The Creative X-Fi Scandal @ NGOHQ

Lincoln Russell 6 May, 2006 at 11:17am ET Article published in Tech

Big news a few months ago, NGOHQ did some research to find out what happened next.

We found out that only a few manufacturers have released BIOS updates to solve some of these issues. Creative has made a mysterious firmware upgrade that cannot be found on their website, and some users claimed it killed their card. According to users in their forums, most of the effected consumers are STILL having issues with the X-Fi series.

Source: NGOHQ

Comments

6 May 2006 ~ 1:14pm RWB I am glad I use onboard sound
6 May 2006 ~ 2:38pm Enverex I hate using Creative products as I hate Creative, but no-other groups offer as many features... but on the other hand the only feature they really offer is EAX2/3/4 and to be honest, it sounds no different to EAX1 and most games still seem to not utilize it properly anyway... hmm.. I think I've just talked myself out of Creative products.
6 May 2006 ~ 11:00pm airbornflght i like their products (mp3 players anyway) just because a company messed up one product, that doesnt mean that they cant make a good product. afterall, look at microsoft. we are still useing them after some 15 years.
7 May 2006 ~ 8:52am Hawk Stopped using Creative cards years ago because of compatability problems, IRQ conflicts,etc.
I was so glad when they came out with onboard sound.
My onboard sound can rattle my windows without distortion.
Still have a Creative Audigy Platinum setting in box with all the parts & software. Not to mention a few other sound cards in my parts bins.
Only way I'd use sound cards now--- if I were building some kind of media center for music creation or the like.
7 May 2006 ~ 10:00am paroxym Hrm, the Creative hate continues. :rolleyes2:

I stopped using their cards around the time of the VIA chipet/crackling issues, but recently purchased an X-Fi Platinum and must say the sound quality and features have left me extremely satisified. No problems with gaming/recording or otherwise. I still wouldn't mind some realtime dolby 5.1 over spdif but you can't have it all.
7 May 2006 ~ 1:57pm Enverex

airbornflght wrote:

i like their products (mp3 players anyway) just because a company messed up one product, that doesnt mean that they cant make a good product. afterall, look at microsoft. we are still useing them after some 15 years.

They didn't mess up one product, they've messed up a lot of times. I only use Windows as I can't play games on my PC any other way (on a few rare occasions Wine or Cedega works).
8 May 2006 ~ 7:45am GooD I'll never buy a SoundBlaster card again i think. every time i did i had problems with them... The last one on the list is with my audigy2 , no more rear-left sound in 5.1 surround mode. Pretty annoying

It's sad the its almost the only sound card maker for gamers... I would like to have a good alternative to SoundBlaster, maybe i'll take the cheaper one next time and stay with onboard sound
8 May 2006 ~ 4:13pm RADA I've used everything from a SoundBlaster 5.1 to my current Audigy Gamer.

Never had a single problem with any of them..
8 May 2006 ~ 10:47pm lemonlime I just picked up one of these bad boys.. Amazing card
9 May 2006 ~ 1:59am Jimborae Ahhh look its the Creative EEPROM bug all over again, how sweet.

You'd think that Creative would have sorted this crap out by now.
9 May 2006 ~ 7:37am GooD

lemonlime wrote:

I just picked up one of these bad boys.. Amazing card

Wow !!! Nice card lemonlime ! Finaly one that diserve attention and that is not from SB

I'll order one next month for sure to get rid of my bugged audigy2
9 May 2006 ~ 8:13am Enverex Other than that card having a Dolby Digital encoder (which isn't any use to most people) that card really has nothing going for it, it looks like just an obscenely overhyped standard 8 channel sound card.
9 May 2006 ~ 8:55am lemonlime

GooD wrote:

Wow !!! Nice card lemonlime ! Finaly one that diserve attention and that is not from SB

I'll order one next month for sure to get rid of my bugged audigy2

If you have the Logitech Z680s or 5500s, this card is fantastic. The DTS Connect quality is amazing. There was a world of difference playing Oblivion. I'm not sure how much of an improvement there will be over an audigy 2, but if yours is broken already, I'd go for it. The sound quality is night and day compared to the onboard, that is for sure.
9 May 2006 ~ 12:09pm Developer I guess this is OT but when you brought X-Plosion in already, what's the reference point to say about a "world of difference"? Asking because I am very suspicious about much hyped DTS, which is nothing more then a lossy compression algorithm to get multichannel audio down the digital connection, which btw. won't convey EAX effects.

This X-plosion is way too expensive to compete with much better known Chaintech and offers not much more.

I mean, except for people who (1) have high quality receivers (2) that they use for gaming (3) and despite high value they put to sound they do not care about EAX effects no-one else can be bothered...

