Andy & Jon:
"While sales of AWE64 have been brisk, if you look
beneath the surface, there really isn't that much
reason to upgrade. Creative has been lucky that their
customers have perceived "wow" where there really is
no "wow". But with the new products, there really
ARE some major improvements and advantages, and
some good reasons to upgrade. "
My comment about being "technically screwed up" mostly refers to the poor utilization and choice of the hardware. As the above quote indicates, basically all the AWE and SB32 series cards are very close to the original AWE32 released in 1994. Because of that, there are a few points to realize. First, it means they haven't spent much time and money on development in recent years and yet are able to sell "old" technology, thus improving product margins. This would be positive in terms of just revenue making, and it's pretty interesting to see a computer product with such a long life span. I mean, over 3 years is incredible. However, the downside is that the lack of further development (I suppose the time and money was spent on the other recently announced products) slowly began to diminish the reputation of the product and allowed other companies to gain market share and OEM deals (Ensoniq in particular). Although it seems Creative didn't notice a signicant enough loss to further any real improvement on the existing products. For example, if 10 where close to the ideal optimum that the product could be, the initial AWE32 would rate maybe 6 or 7, and the newer ones maybe 7 or 8. Now here's an audio example
members.aol.com (which is an Mpeg audio file of about 500kb)
you can use Winamp to hear it if you don't have MP3 players
nullsoft.com
I created and designed this piano on the AWE, but this type of "quality" is as yet undiscovered in their products. Of course there's a number of other major and minor details I won't go into here. Some of them border on hilarious to just plain stupid.
That's why the 10k1 chip is important, it apparently (by the data I've read) utilizes most of their best audio capabilities in a chip that would have a lifespan of about 3-4 if not over 5 years. So if they correctly create products with it, they have the potential to dominate the mid-range and upper semi-pro/pro PC sound market, leaving the 8008 chip to cover the entry level. Of course what I said stands for the 8008 chip too, probably scores about 7-8 out of 10. |
