Creative's Sound Blaster Z SE promises an even better audio experience

vegeta535 I would rephrase the question:

Seriously, who uses a soundblaster anymore?

All the audiophiles are using digital output to expensive receivers, or studio monitor speakers. Or they're buying USB DACs. Or they're using anything that isn't a Creative Labs sound card.

Everyone else... I mean if you care enough to want something other than onboard audio (or the native HDMI audio output from your video card), why would you buy a soundblaster card anyways? That's just trading one perceived problem (lower quality, electrical noise, whatever else audiophiles go on about) for the same one (with the added benefit of Creative's "wonderful" software).
 
GotNoRice said:
Not really. Creative got a reputation for bad drivers in the Windows 98 / Sound Blaster Live! era, and early XP era, and have never really been able to live that down. They started getting their act together about 15 years ago and their drivers are actually very good now. There have been some issues in the last couple of years that helped to perpetuate their reputation for bad drivers, even though none of it was their fault. The Windows 10 1903 update for example made some significant changes to the way audio works in Windows 10, which caused most Creative sound cards to stop working. Many jumped to the conclusion that Creative did something wrong, when it was in-fact purely a Microsoft issue. Creative responded to the problem Microsoft caused by promptly releasing new drivers for every card they made going all the way back to the X-Fi series, including the earliest models which were released in mid 2005. Releasing new drivers for 15+ year old sound cards is what I would consider to be an example of good driver support, not bad driver support. Consider that Nvidia and AMD usually abandon support for cards when they are half that old.
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You're forgetting something else. Creative was going to start charging people for drivers and driver updates. They only backed off after massive backlash. This was during the time of the Live! cards. Even trying to do that was more than enough to turn me off Creative and I've never owned another one of their products since.
 
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