While Alchemy’s version for Audigy has now been available for more than 10 months now, Creative decided to make it payable while the X-Fi version free. You had to spend $9.99 to take advantage of this "wrapper" that enables going around certain limitations inherent to Windows Vista by preventing the management of DirectSound 3D effects by a specialized DSP. In reality, it intercepts DirectSound 3D effects and converts them into OpenAL thus enabling to continue to benefit from audio acceleration in hardware as well as advanced functions such as EAX.
This rather unfortunate choice should soon just be a bad memory because the Singapore company should soon put it on line for free the week of May 19th and has pledged to reimburse those that chose to pay. So this is some good news and probably not entirely unrelated to the upcoming announcement of the Sound Blaster X-Fi 2 as Creative apparently judged it necessary to improve its image that suffered in the "Daniel_K" incident.
While Alchemy’s version for Audigy has now been available for more than 10 months now, Creative decided to make it payable while the X-Fi version free. You had to spend $9.99 to take advantage of this "wrapper" that enables going around certain limitations inherent to Windows Vista by preventing the management of DirectSound 3D effects by a specialized DSP. In reality, it intercepts DirectSound 3D effects and converts them into OpenAL thus enabling to continue to benefit from audio acceleration in hardware as well as advanced functions such as EAX.