Sound cards: an industry that has long been dominated by the likes of Creative; with their Sound Blaster series of add-on devices. One could say that using the aforementioned company products is a mixed bag as they blessed us with decent voice synthesis to replace the old Adlib cards. Since then Creative has dominated the market with a slowly increasing line of products. However the other side of the coin is that a rising company back in 1992 (around the time when Doom was launched) going by the name of ‘Advanced Gravis’- released the Ultrasound range of cards (or GUS was its friendly moniker) they for a short while gave Creative a run for their money; with its first generation wave table cards, programmable musical instruments etc. However the world was hooked like sheep onto the Sound Blaster name and despite having a big name in the music world and being technically superior in every way, the advanced Gravis Ultrasound died a lonely death! This reviewer remembers this sound card with great fondness.
Recently Creative has courted controversy by deliberately disabling certain features in their drivers so as to cause complications in Windows Vista. This was done in order to force owners to purchase their Alchemy software which re-enabled those same features again. A gentleman known as Daniel_k discovered this issue and re-enabled the features again, by the use of a software hack. Creative then threatened to prosecute the aforementioned gentleman; however this all back-fired when Daniel reported this to the press and instantly Creative shares dropped by seven percent overnight. Anyone whom uses Creative sound cards will freely recognize the bloatware drivers and the issue of the aforementioned drivers causing a slower boot up time.
Today Overclockers Tech can possibly offer the consumer an alternative by Asus, namely the Xonar Essence ST! Billed as a musicians sound card first and a gamers card second, one can not help but be thrown back to the year 1992 and the era of the Advanced Gravis Ultrasound!
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