My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (aka The PC Doctor) usually gets stuff right, but he’s posted a story this morning that appears to be grossly in error:
From the “that’s gotta be a dumb PR move” files, Creative Labs decides to try to charge $9.99 for Vista compatible drivers for the Audigy range of sound cards.
No, this isn’t April 1st and I kid you not. Creative really does think that people are going to pay money for a driver.
I scratched my head over this one, because I just installed a new Audigy SE card in my home theater system on Tuesday, downloaded the drivers (no charge) from Creative’s website, and am happily listening to 5.1 surround sound in my living room. Creative didn’t ask me to pay for these drivers, and I didn’t offer. We both seem to be happy with the deal.
So what’s the real story? Creative’s Vista drivers for the Audigy series are free. In fact, the update I got was posted last week, although the driver files are dated in April. They include full support for all audio features and the basic Creative console application, and they work great.
The upgrade package with the $9.99 price tag is Creative’s ALchemy software. I’ll let them explain:
In Windows Vista, Microsoft removed the Vendor Extension mechanism from Vista’s DirectSound implementation. With previous Windows Operating Systems, the Vendor Extension enabled the Sound Blaster Audigy to provide accelerated audio for DirectSound3D games.
Without Creative ALchemy,most DirectSound games running in Vista will be reduced to stereo output without any EAX effects.
Creative ALchemy (Audigy Edition) restores your Sound Blaster Audigy’s ability to process EAX effects, 3D surround sound, sampling rate conversion and hardware audio mixing for DirectSound3D games in Windows Vista.
Creative Labs had to do some fairly significant software development work to add this feature into their Vista package for older sound cards, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask gamers to help defray some of the cost of development. This shouldn’t be a surprise, either. The company announced its plans back in May.
The trouble with a story like this is it quickly gets bounced around the echo chamber and pretty soon it gets accepted, regardless of the underlying facts. I hope this one gets corrected quickly.
Update: In the comments, Adrian says he disagrees: “No matter how you cut this Ed, people are being asked to pay for drivers.”
Hmm. That’s not what Creative says:
ALchemy is a software application that translates audio calls from one API to another. ALchemy is NOT a hardware driver, and will require that you have an appropriate driver installed and functioning properly first.
People are being asked to pay for a software update. That’s been going on for a long time. In cases like this, where an OS update breaks compatibility with an existing product, vendors have three choices:
1. Abandon the product and tell their customers it’s not supported on the new OS.
2. Create an update and give it away for free.
3. Create an update and charge for it.
Every decision is different, and every company has to struggle to figure out the right thing to do. That $9.99 price tag seems pretty reasonable to me, especially if the alternative is to abandon the customers because management can’t justify the cost of the development effort otherwise.
Technorati Tags: Creative, Audigy, drivers, Windows Vista
Larry, I suspect you’re off by an order of magnitude. These are low-end cards, not the sort that hardcore gamers are likely to choose anyway. The only people who need this update are those who are running Vista and who plays games that use multi-channel sound and EAX effects. Is that 20%? Doubtful. Maybe 2%.
I think $10 for a “software update” for hardware is ridiculous. Just imagine a distopian future where you’ll need to buy $10 “software updates” for all your hardware components!
Imagine this scenario: Microsoft changes how input devices work in games, so now all mice manufacturers need to update their drivers. You just bought a $100 laser gaming mouse a couple months ago and when you go to download the drivers you find out that you can download a basic driver that allows tracking at half the dpi and only the left and right mouse buttons work. If you want to have full resolution tracking, use the wheel and the other buttons, you have to buy a “software update”. Would you spend $10 for a mouse “software update” to enable the middle mouse button in games? I wouldn’t. That company would lose my business.
This is a horrible business practice and I can’t believe anyone would imagine it’s a good thing. Thankfully, I don’t own a Creative sound card, and I’ll make sure never to buy their products from now on.
I *wish* Creative would let me buy a working Vista driver for my card.
We bought a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum for one reason: it supported onboard digital decoding; our previous card only supported pass-through.
But then we upgraded to Vista and lost that feature. Creative’s new drivers are hobbled, no more onboard decoding for us so the entire purchase was useless.
From the driver release notes:
“This driver does not support the following:
* Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS™ signals
* DVD-Audio
* DirectSound®-based EAX games
* Gameports
* 6.1 speaker mode.”
and I have yet to see any hint of them correcting the situation.
What is being missed here is that the ALchemy software for X-Fi cards is free, while they are charging for Audigy.
Ed Bott, what planet are you from? The fact is that almost all other hardware vendors have been regularly communicating with their customer bases and have regularly released beta and finally WHQL drivers – FOR FREE! The issue IS NOT MICROSOFT it is Creative’s complete disdane for it’s customers, mainly those who have Audigy 2ZS sound cards. I respectfully ask you to do more research before you blog or make posts and then participate in a debate on this topic. I would suggest you and anyone else go to the Creative forums on Windows Vista and drivers and you will see tens of thousands of really pissed Creative customers – and that includes me. They have not said anything to any of their customers and as it stand I cannot exploit the full sound card capability I had under Windows XP. Microsoft worked with all hardware vendors beginning more than 2.5 years ago releasing new operating system architectures, beta code and much more. Creative have known for more than 2 years what would be happening and almost everyone else has done the right thing by their customers, ie. nVidia, ATI etc etc and continually released drivers and importantly communictaed with their customers. I bought my computer with a Creative Audigy 2ZS just on 2 years ago knowing that Vista was coming and therefore expecting updated drivers from all the hardware manufacturers. Guess what, Creative are the only one to not only not provide decent drivers and updated software but they have stcuk two fingers up to their customers by not once saying when or if they will release updated Audigy 2 ZS drivers. They have released some drivers for other cards. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO PAY any more money to creative for updated drivers.
What annoys me about this is that a bought a new computer with Vista and a Creative Sound Card. I also bought the optical add-on so I could output in surround sound direct to my surround sound system.
I did research before purchasing and nowhere was it mentioned that I could not play DVDs in surround sound, let alone surround sound games. In fact there was hardly any information at all then.
I would have been better off putting the money towards a higher CPU rather than a dedicated sound card.
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&message.id=18972
Here you have Alchemy that works with every Sound Blaster Life+ and restores EAX/5.1. For free.
The true is simple: creative llided to us. The X-fi Alchemy (realased for free) can (and always could) work with Audigy as well. It just included system check to prevent working with cards older than X-fi, probably this was to force us to buy new hardware. As soon us the sytsem chceck i deleted, it works just fine. Shame on you, creative!