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Sim Wong Hoo has died

theedgesingapore.com

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Re: Sim Wong Hoo has died

#7
Known in the US as Creative Labs.

Mercy, those Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live PCI cards (CT4830) were like the default go-to option for everyone for years & years. Every system build got one! They were reasonably priced & considered pretty decent! Motherboards had pretty bad onboard sound if any at all, up until an Nvidia chipset started sometimes having some good implementations (the nForce chipset with integrated SoundStorm, the same DSP-based chipset as on the Xbox, and boasting a very rare Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding capability), so in went a Live! (Value) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Live!

I kept my computers in closets & ran extended HDMI & USB extension cable runs to workstations for about a decade, and the Creative Labs X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro (SB1090) and latter X-Fi HD (SB1095) were my go to card for a long long time. Again, cheap-enough, and acceptable DACs.

Re: Sim Wong Hoo has died

#8
post #4

I will remember Creative as the company that purchased two of the greatest music synthesizer companies, E-Mu and Ensoniq, merged them, and then destroyed them.

This. Creative had scale and ability to reduce costs for both E-MU and Ensoniq. These companies had extensive silicon design and fab experience (Dave Rossum is still at it in fact) that could have been leveraged and some truly innovative products could have been made.

Still computer software was rapidly eating the Audio hardware market and things like samplers started to seem both redundant and one and the same thing. (Akai s5000 and Z series were basically a pc)

I’m sure it was not an easy call to kill the hardware business for emu/ensoniq but I wish they hadn’t.

Edit: I will also forever think of this video when I hear the name creative labs- https://youtu.be/h73kd6wsBq0

Re: Sim Wong Hoo has died

#9
One of very few Singaporean semi companies which made it.

The only one I would list second to it would be Espressif, which makes ESP8266 and ESP32.

I lived in Singapore as a student 2007-2009.

Re: Sim Wong Hoo has died

#10
post #4

I will remember Creative as the company that purchased two of the greatest music synthesizer companies, E-Mu and Ensoniq, merged them, and then destroyed them.

I will remember Creative as the company that issued repeated lawsuits against Aureal Semiconductor (losing repeatedly), then bought their assets when Aureal was forced to declare bankruptcy due to legal fees.
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