The future of Creative Labs and the sound card market

While the market for ever faster and better graphics boards continue apace, and we see new markets opening up for calculating physics and the like, the lot of sound processing, for gamers in particular, seems to have become an almost forgotten factor for most PC users. A few years back, the thought of using on-board sound would have been viewed with not far short of abject horror by many, with vast numbers of people clamouring for the latest functionality and environmental effects in their games. As we enter 2007 however, the future of the PC audio space, and the need for discrete sound boards in particular, seems far more uncertain for a number of reasons..