In 2021, I bought a soundbar from Creative. The quality of the soundbar was actually pretty good, but it had a really awful noisegate issue where if the scene was too quiet, it would just cut to zero. For some movies this wasn't a big deal, but for most movies it made them unwatchable.

We put up with it for a year, but we got sick of it and I was about to buy a replacement. I tried the updated firmware on Creative's website, and it didn't help, but then I found some YouTube video with like 10 views that claimed to have a fixed firmware from Creative that wasn't publicly available, and they had a link to some shady mega.co.nz download for it. Stuff like that screams "malware!", but I figured that I was about to throw the soundbar into the Goodwill pile anyway, so if I break it no big deal, and it's not like the soundbar was connected to the internet, just optical audio, and I don't think anyone could install a crypto minor on there, so against my better judgement I installed the firmware and...

It worked! It fixed the noisegate problems entirely, and now the soundbar is actually excellent. For some reason, Creative still hasn't bothered uploading the fixed firmware on their website though.

So it's weird, Creative is still around, and making theoretically-decent products, but they lack a lot of polish. Kind of a sad fall from grace.

Aureal made 3D audio for the first time - real 3D audio, ray-traced sound - and it was absolutely staggeringly amazing. I played the first Half-Life using this. It was incredible - unforgettable.

Creative destroyed them, to destroy the competition, and that technology far as I know has since then been lost - the 3D stuff I know of after that is not ray-traced.