Creative never hides their true colors

Creative makes sound cards.  Sure they make alot of other things now, but they built their business on sound cards.  They succeeded a thrived in the very early PC market to make soundout of PCs better and better.  This is where the good part ends.

There are many constants in PC hardware, and one of those is that Creative drivers suck.  I mean, there are other companies known to have substandard drivers or to not make very frequent updates.  But I bet if there was a poll of the ones most well known for this, Creative would clearly be at the top.  Another bad thing Creative is known for is misleading advertising and product specifications.  By misleading I mean total untruths.  No matter how many times their shady product details are revealed for the truth they are by many respected hardware reviewers, they still seem to one-up themselves.

I won’t be going into the whole history of this, because frankly it just requires a few words in Google like “creative misleading” or “creative shady” or something similar,  and you will get more than you will ever want to read.  And you know what you won’t find?  You won’t find one Creative representative denying any of it.

But, this article is about some current topics.

First: Creative has a second-wave of X-Fi sound cards.  These sound cards are different from the previous few X-Fi sound cards in one important way:  They don’t have an X-Fi chip in them at all!

Second: Creative doesn’t want your old non-X-Fi card to work in Windows Vista.   Y’see, Creative hardware of past generations work fine in Vista.  There is absolutely nothing hardware oriented keeping them from working, and working well.  But Creative won’t make drivers for them.  Not only that, but when a intrepid user modified the drivers for the Audigy card he owned, Creative handed him the Cease and Desist rigamarole. (Because that link is straight to the Creative forums, and possibly could be modified or removed at any time, I include the post in it’s entirety after the break.)

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards.  In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative.  Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended.  We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services.  The difference in this case is that 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.  When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own.  If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you.  We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages.  To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP.  In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules.  If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Forum Moderator
Creative Labs