Blaster, the card that defined an industry and the company that turned it's back on it. I don't expect anything to come from this letter and I don't expect a meaningful reply from you. You'll probably write me justifying your decisions you've made with your product line and offer some false sincerity about how you are happy i am enjoying my price-gouged discontinued soundcard i had to buy off e-bay because your current line of products are not a step back in your eyes because of the profits they turn. This generation of customers who buy your Platinum HD, or Reco3D or Z-series line of cards probably oblivious to what they are missing out on (through no fault of their own), funny how the bliss of ignorance works and lines your pockets...
It saddens me that i had to buy a discontinued product off e-bay because it's a better product than what your company currently offers. I wish this wasn't the way things turned out. When you dropped the fun presets and finite control of the EAX effects during the transition from the Audigy to the X-Fi line of cards I noticed but since they were not the main reason I owned a Creative card I tolerated it. But now you've gone and ruined the features that were the reasons i bought Creative cards, and this I will not oblige.
My Creative Hardware.jpg

Answer 1

@To the OP:
I own a X-Fi Elite Pro for the past 8 years now.
Since there, this card has faithfullly seen me through 3 major PC upgrades.
I'm currently at a point where, very sadly, much of what you've described is also weighing on my decision to not go for a Z line.
@Creative:
I do hope you're listening and can come up with a solution to a simply design feature - namely a fully working Stereo Surround, like the one that was available in the X-Fi line of cards via CMSS-3D.
Regards,