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Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Preview

Spinner August 9, 2005 5:07 PM ET in Tech

The Creative X-Fi processor can remix and remaster audio on the fly to improve the sound quality of your movies, games, and music.

The rising popularity of PC host audio has been troubling for discrete, add-in sound card manufacturers. Most of today’s motherboards come standard with built-in sound that’s sufficient for basic gaming and media playback. Why buy a sound card if my motherboard can already handle game audio, right? Sound card pioneer Creative Labs has taken the host audio challenge in stride and intends to make sound cards relevant again with good old-fashioned innovation. Creative’s new X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor promises to dramatically improve the sound quality of already existing movies, games, and music–just install the card and hear the immediate upgrade over regular built-in PC audio.

/me desperately looks for a snap, crackle and pop joke.

Source: Gamespot

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8 Comments:

  1. entropy
    Disorder at its finest
    9 Aug '05, 10:36 pm

    I read about this awhile ago. I don't see the point.

    The "Crystallizer" may or may not be worth its weight in salt, but I'm betting no. You never want to upsample stuff, and it's just not necessary and often times ruins the sound. But maybe they've got something here, who knows.

    I find it hard to believe that this chip is equal to, or useful as, a 3.4ghz processor. The "upmixing" that supposedly covers the other 1.7ghz does NOT require that much. At all. My M-Audio does that JUST fine, never flinches, and it's probably only 100mhz or less.

    In short: I find it hard to believe that this will be worth the money, and believe me, it'll be quick the kick in the wallet for this little beast.

  2. drasnor
    124 Golden Eye Drive
    9 Aug '05, 11:07 pm

    Besides, Creative has a terrible track record with their drivers. My Audigy2 still crashes (any of) my computer(s) periodically.

    -drasnor

  3. entropy
    Disorder at its finest
    10 Aug '05, 2:57 am

    $279.99

    Oof! I'll pass. I have a feeling my Revo 5.1 will be carrying me for quite awhile.

  4. Enverex
    ~-+-~
    10 Aug '05, 5:07 am

    I hate Creative cards for 2 reasons, one the whole crackling etc the second would be because of their insane and awful driver system requiring the CD to do things then giving new drivers on the site without version numbers etc and then if anything goes wrong you have to uninstall everything and start again with the full drivers from the CD... ugh. Installing some cheap 5.1 card in the other PC was a dream, just one standard driver download, no weird stuff and no screwed sound.

    On that note, does anyone know of any 7.1 cards that support things like EAX3 or whatever? (not that EAX3/4 seem to work properly on my Audigy anyway).

  5. djstubbs
    Icrontian
    12 Aug '05, 1:26 am

    I'm pretty sure there is a pre-order discount that brings it down to $200 somewhere.

    I can't recall where I saw that now...

  6. primesuspect
    The Icrontic Guy
    12 Aug '05, 1:28 am

    $200 is way too much to spend on a creative soundcard. Their drivers are notoriously awful. Their software engineers must be a bunch of buffoons or they are hobbled by bad management or something.

    For the money, you may as well buy a pro audio card like something from echoaudio or m-audio.

  7. entropy
    Disorder at its finest
    12 Aug '05, 1:43 am

    My Revo only cost ~$95ish dollars, and it works great. My one complaint is hardware EAX acceleration... but oh well. I mostly listen to music, so it's better anyway. But I refuse to spend more than around $100 on a soundcard. It's not necessary.

  8. TheSmJ
    Whatever!
    12 Aug '05, 3:54 am

    I'm happy with my onboard Soundstorm audio. It's a shame that good sounding onboard audio never took off.

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