Creative can go to hell, i will never buy anything from them ever. Being personally f***** by them on my Audigy Sound blaster 4 pro, add access to DTS, DolbyD and THX support but when i updated to Windows 7 they removed that from me and asked money to enable it, something i add already paid, when a guy called Daniel_K reversed engineered the drivers and enabled those things to all of us, Creative threatened him with a lawsuit, making the community very angry, then they backtraked when the heat was to much for them. Then was the evil way they killed Aureal by a hostile takeover and buried their A3D tech, much better than EAX 1/2 back then. Then they threatened idsoftware with a patent claim forcing EAX 4 to be implemented at the last minute in Doom 3, then they bought the open source sound API OpenAL, made it closed source and pretty much let it die by not supporting it like they should, that API was the last one with true hardware audio acceleration.
This and other things make me hate this company so much that even if this new thing from them is really impressive, I will not buy it, for me Creative can just die.
And imo it appears to be just a novel way to do HRTF audio and Razor has that, Dolby has that, Rapture3D does that for older OpenAL games, etc.
Most of what you are "Mad" about and lost when going to windows 7 is due to Microsoft:
Windows Vista/Windows 7
Windows Vista features a completely re-written audio stack based on the Universal Audio Architecture. Because of the architectural changes in the redesigned audio stack, a direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers does not exist.[7] DirectSound, DirectMusic and other APIs such as MME are emulated as WASAPI Session instances. DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance. It's likely a supposed performance hit might not be noticeable, depending on the application and actual system hardware. In the case of hardware 3D audio effects played using DirectSound3D, they will not be playable; this also breaks compatibility with EAX extensions.[8]
Third-party APIs such as ASIO and OpenAL are not affected by these architectural changes in Windows Vista, as they use IOCtl to interface directly with the audio driver . A solution for applications that wish to take advantage of hardware accelerated high-quality 3D positional audio is to use OpenAL. However, this only works if the manufacturer provides an OpenAL driver for their hardware.[9]
As of 2007, a solution to re-enable hardware acceleration of DirectSound3D and Audio Effects, such as EAX, called Creative ALchemy was launched.[10] Creative ALchemy intercepts calls to DirectSound3D and translates them into OpenAL calls to be processed by supported hardware such as Sound Blaster X-Fi and Sound Blaster Audigy. For software-based Creative audio solutions, ALchemy utilizes its built-in 3D audio engine without using OpenAL at all.
Realtek, a manufacturer of integrated HD audio codecs, has a product similar to ALchemy called 3D SoundBack. C-Media, a manufacturer of PC sound card chipsets, also has a solution called Xear3D EX, although it works instead by intercepting DirectSound3D calls transparently in the background without any user intervention.
Windows 8
WASAPI audio stack in Windows 8 introduces support for "hardware offloading" of multiple audio streams to the audio card for mixing and effect processing, in addition to the software processing introduced in Vista,[11][12] however the functionality is only exposed for Windows Runtime apps.[13] DirectSound's and DirectMusic's hardware interfaces to sound card drivers are
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound
As for your claim that they told you had to pay for the software to make it work again, that is the first I have heard that, it was all available for free, but required you to install Creatives alchemy software. this is was true for the original Sound Blaster Audigy as well as the X-fi serious I owned. I never was confronted with having to buy anything beyond what came with the card(s).. of course windows 10 screwed it all up worse in my opinion.
As for their business practices, if you view it from a business standpoint, and not a pissed off consumer standpoint, you won't be as mad, As they are a business, which relies on profits, protecting their business,product lines, patents, and eliminating competition. Filing lawsuits, or threatening such lawsuits for patent infringement is not necessarily dirty business, but as a pissed of consumer, you may see it that way. Look around, it is happening everyday from many competitors. (Samsung, Apple, Nvidia, Intel, Amd, etc) The problem is the consumers may end up screwed in the end, which is the case here, and we take it personal and call it dirty business, when in reality, it really isn't. There are dirty business practices, but protecting your patents, filing lawsuits because you believe that XYZ company is in violation of them is not one of them. It doesn't mean you will win the court case, but as a business, you don't look at XYZ company, and go "oh, we think they are in violation of one or more of our patents, we are just going to ignore that, just to be nice"... business does not work that way.
Good news to all of this is because of the explosion of VR, increased focus has been put on audio in games, and there are solutions/middlewares in development that aim to bring real HRTF back to gaming within the limitations of window's native audio systems.
