Creative has been known for their lack of good drivers for several years now and unfortunately, their latest drivers for the Creative Sound Blaster Arena Gaming Headset is living up to their poor quality drivers.

The headset has great sound quality and supports EAX for older games and the crystal audio enhancement works well with most music. The headset is lightweight and versatile.

If you try to load the drivers directly from the CD, after extracting the files, the install shield detects the presence of outdated software and then tries to delete it before installing the new software. The only problem is that it deletes its own setup files in the process. Most users have had this happen to the alchemy software and the drivers themselves … very poor programming.

Work Around

Do not install anything from the CD. Instead go to Creative’s support website and download the drivers there and only use drivers dated later than Jan/Feb 2010.

Once working drivers are installed they are pretty stable. The configuration console is designed to look like a home entertainment console. It looks great but makes configuring a lot slower because it only has tabs for navigation. The console is shown below. You will need to use the back button a lot to tweak your settings.

The driver’s ability to produce quality in some of the most common games is mixed. They do well in the following games:

• Battlefield: Bad Company 2
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2
• Counter-Strike: Source
• Left 4 Dead
• Left for Dead 2Quake 4Portal
• Prey
• Team Fortress 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Unreal Tournament 3

But the drivers performed poorly in:

• Battlefield 2
• American McGee’s Alice
• Call of duty 5: World at War
• Crysis Warhead
• Emeny Terrirory: Quake Wars
• Mirror’s Edge
• Fallout 3
• Half Life 2

Conclusion

Creative, you need to provide a quality driver update ASAP.