To thwart the competition, we moved quickly to launch newer and better sound cards almost every other year. X-Fi today is Sound Blaster in its tenth-generation glory. And to-date, we have launched a total of 6 completely new audio platforms (marked with *):

1989 - *Sound Blaster (8-bit mono, 100K transistor/1MIPS)

1990 - Sound Blaster Pro (8-bit stereo)

1992 - *Sound Blaster 16 (16-bit stereo)

1994 - *Sound Blaster AWE32 (EMU8K APU, 32-voice wave-table)

1996 - Sound Blaster AWE64 (64-voice wave-table, 90+ dB)

1998 - *Sound Blaster Live! (EMU10K1 APU, 2M transistors)
           EAX® (new audio standard for Windows®)

1999 - 100 millionth Sound Blaster shipped

2000 - Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 (5.1 Surround output)

2001 - *Sound Blaster Audigy (24-bit, 5.1 output, 100+ dB)
           EAX ADVANCED HD (24-bit / 2nd generation EAX)

2002 - Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (6.1 output, EAX ADVANCED HD 3.0)

2003 - Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (7.1 output)

2004 - Sound Blaster Audigy 4 (7.1, EAX ADVANCED HD 4.0)

2005 - *Sound Blaster X-Fi (51M transistor APU/10,000MIPS)
           EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 (128 3D voices)

The Sound Blaster APUs evolved and grew as fast as CPUs did. In fact, it outpaced the famous Moore's Law which states that the CPU will grow 2X in speed every 18 months. The Sound Blaster X-Fi has over 10,000 MIPS and if you compound that over the last 16 years, the Sound Blaster performance has increased 2.5X every 18 months, netting an astonishing ten thousand fold increase. In terms of processing power, the X-Fi processor has beaten the current top end Pentium 4 (3.6GHz), which also has about 50 million-plus transistors.

Do you really need all that ten thousand million-instructions-per-second to process audio? You bet! - Not just any audio, but Xtreme Fidelity Audio. And if you have more MIPS to spare, our audio research scientists will chew them up in a blink. Back to 1990, when the Sound Blaster Pro was launched; it was a much improved 2nd generation stereo sound card, but still 8-bit. Due to its weak IP protection mentioned earlier, it was the card that almost all copycats used as a basis for their copying. Even till this day, besides Creative, no one else has dared to claim compatibility beyond the Sound Blaster Pro. And when Microsoft bundled the Sound Blaster Pro audio drivers into their newly launched Windows 3.1 in 1991, the Sound Blaster Pro effectively became the de facto audio standard for PCs. However, with one inadvertent stroke, this bundling opened the floodgates to all copycats, most of whom had no capability to write their own audio drivers. Ironically, the copycats may have helped to reinforce our Sound Blaster Pro standard.

By 1992, with the Sound Blaster 16, PC audio had the same capabilities of CD audio that samples at 16-bit/44.1KHz. But the audio quality of these early generation 16-bit soundcards (in the high 70s dB), while good, was not yet at the level of high end Hi-Fi equipment.

In 1994, we departed from Yamaha technology and took over the role as torch bearer for all new PC audio technologies. We introduced the new Sound Blaster AWE32 with advanced wave-table technology from our newly acquired subsidiary E-MU, which supplies ultra high end Digital Audio Workstation products for the professional market. Using E-MU's new EMU8K APU, armed with almost 500 thousand transistors, the performance of PC MIDI music, for the first time, outperformed those in the pro-music market. It was only about a year later that E-MU used the EMU8K chip in their highest end digital audio workstations. By then, the Sound Blaster AWE32's quality had reached high 80s dB, a hairline away from high end Hi-Fi equipment.

By 1996, the Sound Blaster AWE64, boasting audio quality of over 90dB, attained Hi-Fi status. It was a historical moment for us at Creative. Over the next few years, AWE64 single handedly contributed over US$500 million of gross profit for the company.

In 1997, our de facto audio standard under DOS was getting old and DOS was going away; we needed to replace it with a new PCI-based audio standard under Windows 95®. Several new PC audio players entered the market at this disruptive juncture to try to establish theirs as the new PCI audio standard. The race was on.

In 1998, we delivered a whole new PCI audio chip to the market which powered the Sound Blaster Live!. The EMU10K1 APU, with over 2 million transistors and unprecedented audio processing power and performance of 335 MIPS, blew the competition away. We also developed a new audio platform under Windows called Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX). In order to firmly establish EAX as the new audio standard under Windows, we took the risky route of opening up this sophisticated audio EAX API (Application Interface) to the entire industry, free of charge.

From that day onward, we never looked back. Our leadership position in digital audio was secured.

In 1999, exactly 10 years after Sound Blaster was launched, we shipped our 100-millionth Sound Blaster.

Never in my wildest dreams did I dare imagine that a particular model of any high tech product could last more than 5 years (most last less than 2 years), but the Sound Blaster 16 did. Eight years later, in 1999, it was still in high demand. I guess it was because the Sound Blaster 16 was so stable that it was 'spec' into all systems for big and small organizations alike. I planned to EOL (End-Of-Life) it once and for all before the end of the millennium. The new millennium came but I just could not EOL it; there were strong requests from many customers to keep it going. Finally, in 2002, it was then EOLed after 10 glorious years.

Crossing into the new millennium, we started to look beyond the PC space to exercise our audio technology prowess. We became one of the early pioneers for the portable digital music player market. One of the very first hard-disk digital music players (Creative NOMAD Jukebox) was launched in the year 2000. The Sound Blaster Live! 5.1, which could provide full DVD 5.1 surround capability, was shipped in this very year, heralding the first move of the PC industry's march into the living room.

The march into the living room, while not breathtaking initially, was steady and relentless. We steadily gained new ground as we continued to aggressively pursue new audio technologies beyond the PC box. And in 2001, we launched the world's first 24-bit quality sound card, the Sound Blaster Audigy. The Audigy APU was even more sophisticated and complex than its predecessors. With better architecture and more sophisticated micro-programming, the Audigy APU was able to deliver 4X more effects processing power than the Sound Blaster Live!. Together with this new Audigy platform, we launched a brand new 2nd generation EAX - the 24-bit EAX ADVANCED HD.

The audio quality of Audigy breached the 100dB level; a level that way surpasses even high end Hi-Fi equipment, moving into the realm of professional digital audio workstations and expensive recording studios.

By 2002, the Audigy 2 was able to support the new 24-bit DVD-Audio standard in the Consumer Electronics space. Audigy became one of the largest installed base for DVD-Audio almost overnight. Soon, newer versions of Sound Blaster Audigy began to support 6.1 surround and 7.1 surround audio, each with a whole new version of EAX ADVANCED HD that provided better and better realism in 3D audio.

All these served to form the foundation for X-Fi. After the completion of the first Audigy APU in 2001, the research team immediately embarked on a new journey that no beings on this earth could ever imagine. Their mission was to deliver a whole new audio platform that could take us far, far beyond the PC audio space which would forever change the way people perceive audio; or to be more precise, any kind of audio. It was an extreme vision that no one dared to dream.

Thus Xtreme Fidelity.