Hi everybody, I just came across this German article about the future of EAX 3-4: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/81212What ist basically says, is, that modern Creative hardware will be rendered usless with default Windows Vista, because Vista audio is routed differently. Meaning, onboard sound devices which fulfil the Vista requirements will be more than enough to generate Vista audio. Otherwise, it's certainly much too technical for me. Maybe 'The Musicians' amongst us know more? :-) And just to raise the subject in case somebody intends to buy a seperate soundcard and use Vista in the foreseeable future... It might be a non-dureable investment? Digging a wee bit deeper, I came across the following interview with Creative's Darragh O'Toole (March 2006) which contains a couple mentions about sound & Vista (mainly in the last third): http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/multim...-interview.htmlIn this interview, these lines seem to stand out: Quote Darragh O'Toole: >>It appears that Vista will not support a Direct hardware patch and will have a DS SW layer. As this is not an optimal signal path, involving latency and CPU software processing overhead, OpenAL will be the API of choice for programming game audio for best performance and access to hardware accelerated features.<< End quote ...this is not an optimal signal path, involving latency and CPU software processing overhead... Huh, isn't that in opposition to the proposed performance increases under Vista? Or was that never proposed? In the interview with Heise, O'Toole considered Creative more collateral damage than anything else. He states he doesn't consider MS' efforts a move to sideline Creative. Apparently, it's due to the new security philosophy... Truuusstt us! ;-) Anyway, could well be things have changed since March? OTOH, looking at the German article, they haven't. As usual, comments, knowledge, thoughts, ideas, feelings, insight, etc welcome. :-) Kind regards Jaap Pls note there seems to be workarounds for this matter http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.htmlbut they likely are or will be non-standard. Standard MS that is...

As an aside, the reason that sound is changing with Vista is actually because there is Good Reason, even though it has been worded in such a way that it looks like baby and bathwater in that article.In Vista the entire audio process is moved out of the kernel and into user mode. No more kernel mode device drivers, including sysaudio.sys, kmixer.sys, wdmaud.sys, redbook.sys, etc, which in truth were known ONLY for their unreliability - not surprising, as most were originally designed for the Windows 3.1 environment!. In Vista and beyond, the only kernel mode drivers for audio are the actual audio drivers and portcls.sys, the high level audio port driver. The second major change is a totally revamped UI for audio. Sndvol32 and mmsys.cpl are rewritten to include new, higher quality visuals, in keeping with the requirements of Vista and to focus on the common tasks that users actually need to do. Basically, until Vista, sound was operating as the long-lost black sheep of the family - known, but studiously ignored for the most part, unless it had to be invited to the party! No significant developments in the sound API had really taken place since DX5 days, and Vista is supposedly going to offer a far more robust and flexible soundbase, including backward comaptibility via the DX9.0L API, which DOES include sound support for EAX, AFAIK.It was a system that was becoming overloaded, well overdue retirement, and increasingly responsible for erros, CTD's and worse in the OS. It was the weakest link. Goodbye!Details of inbuilt user benefits from here:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060907-7682.htmlNow that's not to say that its all good news. There is still considerable doubt about the capabilities of Vista in pro-audio circles, even among those who worked on Vista!http://createdigitalmusic.com/2006/06/27/i...s-music-on-mac/Of course, the reasonable answer is that almost all pro audio works better, and is designed for a Mac. But there are still a a lot of people like myself who have near Pro-level home equipment running through a Windows environment who are distinctly twitchy about the absence of firm information since early beta time. I simply cannot afford, nor would wish to have the aggravation of, changing all my hardware and software to suit Vista. But if I had to, then I would ONLY change to a standalone Mac, anyway. There are many advantages to starting afresh in a Mac environment. None whatsoever demonstrated with moving to a Vista one.It might be that MS are keeping this quiet, ready for an true audio `push` when they release Zune and that in the meantime it is just being inlcuded with Vista, not promoted. Or of course it could be that they haven't actualy addressed any of the concerns and don't intend making Vista an audio-friendly platform, except through Windows Media Centre.But none of this will affect gaming users, regardless what anyone is saying about EAX being abandoned. It's not `abandoned`, it's obsolete. Oh well.Allcott

Hi Allcott, thanks a lot for your detailed reply and the links. Very interesting. Some Vista features really seem to make sense, as they probably should... :-) The per-app mixing feature i.e. In your second link there's this line: >>Vista will have a completely rewritten audio stack with lower latency and per-app mixing