On Wednesday August 29th I attended Creative Labs Audigy press event in Stockholm, Sweden. In addition to presentation and demonstrations of the new Audigy cards and EAX Advanced HD by Neal Leggett (European Brand Manager, Compressed Audio) Leonardo Colucci (European Brand Manager, Speakers) presented the new speaker line-up that will be introduced later this fall. The presentation of course focused on the products that will be introduced in Europe this year but for the most part those will be the same or very similar to what Creative Labs will introduce in America and Asia.

The past, present and the future

Before the product presentations started representatives from Creative Labs gave some info about the companies past, present and future. What follows is a more detailed view than what was part of the press event. 

As some of you probably know Creative Labs was founded in Singapore 1981 by Sim Wong Hoo. The first milestone for the company was the launch of the Creative Music System – C/MS”, a 12 voice-stereo-music synthesiser in 1987. It took a couple more years before Creative Labs was a well known brand with the introduction in 1989 of its first PC audio card, the Soundblaster. For those that don’t remember the card only offered 11-voice FM synthesiser and 8 bit mono playback. If that wasn’t bad enough you usually ended up connecting it to a tiny cheap 2.0 speaker powered with perhaps 1 Watts RMS. However, this was still a huge improvement over what most of us had used before, the infamous PC speaker.

The Soundblaster Pro (1991) added stereo and a year later Creative Labs brought 16 bit stereo playback on the PC to the masses. A daughtercard offering wavetable synthesizers instead of the lousy FM synthesiser was also introduced but it took a couple more years (1994) before the wavetable synthesizers was part of the card with the introduction of the AWE32. Creative was rather late with making wavetable synthesis a standard part of the card making many, including myself, look elsewhere (Gravis Ultrasound) but most still went with the excellent compatibility over excellent MIDI playback. However with the introduction of the AWE32 few gamers (myself included) had a compelling reason to look elsewhere. Especially considering id Software semi broke the Gravis Ultrasound code when they added support for AWE32 to Doom and later Doom II.

Creative released a few upgrades of this card (AWE64, AWE64Gold) but the next (not including the PCI cards they got when they bought Ensoniq) major milestone was with the introduction of the Live 1998. Again Creative Labs was late offering a PCI card and many users probably thought Creative Labs days as the market leader were numbered. The Live, EAX, several software and a couple hardware upgrades changed all that and today few if any questions that Creative Labs will remain a major player in the PC audio business for years to come. The company sales exceed 1 billion US dollars/year and the company has over 5000 employees world wide. 50% of the sales are in America, 35% from Europe and the remaining 15% from Asia.  In quantity Creative claims (on their website) over 100 million soundblaster users and 25 million installed PCI soundcards. In addition to being the market leader by a huge margin in the PC soundcard business they are now also, at least in Europe, number one when it comes to multimedia retail speaker market (17% in Germany according to a recent report).

Even though the major threat to Creative Labs the last few years filed chapter 11 in the Spring 2000 (Aureal which Creative Labs later acquired) several new competitors have appeared (Philips, Hercules, Analog Devices and Nvidia) and some old ones like Cirrus Logic and ESS still remains. In the PC speaker market the market is even more crowded. In addition to the competitors the major current threats are the market slowdown and external threats to the PC gaming market, that is the console market. However despite the current economic slowdown that has been hitting the PC market especially hard, and some people questioning the future of the PC gaming, Creative Labs didn’t seem to have any worries about the future of the PC audio market in general or the PC gaming market.

In fact the presentation started with how the Swedish part of the company will expand quite a bit this year due to Swedish office taking on responsibility for all the market and sales in Sweden instead of the Creative Labs Denmark. This will mean an increased focus on the Swedish market and Creative Labs Sweden expects to increase sales this year. This change is a clear sign that the optimistic view of the future shown during the presentations was not just for show. There was also no doubt Creative Labs representatives were really enthusiastic about the new Audigy soundcard line-up and the EAX Advanced HD technology it features as well as the new speaker systems, in particular the MegaWorks 510D.

So on to Audigy Presentation