This whole topic on NGO smells fishy considering NGO was giving X-Mystique cards away for free and no they are slamming X-Fi with in fact no good reason. I mean the bios update I did on my mobo solved the problems 4 or 5 months ago, and if you go to the forums they are talking about there is nothing new there. But if you look up the discussion thread on NGO it seems they have banned anyone who said X-Fi was working fine...
My X-Fi works fine anyway.
9 May 2006 ~ 12:16pm Enverex Indeed. Basically the quality will be lower using that DTS connect than it would using a normal standalone card connected via the analog cables to get multichannel instead. So to be honest, the X-Plosion is nothing but hype. Its no different from the nForce's onboard sound that encoded to Dolby Digital to get the sound across to amps that only allowed digital input, except DTS instead of Dolby. I was looking around that site as they seem to make it sound like the best thing since sliced bread, when infact it's a very basic principal that LOWERS the sound quality and is only something that a very few select people (people with say, high end theatre systems that only have digital inputs and not multi-channel analog inputs) would ever need. I guess it's just a case of people buying the hype again.

I can almost guarantee that that card will NOT sound better than your Audigy 2. Infact, technically, it should sound worse. You're all just seeing the big words and pretty pictures and not actually analysing what you're actually buying.

Sure, it's better than onboard, but so are most things, things that cost £15 or less, heh.
9 May 2006 ~ 12:33pm GooD

lemonlime wrote:

If you have the Logitech Z680s or 5500s, this card is fantastic. The DTS Connect quality is amazing. There was a world of difference playing Oblivion. I'm not sure how much of an improvement there will be over an audigy 2, but if yours is broken already, I'd go for it. The sound quality is night and day compared to the onboard, that is for sure.

My audigy2 is only bugged, since there no sound output from rear-left anymore while in 5.1 mode, i've tried anything but there's nothing to do... After 3 months of good work one morning i started my computer and rear-left sound was gone... I cannot use my 5.1 headset anymore as the sound is weird cuz i can clearly see that i have no sound from the rear left, its more noticable than with my set of 5.1 speakers.

Im a little worried by the fact that the X-Plosion doesnt support recent EAX but other than that it seems to be a very nice card. I'll probably give it a try.

For the X-FI i know that some users will have a great experience with it... But there's always a large counterpart with SoundBlaster. For every happy customer there will be one unhappy. I hate the way that they do things, how they manage drivers update... The problem is not only on the quality of their products, that's the compagny itself. I was thinking with time they would be back in the right way, but as i can see it's still not the case. My .02
9 May 2006 ~ 1:02pm GooD Im a little lost when it comes to 'sound quality' or any technology related to it or way to mesure it. Im just glad to see some sort of an alternative to the SoundBlaster solution.

I've just read a lot about the x-plosion card and from what i saw it seems great. It's a not a card designed for gaming tho, as some people denote a drop of 5 to 10% of fps when you compare this card to the x-fi. Also the lack of support for EAX is sad, but it doesnt seem to make a big difference in games anyway.
9 May 2006 ~ 2:58pm lemonlime

Developer wrote:

I guess this is OT but when you brought X-Plosion in already, what's the reference point to say about a "world of difference"? Asking because I am very suspicious about much hyped DTS, which is nothing more then a lossy compression algorithm to get multichannel audio down the digital connection, which btw. won't convey EAX effects.

This X-plosion is way too expensive to compete with much better known Chaintech and offers not much more.

My apologies for getting off topic as well

The only reference I have is the onboard AC97 audio I'm afraid--ALC850 on the DFI NF4 series boards. I doubt that the improvement in sound quality had anything to do with DTS specifically. I've never used an Audigy/XFi, so I'm afraid that I can't draw any conclusions between the two cards. I haven't had that much time with it yet, so I haven't done any comparison between DDL, DTS and Analog yet. I must say, there is a tremendous improvement over the onboard in many respects.

EAX support was a non-issue to me really, and I haven't seen too many games that really put EAX effects to good use IMO. I understand that there is EAX 2.0 support, but again, nothing I'm too concerned about. I've been looking for a new card for quite some time to replace the onboard. Since both my Z680s and HT receiver support DTS and DD (one feature I really missed from the soundstorm) I decided to go this route. Cost was about the same between the XFi music edition and this card, so it was a toss up. I'm not disappointed

There is a comparison here if anyone is interested in seeing SQ benchmarks compared to an Audigy.
10 May 2006 ~ 3:35am No problem with my X-Fi to be real honest, that article is too suspect to be taken seriously. the issues they raised were settled by Motherboard bios update and if the motherboard bios update weren't available, Creative offered RMA service where they will modified the firmware to solve the issue. This seems to me like a good support where they have gotten somewhere after working with the motherboard manufacturers.

I bought a X-Fi Plat only this year in March, was worried at first when I come across article but hey, I did not get any of the described problems, in fact I think the my mobo A8NE and X-Fi worked from the box without any bios upgrade or firmware messing about.

Upgrading from onboard sound to X-Fi, the experience is massive. After the upgrade, go play some games, watch some movies and listen to some music, I dun think I ever want to go back to AC97 lol.

On the Xplosion card, I think they are overhyped too. It is not even hardware accelerated.