Tuesday, October 18th 2016
Razer Reinforces Audio Business by Acquiring Majority of THX Assets
In a bid to reinforce its audio business, Razer has now acquired the majority of THX's assets. THX, which was founded in 1983 by George Lucas, has for the past thirty-three years focused on cinema audio systems, home audio systems, and audio certification. It is now to operate as an independent subsidiary of Razer, under its own management and the leeway to run its own operations and make its own business decisions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though Razer stressed that it intends to maintain all of THX's management and staff.
It is expected that this won't bring about major changes to THX's business model; their main focus points, namely Certification (testing and validation that a given system has passed a set of criteria determined by THX); THX Live! (focused in the audio experience unto itself, whether at cinema-like venues or at home); and THX Inside (focused on hardware's underlying technologies), are to continue operating within their given framework. That said, THX will now further expand their Certification programme to additional lines of products: headphones, Bluetooth speakers, streaming video, set-top boxes, and connected speakers, which are all, unsurprisingly, part of Razer's product portfolio.
Historically, Razer has always been heavily focused on the PC gaming market, from systems to accessories (with its mice being some of the most well regarded among enthusiasts). Though an apparently big part of this acquisition is an overlapping interest from both parties regarding VR (which is quite the technological, marketing and business push these days), with THX recently increasing its efforts in this area, and Razer being an already known contributor to the OSVR platform.
Although this wasn't a particularly likely acquisition, both parties stand to gain: THX sees a financial infusion (and who doesn't like capital), while Razer will receive feedback and solid audio engineering towards the improvement of their audio products and enjoy THX's still strong brand recognition.
Source:
TheVerge
It is expected that this won't bring about major changes to THX's business model; their main focus points, namely Certification (testing and validation that a given system has passed a set of criteria determined by THX); THX Live! (focused in the audio experience unto itself, whether at cinema-like venues or at home); and THX Inside (focused on hardware's underlying technologies), are to continue operating within their given framework. That said, THX will now further expand their Certification programme to additional lines of products: headphones, Bluetooth speakers, streaming video, set-top boxes, and connected speakers, which are all, unsurprisingly, part of Razer's product portfolio.
Although this wasn't a particularly likely acquisition, both parties stand to gain: THX sees a financial infusion (and who doesn't like capital), while Razer will receive feedback and solid audio engineering towards the improvement of their audio products and enjoy THX's still strong brand recognition.
68 Comments on Razer Reinforces Audio Business by Acquiring Majority of THX Assets
Creative and Aureal innovated things back in 1998 that we are now slowly getting back with so called GPU accelerated audio. Which in a nutshell means you need a Radeon and you get like 3 titles that sort of maybe support it. Yay for progress...
If I'm brutally honest, games with EAX 2.0 had more organic sounding materials than this generic software crap that all sounds artificial like you're applying wood, metal or glass effects to a plastic surface. It wants to sound like those materials but it always has that plasticky sound to it. And that's why I hate the current state of PC audio from the bottom of my heart. It's crap, has regressed back for decades and it just sounds awful.
stereo: USB -> DAC + amplifier
multi-channel: HDMI -> receiver (DAC + amplifier)
The motherboard integrated DAC is more than enough for >90% of consumers. Options exist for those that need more but it is external because the software of those that are available is shit.
THX certification...does it even carry the weight it used to? That really is THX's only notable product. I'd argue yes because it separates the posers from the good stuff. The thing is, most speaker manufacturers don't even bother to get THX certification anymore because they feel it doesn't generate more sales for them. I think Razer made a mistake unless it manages to topple something like Beats.
It's why I always laugh when so called "audiophiles" start talking about audio quality in games and they have absolutely no clue what 3D positional audio even is or why material audio shaders matter more than all the audio quality metrics they know...
That said, we got technologies like OpenAL to fill in the gaps.www.soundandvision.com/content/thx-certification#ElJJu2EsWM6YKWMT.97
Remember in the 90s that separate audio processor made a big difference in terms of framerates (single-core processors). Additionally, very little was integrated into the motherboard back then where almost everything is today.
Pretty sure there was never a THX certified sound card so...not really relevant to this discussion.
So naturally the new released sound cards got nothing to offer compared to previous solutions, or compared to on-board sound which lately, has got on the same level as the add-on solutions from 4-5 years ago.True, but also do remember, that 3D sound not only involved specific material and environment sound types and realistic reflections, but mostly 3D sound positioning. Which was so amazing at that time because it could have been done with 2 crappy speakers only.
I was gaming on Unreal with A3D 2.0 card, and up/downs, back sounds and also environmental sounds were so realistic that I couldn't believe how good they were in 1998. Good ol' times.The Hardware is there for sure. ALL Creative, Asus, Turtle Bitch, etc have very good hardware processor capable of outputting quality 3D sound, however, the current software for them are utterly crap and not using the full potential, very buggy if emulated, etc, but the nr.1 issue right now is, the complete LAZINESS and probably lack of knowledge of game producers to implement such solutions in Windows 8+ games...
I definitely wouldn't want to return to the XP and earlier days of hardware. There was a plethora of audio devices out there and if you don't happen to stumble upon the right driver, expect audio issues (popping and the like). Go back to the 90s and you'd have to have specific hardware to hear anything in games whatsoever. Both were hell. Today, Microsoft's generic HD Audio driver is often better than the garbage the hardware vendors put out. It's like the 2000s are trying to make a comeback and (fortunately) failing.
I've had Diamond Monster II (Aureal A3D), SB Live! 5.1, SB Audigy 2 Value, SB X-Fi Xtreme Music, X-Fi Forte and now SB Z and have used EAX on all of them. The garbage software audio today can't be compared on any level. At all. You have to be literally deaf to ever claim otherwise.
The last sound card I had a lot of background noise in them. Instead of blowing $100 on another crappy sound card, I blew $200 on a USB headphone DAC + amp and I don't regret the decision.
a whole lot of cards I can't remember -> Live 5.1 -> Audigy 2 ZS -> HT|OMEGA Striker 7.1
I've refused to buy Creative since they retroactively removed stereo surround support in an effort to force people to buy X-Fi. I can't name once I deliberately tried to use EAX.
And again, this has nothing to do with Razer nor THX. THX certifies hardware, not creates it.
But guess what, the Creative proprietary one, EAX+CMSS3D offers better sound quality over those, and better stereo separation for my 2.1 speakers.I agree, it was a mess in the beginning, but then MS released Direct Sound 3D that all major sound card producers at that time, including Creative, Aureal, Asus, Auzentech, etc, had drivers ready and compatible with DS3D, so that's no excuse.
Here's an example of how audio is done these days (no EAX):
docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Audio/Overview/index.html
Sound Cues in particular.
People saying CPU can do everything HW accelerated soundcards could do. Then ask yourselves, why is AMD offloading audio computation on GPU if a 2GHz dual core can run all the audio effects so easily? The X-Fi had computation power of Athlon FX-53 or Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.
And how can you say Creative is garbage when you're using Realtek?! Like lol... And that fancy Unreal sound editor, yeah, it sounds like generic garbage no matter how many fancy effects you daisy chain in it. All materials have the same garbage plasticky sound. Until you play System Shock 2 or Half-Life 1 from 1998/1999 using EAX, you can't possibly talk about audio quality in games. And those EAX versions were rather primitive compared to EAX 3.0 or 4.0...