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Creative Releases New Vista Drivers

For the non E-Mu 10kx line

Jun 29, 2007 16:56 GMT  ·  By
Creative's X-Fi Elite Pro
   Creative's X-Fi Elite Pro

If you've already read the subtitle you're probably wondering what Creative products are not based on the original E-Mu 10kx design. Well, in order to answer that, a little history lesson is needed. The first Creative ever based on the E-Mu 10k1 line of APUs was the 1997 SoundBlaster live. From then on up until the last Audigy 4 Pro, all Creative's cards were based on the 10k1 and later on the 10k2 series of chips produced by E-Mu. As a result they packed similar features and the quality of the sound was about the same if equally matched DACs were used. X-Fi on the other hand has a totally new APU and doesn't have the same 48-bit fixed processing all the Audigys and Lives have.

However besides the E-mu 10kx line and the newer X-Fi series, Creative has also produced some low-end cards which come without any DSP whatsoever. Among them you can find the Audigy LS, SoundBlaster Live 24-bit, Audigy Value and even an X-Fi Gamer Edition (twice as cheap as the X-Fi Xtreme Music and a lot thinner - looks just like a 64-bit Nvidia card). These were pretty good performers when it came to music as they featured pretty capable DACs but they lacked EAX support (bigger than 2.0 version) and they sucked a CPU dry due to the fact that they didn't possess a proper DSP. And the introduction of Vista changed matters from bad to worse since Creative hasn't released any drivers for these cards in a while.

However after the updated X-Fi drivers for Vista it seems that Creative went back to a more humane approach. Because three days ago they released a new driver for Vista which greatly improves the performance of CA106-DAT cards under this particular OS. The supported cards are the Audigy LS, Audigy SE, Audigy Value and the Live! 24-bit, all of them using the infamous CA106-DAT chipset. Owners of these cards will now have access to the Creative Labs Audio console, the various EAX settings and a dedicated speaker setup application already available in non-Vista drivers. EAX effects are still here and you will also have full control over the SPDIF sampling rate. The drivers can be found here.

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