Creative is a brand name. It manufactures a lot of sound related products, such as MP3 player, audio/sound card, speaker system, etc.
Its Sound Blaster card is very strong brand and has an outstanding sound quality in the sound card market from 1987.
It is the No 1 in the world.
I used Sound Blaster 16 around 1995. Pic from Wiki.
It introduced 16-bit digital audio sampling to the Sound Blaster line. Natively supported FM synthesis through a Yamaha OPL-3 chip. The cards also featured a connector for add-on daughterboards with wavetable synthesis (actually, sample-based synthesis) capabilities complying to the General MIDI standard. This card made the computer game hears really at the first time.
Later I used Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Pic from Wiki.
The card I used is Live 5.1. It supported 5.1 channels. Included center speaker and subwoofer. This time it make the movie playback better than before. The movies begin to use Dolby Digital 5.1. The VCD is also starting popular.
Now I use Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. Pic from Creative official site.
The Audigy 2 ZS supports up to 7.1 speakers (although the 4.1 speaker configuration was still in reality only 4.0; a dedicated low-frequency-effects channel output was only available with 5.1 and higher, requiring the presence of a centre speaker). I don’t have 7.1 speakers. So I keep using my Creative 5.1 speaker system.
It has a 1394 port. I can use it connect my Canon DV with my computer.
I do like Creative Sound Card. It is better than the on-board sound.
