That first year forced me to purchase something else... there was a big uproar about it at the time because of being "forced" to purchase new hardware due to their blatant lack of support/drivers. I did try out some of their so called "working" drivers when they did release, and I had nothing but problems with them.

I did not know about the Daniel K ones.

Too little too late... and still too little it seems.

I wish Daniel K would update his Audigy 2 drivers with this Creative release. His driver actually functions as I hope a driver would. For example, I have the card disable the speakers when I plug my headphones in and only his driver will switch to headphone speaker setup when I do that. Creative's stays on 5.1 and then I lose the rear channel sounds.

I tried the last Creative drivers and that bug was still there. I'm not inclined to use or try these new drivers even if they may have some optimizations and bug fixes.

I asked about what was new/fixed in this version for XP: http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=143660 ... No one seems to know.

I wonder if it fixed my volume control options that kept getting resetted.

> I just sold my Audigy 2 (OEM version - SB0240) the other day
> (was collecting dust) due to lack of "working" drivers for Vista/7

I have had working official Vista drivers for more than an year now on my Audigy2. The first year of Creative's Vista support was horrid, and Daniel K kept releasing the unofficial drivers which worked quite well. But then for a very long time now, the official Vista drivers work great and so does Alchemy for that matter.

I have been using the same Vista 64bit drivers on Win7 x64 RC, and that works fine as well.

I just sold my Audigy 2 (OEM version - SB0240) the other day (was collecting dust) due to lack of "working" drivers for Vista/7. And I got $96 for it! There is a demand for this particular model on eBay.

This comment was edited on Jul 29, 2009, 19:25.

Onboard sound is good enough for a ton of people. And some higher end mobos have superior on board sound. And then if you are still not satisifed there are viable non creative sound cards. I can't stand creative precisely because of their horrible horrible drivers and how they dump support for some of their cards and support newer cards of even more expensive versions of the same basic card. What happened to that unified driver stuff? Nvidia can do it AMD/ATI can do it but creative cannot get there.

Bucky: Ah, I still use XP, games that use EAX (like v4), and not planning to go Vista/7. XP is fine for me. I would love dump Creative sound cards, but the problem is games.

This comment was edited on Jul 29, 2009, 18:47.

Bucky: Does it have hardware EAX support? No software emulation.

I'm almost positive it can do hardware EAX up to 2.0, and then software emulation a few more notches up. I could be wrong though, the ability to enable EAX might be provided by the software. To be honest I stopped paying attention once I switched over to Vista, and that was awhile ago.

Surprised that they even bothered with a Windows 7 driver.

Wow, that seems really customer friendly again, Creative. Maybe you should hire a few more guys with a phd in music.

God, I fucking hate Creative.

How do you even figure out which Audigy you have? For that matter, why are there 7000000000 different Audigy's?

Never, ever again...

Creston

Bucky: Does it have hardware EAX support? No software emulation.

Friends don't let friends buy Creative!

QFT. I've been running an Asus Xonar DX for awhile now and I love it. Far better sound quality than the onboard solution and it's not made by Creative.

It's appalling that Creative is the biggest name in soundcard manufacturing and yet it's also the company that offers least support. I'm just glad that Microsoft fucked them over with Vista and effectively ended the era of hardware soundcards, which was coming to an end anyway with the improved sound quality offered on motherboards. We need a revolution in sound APIs but it needs to be industry standard and none of the EAX proprietary bollocks.

I'll be glad when the Creative era in soundcards is over... and I can't imagine that will be too long, if we're not pretty much there already. I'm just surprised that video card manufacturers haven't added dedicated audio hardware as well, especially with HDMI; audio hardware acceleration could be a nice selling point.

I swear, this company works harder than any other to actively prevent you from using (and later purchasing again) its products.

Don't install this driver...install this one, but only after you install the CD drivers...don't install if you do have the CD drivers...only if you have this CPU...install, but then get the five separate updates for those other utilities...then the patch for this one utility...now you need to roll back this one due to that one update...etc.

Oh yeah - we do not work with your hardware. Thanks for doing all that updating, though! \o/
Insert "I loved Aurel" comment here.
Wishing somebody would do something nice with PC soundcards,
Ray

So while every other company is working towards unified drivers, standardized releases, and ease of installation for the customer... Creative is doing the same old crap. Why in hell would you release a driver update for "Audigy series" cards and then tell people NOT to install it on certain Audigy cards??

Even for hardware EAX for games (assuming a few years ago)?

Friends don't let friends buy Creative!

"Driver
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy series driver 2.18.0011
Filesize : 37.62 MB Download
Show Details
Release date : 13 Jul 09
This download is a driver providing Microsoft® Windows® 7, Windows Vista® and Windows XP support for Creative Sound Blaster® Audigy® series of audio devices. For more details, read the rest of this web release note..."


No?

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=300416

Typically for creative, they break a bunch of stuff for some (like mp3 playback) I'll be sticking with the driver win7 update provides for now.

I...don't actually see the drivers on that page.