CL Buys Aureal

[Electric Amish]

http://www.clubic.com/n/n1080.html

It's in French.

[Jammrock]

Translation anybody?

[paulcs]

I ran the article through Babelfish and then attempted to translate Babelfish's translation. Hopefully, I didn't screw it up.

"Guillemot was first to express interest in purchasing Aureal, although our sources tell us that Creative Labs was successful in its efforts to buy the company.

"Although Guillemot had initially bid $8 million, Creative countered soon afterwards with a bid of $11 million, and finally $21 million. 3DFx had also shown interest but could not submit its bid in time.

"The sale includes Aureal's assets (trademark, domain names, designs and patents, goodwill, stocks and appropriations customers) such as A3D technology and the Vortex processors, as well as the abandonment of the Aureal's lawsuit against Creative. This last point makes it possible to comprehend the multi-media leader's eagerness to acquire the late company at all costs."

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 29 August 2000).]

[paulcs]

I have no idea of what an "appropriations customer" is other than Babelfish's translation of "les crédits clients." At first I thought it meant "creditors," but that wouldn't make sense in the context of the sentence.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Mark F]

"appropriations customer"

I think that means the buyer. CL wants to buy/appropriate (well releave them of there insolvancy) AUREAL so that makes them the customer.

From Paul's translation it sounds like the site translated some info from last week, about CL's attempts to accuire AUREAL. The sticking point in this offer was the demand that the suite be droped against them.

If it's real some of the US sites should have it up already; or no latter than today/this evening in US. If you don't hear anything else then things are safe for the moment. If not a 'moment of silence' please.

Mark F.

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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a DVD...
and burped out a movie

[Schorsch]

When I saw this thread, the next thing I did was to go to www.vortexofsound.com which seems to be the most reliable site when it comes to Aureal news. And I was relieved to see that no final deal has been made so far (if CL buys Aureal, I'll never see a new driver for my good old Vortex 1 card...)

[Jammrock]

I don't see why everyone is so upset. I had an Ensoniq AudioPCI before CL bought them out. They didn't stop updating the drivers once CL bought them out.

Now whether it would be a good thing if CL bought them out is a differnt story. If CL buys Aureal then there will be practically no competition in the 3D audio arena. Some other small companies have chips, but they're nowhere near the quality as CL or Aureal.

Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Jammrock

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Athlon 650, Biostar board, 128 MB PC133 (Crucial), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, 10/100 NIC, lots of case fans, etc...

[Mark F]

I don't see why everyone is so upset. I had an Ensoniq AudioPCI before CL bought them out. They didn't stop updating the drivers once CL bought them out.

Yeah, but CL used Ensoniq's chip and then technology. They just what to drive a stake in AUREAL's heart.

Mark F.

ps. And I want my SQ3500!!


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OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a DVD...
and burped out a movie

[DuRaNgO]

If CL was smart , they would continue to carry both lines, talk about market share!
jim

[This message has been edited by DuRaNgO (edited 31 August 2000).]

[thecurse]

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If CL was smart , they would continue to carry both lines, talk about market share!
jim
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and twice the support calls and development of nw drivers. 10 to 1 odds they butcher aureal.

ensoniq they wanted for a reason -- pci sound cards. ensoniq was who first got pci sound cards that worked under dos for compatability. cl then put a sticker over the ensoniq chip and called it the cl pci64.

i owned an ensoniq pci sound card when cl bought them out(i could not get isa and pci cards to coexist nicely in my hp netserver that i was using as a workstation). at first i was mad because i thought oh great no more drivers for me but fortunatly i was wrong.


with aureal gone cl has more than the lons share of the market only a few other companies exist that make sound cards: ess, and yamaha are the only two i can think of off of the top of my head and they exist mainly because of being cheap onboard solutions not because of stellar sound quality.

[Thundrchez]

Try to get Creative drivers to work with an Ensoinq ES1370 based AudioPCI card. They don't work. Support? Only for the ES1371 and newer based AudioPCI cards.

Aureal made some really fine stuff.

[paulcs]

I've checked recently. Creative, unless I've missed something, has not update Esoniq drivers in over a year. That, as far as I'm concerned, is Diamond-like support. Here's a link:

http://www.creativehelp.com/files/do...8&prod=sb_ensq

You'll note the August 1999 date.

Creative updated drivers on their flagship audio product, the Soundblaster Live, in November of 1999 and in May of 2000. Honestly, I may have missed something, but this product has had more than its share of conflicts and needs all the driver support it can get.

We all should be concerned about this potential purchase. Many thinking people on the Creative newsgroups, when Aureal's fiscal problems were exposed, became very nervous about this situation. They felt that Creative's lackluster driver support for the Live board would only get worse without Aureal, at least in part, keeping them honest.

Creative, on the other hand, handles their NVIDIA drivers very differently. Although the drivers, of course, are based upon NVIDIA's reference drivers, Creative has been truly innovative in this regard. And that, I suspect, is because they have lots of competition in the GeForce market.

I have three Creative and three Aureal boards. I can't see anything good coming out of this sale. We won't have a choice, and Creative will know that we don't have a choice.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 01 September 2000).]