MacGamer today posted an incisive editorial by Corey Támas on Creative Labs' handling of their Sound Blaster Live! audio card.

Támas remarks on the powerful role sound can play in creating an immersive environment for the gamer and on the tremendous potential of the Sound Blaster Live! and of EAX and OpenAL, Creative's 3D sound APIs, for realizing such immersion.

It is a potential, however, that has so far remained largely unrealized, and Támas lays the responsibility for this failure squarely where it belongs:

Functionally, we have no product from Creative Labs at this time. Even those who can stomach the unstable drivers in OS 9 won't be doing so for much longer, as the entire Mac community, willing or not, will eventually migrate to OS X—at which point the Sound Blaster is nothing more than a paperweight. This is bad news for a variety of reasons: Firstly because we lose the use of a good product. More importantly, however, is that Creative Labs could do what so many experienced-on-PC but new-to-Mac companies do: Blame the Mac market for the failure. Far too many times we see a company launch a Mac product (without the benefit of experience and research that Mac-oriented companies have) and when they don't make it fly on the first attempt, they pack up their little red wagon and go home, claiming that the market is dying and warning every other company off of it. Creative Labs may have already gone this far, as their silence to the Mac community is deafening and there's no testament to indifference like a product that sits, undeveloped and off the public radar.

IMG Review: Sound Blaster Live!

MacGamer: My Unrequited Love for Creative Labs

Sound Blaster Live!

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