Is Aureal Dead?

nuntius asks: "I went over to Aureal's Homepage to check for any news drivers, but all I saw was talk of the resignation of all senior staff/executives and talk of Chapter 11. What's happening? When did I miss this?" Looking at the state of Aureal's site, and the plethora of 404's, the obvious conclusion is, at the very least, that things are not going well. It's a shame. Aureal looked to be doing some pretty neat things for the state of Linux Multimedia. Can anyone shed some light on what is going on and whether the company has a future?

Guillemot Buy-out?

[zarmok]

Read on Bluesnews [bluesnews.com] the other day:

Vortex of Sound has obtained a letter from Oakland's Bankruptcy Court that seems to suggest that Guillemot wishes to purchase what's left of Aureal, the beleaguered audio hardware company. If it goes through, this wouldn't be the first time Guillemot bailed out a company in danger of going under - they previously purchased Hercules and Thrustmaster.

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http://www.vortexofsound.com/news.htm [vortexofsound.com]

is the URL.. but I got a DNS lookup fail :-\

RB

Aureal is all but dead

[mmaddox]

4 of Aureal's board members walked out in March of this year, along with all 8 of the company's senior executives. Two weeks later, the company filed for Chapter 11. Now, although Aureal has recently re-filled these management positions, and contends that the Chapter 11 filing was for the purposes of reorganization of their financial affairs, the similar actions of companies like SyQuest and Adlib (remember them?) and their subsequent demise lead me to think that this is about it for Aureal.

This is a shame, too. Good products can fail because of poor management...an axiom that many of us geeks should learn and remember.

Although the company appears all but dead, I would hazard a recommendation that anyone looking to buy a sound card avoid the purchase of any Aureal or Aureal-based products.

Long list of creditors

[Anonymous Coward]

They owe a friend $40,000 for work he did for them and he is not expecting to see very much if any of it. Naturally, he's not pleased. He was amused when CompUSA was selling Aureal soundcards with a rebate! I hope the rebate was from the former, not the latter because the list of creditors would grow all the longer!

Aureal Files

[maggard]

Though their web-site has been butchered the FTP servers and their files remain active. The beta Linux drivers are there as are the beta Win2K drivers. The Win9x drivers and developers kits also remain.

The interesting question is if someone does buy Aureal's technology will they open it (and expect to recoup on hardware sales) or at least license it to developers who can continue to support it.

Sourceforge Project

[Grandal]

A Sourceforge project has been created to hack on the drivers (to update them to work with new kernels, etc. until new ownership does something or the source is released).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/aureal [sourceforge.net]


"Your mother sent me here to kill you..."

Getting in to the website

[The Phantom Blot]

If you go right down to the bottom of their homepage, and click on the "Contact" link, you'll get to a page that still has all of their old menus intact. From there you can find your way around the old (currently unmaintained?) site. Also, believe it or not, I got email tech support out of them just last week. It took about two weeks for a response, but apparently somebody still is sitting there in the office.

Re:Aureal is all but dead

[FigWig]

Good products can fail because of poor management

Not to mention frivolous lawsuits by behemoths like Creative. Those bastards were so use to sitting on their laurels that they tried to crush the superior technology that Aureal developed. The Vortex chip is awesome, far superior to the EAX system that is on the SBLives. It actually does wave tracing to calculate 3d sounds, while EAX just adds reverb and other cheesy effects. EAX can sound pretty good if done right, but A3D sounds awesome. If only the Linux drivers would be open sourced (I think the web site promised this before the company fell apart), I would be a happy man.

Re:Aureal is all but dead

[Quietust]

Though they put so much work into A3D, they seemed to have skimped out on other aspects.
One of the many problems I had with my Vortex2 card was that if I had 2 or more programs using the soundcard, sound would clip horribly. Even if only one of them was producing sound!
The other big problem I ran into was poor SB16 emulation, particularly in its OPL2/OPL3 synthesis which was off-pitch AND failed to produce effects such as vibrato and tremolo, resulting in the music in my old MS-DOS games (like DOOM) sounding rather bland.

Which is why I ended up buying an SB Live! to replace it, only to find that its SB16 emulation does not work AT ALL due to some aspect of my system (possibly the motherboard itself; the DOS drivers don't even work); now I can trade my old Aureal Vortex2 card for a genuine SB16 to use in the system along with the SB Live! :)

-- Sig (120 chars) --
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.

Re:Aureal is all but dead

[pepsee]

If only the Linux drivers would be open sourced (I think the web site promised this before the company fell apart), I would be a happy man.

Ahh...one of the fundamental reasons why people have been advocating OSS all along (open source, not Open Sound System).

Aureal kind of disappointed me

[Felipe Hoffa]

I was a strong suporter of Aureal hardware, I bought the original Monster Sound Card, the MX80, the MX200 and last the MX300. The first two were an easy choice, but when I got the MX300 they had a strong competition from Creative.

One of the reasons I picked the MX300 instead of the Creative, was that Aureal promised the MX300 would play EAX (the creative format) in a short time. Then I needed Linux drivers, and they also promised them.

One year later I wrote them about their promises, and told me both were going to be realized in a few months. Eventually they did, but at that moment I wasn't as happy with them like I had.

Fh