Hands over your ears, ASUS and Creative ignite the 'Sound Wars'

Mike Bantick
Thursday, 27 March 2008 05:00

Your IT - Entertainment

Before Vista came along, sound card manufacturer Creative had an iron grip on the market, now they find themselves defending their EAX sound technology against dubious claims by rival ASUS.

ASUS have raised the ire of competitor Creative with the release of their Xonar DX PC sound card, claiming; "the latest EAX effects and DirectSound out of the box"—even in Windows Vista.

Vista made things difficult for Creative by dropping hardware support for the directsound API.  Meaning signed drivers for Creative based sound hardware have been difficult to come across.

In a statement however from the Creative Labs VP of Corporate Communications Phil O’Shaughnessy, it seems ASUS entering the same space (including pricing) as Creative has put the venerable company over the edge.

The statement reads;

Hello from Creative,

With respect for you and your readers, we wish to share this important information. With its recent driver updates, Asus is misleading its customers by suggesting that its sound cards now support EAX 5. Asus sound cards do not support EAX 5, nor do they support EAX 3 or EAX 4. There are a small number of PC game titles that specifically query the audio device on the system to see if EAX 5 is available before they will attempt to render more than 64 3D simultaneous audio voices. The new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities in order to get these games to ouptut 3D audio on Asus sound cards. Asus customers are not getting a genuine EAX Advanced HD experience with this driver update. Furthermore, the several hundred games that support EAX 3 or EAX 4 for delivering in-game effects will not provide those effects from Asus sound cards.

Thank you,

The Xonar DX is now available (in the U.S. at least) and has the same price as the Creative Labs X-Fi XtremeGamer card at US$89. 

I would be surprised if we have heard the last shots fired in this latest battleground for gamer and audiophile dollars.