What went wrong?

What went wrong?

Nothing.

HD Audio bus finally got good enough for even professional audio, depending on system integrator's build quality. These days, only audiophiles and industrial/AAA audio engineers have much use for them.

/thread

>a bunch of scumbags for older cards in vista era

>market share significantly dropped
>nothing went wrong.

Htpc = cheap

That's what killed soundcards.

My basic bitch Sony amp shits over analogue

AC97 onboard sound was enough for normies after all.

If you look at their website, soundcards are just one of the things they sell these days.

yeah, still making the best RGB gaming speakers

Yeah, I can't blame them for capitalizing on the RGB craze at all, though.

THAT'S ROCK AND ROLL

>AC97 onboard sound was enough for normies after all.
/thread

It quit mattering whether you have a soundcard or not.

There was a time that I had one for alsa support, but it's not 2006 anymore so fuck it.

They thought that a 128mb rectangle would settle the masses for longer than it did.
They had no concept of the future and got ate up by zune an aplel.
They should have made phones.

All of their products were complete ass quality-wise.

The muvo was amazing

CPUs got fast enough that every sound processing thing to not need hardware acceleration.

Intel chipsets have built-in dual-core or quad-core audio DSP, pretty much making Creative irrelevant

I think the only device I ever had from them was an HDD mp3 player (mid 00s).

Well, smartphones happened, I guess.

Can't buy the emu teak or purplehearts easily.
Their dac/amp units are very good and probably even ideal for gamers with the positional DSP shit and more importantly the built in microphones and amped mic in but they're horribly over priced.
Sound cards died because companies stopped making them worth buying and $65 external dac/amp combo units from china shit on everything.
The Creative Aurvana Live is wonderful though and a solid buy.

Too bad that they are completely closed source

Vista took the audio stack out of the kernel level and thus made all audio rendering software level from then on. No more hardware accelerated effects like EAX.

This pulled the rug out from under ALL sound card manufacturers, since it basically made a RealTek chip on the same level as any of Creative's offerings since all the heavywork is done in software anyways.

Literally the only thing one soundcard offers from another anymore in Windows is noise separation of the components/less electrical cross talk.