Firstly this is just a heads up for those Cubase users who have found themselves with a Creative Audigy RX soundcard in the last couple of months. On one level it is a great card - does a nice job for not many $$ at all - however it’s ASIO drivers leave something to be desired.
Once upon a time I had the old Creative EMU series soundcards with a comprehensive set of drivers - however somewhere along the line Creative decided to provide two flavours of driver - one “locked” to 48kbps the other “locked” to 96kbps - no ASIO driver for other bitrates at all.
AS documented elsewhere on the Steinberg site - this causes real problems when trying to use projects set up for anything other than these bit rates - unwanted pitch shifting in software synths and pitch/timing issues with audio tracks/samples.
To cut a long story short I am using ASIO4All drivers to get a full range of rates with the card and Cubase 7.
I have also contacted Creative support to ask the …what the…? question - they have confirmed this is the behaviour (the support tech was shocked to confirm this was the case) but no plan to fix as far as I can tell.
Does anyone know the history on this with Creative and why is looks next to impossible that it will change in future ??
Around the turn of the century (2000 2001) Creative introduced the new Audigy series. Up 'til this time Creative had been losing crdibility as a serious soundcard manufacturer for the pro music business. One special version of the Audigy - the Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro (and only this model) was directly targeted for the pro-audio market, it’s specs matching and even exceeding some of the top of the line soundcards at the time. Unfortunately this didn’t succeed in repairing their tainted reputation and was largely ignored by the proaudio industry. They seem to have decided to stick to their prime market - gameing and mulitimedia applications since then offering only mediocre specs., capability, compatibility (incl. drivers) - more for music hobbyists. Pity, but for serious work, creative has unfortunately left the building.
E-Mu Tech Support claims to be back in action, but I’ve seen NO indication that they’re seriously committed to supporting pro products, and they’ve even taken the old E-Mu products off the Emu site. My takeway: if your Creative/E-mu product works as expected, good for it, keep using it. But don’t expect them to fix, update, or improve it. And keep an eye out for potential replacements so when it does fail, you won’t be stymied trying to find something as capable as what you’re used to. In fact, you might not.
