Vista: No DirectSound3D support

From the Soundblaster.com website:

"In Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to remove the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for DirectSound and DirectSound3D. The HAL is the software layer that on previous Windows Operating Systems enabled an audio accelerator such as the Sound Blaster® X-Fi™, to provide DirectSound3D applications with hardware accelerated audio. This enabled sound cards to perform tasks such as sample-rate conversion, mixing, 3D spatialization using HRTFs, filtering, and effects processing.

"The removal of the audio hardware abstraction layer from Windows Vista will compromise audio in legacy game titles that use EAX® or DirectSound3D (DS3D), usually resulting in stereo output without any effects. "

What this means is all that every game that supported DirectSound3d, won't have 3d sound anymore under Vista. You get stereo output out of your $300.00 soundcard and $400.00 surround sound system.

Nice....

Creative came out with a utility called Alchemy thats supposed to transmute the d3ds calls so you still get 3dsound, but its beta and glitchy.

I guess everyone else is left out in the cold with their top end soundcards.

I can't believe MS took this direction, it seems like a step backwards and what does it leave developers with for a standardized way to use hardware accelerated sound that will work on everyones computer?

They should have implemented some backwards compatibility feature in Vista....this is pathetic for gamers.

Is OpenAL > DirectSound3D?