Oh it's good to see Creative's infamous hardware incompatability proficiency expanding into the enterprise market.. As if ****ing SoHo users wasn't enough.
is there really a need to make "better" sound cards or is their defenition of better, "hey, i got it, we will stick 42 multi function ports on the card, just like the old days" seriously i like my sb live 5.1 and im cntent, is there such a thing as better sound? all the proccessing chips that ANY sound card company uses is made by the same company
Actually there's significant variation amoung manufacturers in solutions for the D->A portion of the sound card. (A good D->A converter is expensive and the price/performance scaling is definitely not linear). A lot of devices use the same (or similar) basic chips made by the same companies. But the key thing is that its a *system* of chips, not just a single chip stuck on a board. In the case of sound cards this means significant sound differences. And yes there's very good measures of *better* sound, most notably in the digital domain in the form of bit and sampling rates as well as in the analog domain in Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), both of which occur due to the limited precision of D->A's amoung other factors.
Okay, since the people here don't seem to know what the deal is, I'll fill you in. That's not a sound card. It's E-Mu's new sampler. The Emulator series of samplers has been around for decades. Creative purcahsed E-Mu a little while back, along with Ensoniq, another major manufacturer of electronic musical instruments. While both E-Mu and Ensoniq have seen their logos stamped on PC sound cards since the acquisition, what you're looking at stems from the musical instrument heritage, and is a direct follow-up to E-Mu's standalone hardware samplers just as the E4XT and such. (As an example, the instrument that Ferris Bueller uses to make the noises of him being sick at the beginning of Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a very old Emulator-series sampler.)
In recent years, samplers have begun moving to software. There are a lot of players in this market, but primarily players that do not have a strong background in the hardware sampler market. Native Instruments weighed in with Kontakt, IK Multimedia with SampleTank, emagic (now an Apple holding) with the EXS24, Steinberg with Halion, MOTU with Mach V, etc. These are all software-based instruments from company whose background is software. What's groundbreaking about the package you're showing here is that E-Mu is the old-school stalwart of hardware samplers, and this is their first software-based instrument of this sort, bearing the name of their premiere and HIGHLY respected Emulator series. These are very, very, very proud instruments, used by every major name in the music business.
Anyway, the package here uses software and hardware both to create a best-of-both-worlds situation. Because it runs on your PC, it can use the copious amounts of RAM and hard disk available and use your screen and keyboard and mouse to have a wonderful user interface, just as the new generation software samplers do. However, because it comes with a package of hardware, it has the prolific I/O of a hardware sampler, and it can offload a great deal of processing for effects and so on onto the included card, like a hardware sampler.
The key thing is that you are not looking at a sound card, you are looking at a musical instrument. All of that hardware is intended for use with the bundled program, to function as one instrument, one unit. It's not meant to reproduce your system sounds or anything else. It will operate standalone or as a plugin to programs like Cubase, etc.
I hope that that clears up a lot of the confusion in these responses.
Incidentally, you can find out the whole scoop by either visiting the product website or picking up pretty much any major music magazine. I know, for instance, that Keyboard Magazine is running a review this month, and I think that Sound on Sound may be also. It's a pretty hot piece of gear, so there should be reviews all over the place.
Just to put the heritage in perspective, here, the Emulator product line has existed since before the Sound Blaster product line existed, and in fact, before Creative existed as a company. E-Mu Systems was founded in 1972, nine years before Creative existed in any form. The Emulator (I) -- the first product in the product line you're discussing here -- came out in 1981. Creative Technology was founded the same year in Singapore, but didn't become Creative Labs in the U.S. until 1988, seven years later. The Emulator II came out in 1984. The Emulator III followed in 1987, and then the last of their completely hardware releases in the line, the Emulator IV and the E4XT Ultra (the "Ultra" line was a new generation based on the same archirecture as the Emulator IV line) came out in 1995 and 1999, respectively. The Emulator X Studio continues this product line by both being the first child of the family to exist within the confines of a PC instead of as a standalone unit and also to be the first entirely new product in the line in almost a decade, which is very exciting news.
Comments
In recent years, samplers have begun moving to software. There are a lot of players in this market, but primarily players that do not have a strong background in the hardware sampler market. Native Instruments weighed in with Kontakt, IK Multimedia with SampleTank, emagic (now an Apple holding) with the EXS24, Steinberg with Halion, MOTU with Mach V, etc. These are all software-based instruments from company whose background is software. What's groundbreaking about the package you're showing here is that E-Mu is the old-school stalwart of hardware samplers, and this is their first software-based instrument of this sort, bearing the name of their premiere and HIGHLY respected Emulator series. These are very, very, very proud instruments, used by every major name in the music business.
Anyway, the package here uses software and hardware both to create a best-of-both-worlds situation. Because it runs on your PC, it can use the copious amounts of RAM and hard disk available and use your screen and keyboard and mouse to have a wonderful user interface, just as the new generation software samplers do. However, because it comes with a package of hardware, it has the prolific I/O of a hardware sampler, and it can offload a great deal of processing for effects and so on onto the included card, like a hardware sampler.
The key thing is that you are not looking at a sound card, you are looking at a musical instrument. All of that hardware is intended for use with the bundled program, to function as one instrument, one unit. It's not meant to reproduce your system sounds or anything else. It will operate standalone or as a plugin to programs like Cubase, etc.
I hope that that clears up a lot of the confusion in these responses.
Incidentally, you can find out the whole scoop by either visiting the product website or picking up pretty much any major music magazine. I know, for instance, that Keyboard Magazine is running a review this month, and I think that Sound on Sound may be also. It's a pretty hot piece of gear, so there should be reviews all over the place.