No, it wasn't. Creative has continued to license the Sensaura technology to 3rd parties since they purchased them. Nvidia chose to halt development based only on the cost of development, as the drivers for the Soundstorm and Nforce APU were developed by Nvidia using Sensaura IP. They did not rely on Sensaura for future developments and even if they did, Creative has taken no steps to prevent anyone from licensing the technology.

The #1 feature of the SoundStorm branding/Nvidia APU was that it did direct Dolby Digital Live encoding which produces a low quality Dolby Digital compatible bitstream. Due to the heavy processing overhead and the fact that much of the processing was handled in software the quality of the sound was sacrificed in order to improve processor overhead.

It's odd that I have never had a popping problem with any of my Creative cards.... perhaps it is because I purchase high quality motherboards and know how to configure them to help diminish the possibility of overloading the PCI bus. My Audigy, Audigy 2, EMU 1212M, EMU1616M, and X-Fi all sound wonderful and are noticably better than the sound output from soundstorm (even when using the optical jack).