New Creative Drivers Suck

Posted by alan | Filed under Audio/Video, Editorials

They released drivers on October 1st, too, and I downloaded them.  I have several gripes with even this new release:

  • doesn’t work with the applications on the driver CD
  • No on-board Dolby Digital or DTS decoding (BIG ISSUE FOR ME)

The Creative Audio Console works, but is watered down compared to XP, and barely any support for the “Audio Creation” profile… pretty much have to use canned EAX effects and can’t create your own.

C’mon creative… WTF

What’s even weirder is that the newer drivers have an older revision number:
October 3: SBXF_PCDVT_LB_2_15_003.exe
October 9: SBXF_PCDVT_LB_2_15_002.exe

What’s up with that?

Well, they finally added the Creative Console Launcher back (which is a seperate download). This is the main application that most people used in XP to interface with their X-Fi, and allows for creating new EAX effects in the “Audio Creation” mode, which is the main thing I missed… I now have like 90% of the functionality back… so I’m not so pissed anymore.

 
The Creative Console did seem to crash HARD a few times… I was unable to even end the task and ended up having to reboot Vista.
 
I just bought the Logitech 5300e 5.1 THX speakers, but they only have analog input.  The only way to get DD or DTS is to use SPDIF passthrough, which these speakers don’t support… I have to do decoding on the card (although WMV-HD works and is totally awesome).
I just got those Logitech 5300e THX 5.1 speakers for my office and they deliver some nice room-shaking goodness. I’ll have a review up soon.

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Permalink | October 11th, 2007

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