just been reading a small article in Custom Pc about X-FI "24 times more powerful than the audigy 2" I had a look around on the site www.soundblaster.com, which makes some interesting statements about the new sound processor, such "24-bit Crystallizer turns your music and movie sound into stunningly clear DVD-Audio level quality" looks interesting just wondering if any one had heard anything about it/ is it likely to live up to there statements?
I have demoed the card and it has some stunning audio features. (Which I can't talk about yet) It does sound superb and I can't wait to get my own.
would be nice to have a card that is the best of both worlds ie sounding as good as something like m-audio's offerings and having all the cazy gaming stuffs like creative cards looking forward to it
EAX is overrated, just encode games in DD5.1 and id be more than happy. I have to admit that i find audio extremely subjective to talk about.
Especially considering you can have the best sound card in the world, and if you pair it with crap speakers, you're stuck. Same the other way around, like slapping z5500's on the worst onboard around. Anyways, sounds extremely promising. Bet it won't come cheap though... especially considering it boasts the ability to effectively restore MP3 audio to live quality on the fly...(audiophiles rejoyce!)
z550 arent exactly the best speakers i really dont like it though, it is saying on the site that the mp3 is treated to sound like the original recording. now this puts me off straight away. i dont want any soundcard playing with the files i give it and "enhancing" them. it says about adding the original punch and vitalilty... how does it know what this is? its only got a compressed file not the original, so it will be guessing on these. then it has the magical feature of taking your stereo music and making it 5.1 which would completely kill the soundstage. 5.1 music is extremely hard thing to do properly in the studio taking up lots of time to get correct. so i fail to see how it can know the perfect settings for every cd/mp3 etc. you throw at it, to get it correct everytime. it will just have the same settings for every track. let alone the "virtual" surround for 2 speakers. if your speakers are setup properly you will have a soundstage with a 3d image. i dont see why a soundcard then has to mess with this to try and create a better one, which again is generated on the fly and not specific to the recording. and... its creative
Well that's the point dom, anything that proclaims it can "restore" compressed audio with some sort of advanced algorythms simply cannot work with every single different type of music. It's also why EAX ****s up so much or doesnt sound as if it's working at all - creative algorythms again. You either get too much reverb or echo or nothing. To me, creative havent yet proven they can simulate every situation correctly, or even most situations correctly.
how would that work? it'd have to encode on the fly wouldn't it? otherwise when you turn around in game the sound would still come from the same speakers, no?
The features of which you speak can be turned on or off giving the user the choice. They are also fully configurable allowing for fine tuning. I have heard both the mp3 "restorer" and 5.1 surround using ordinary stereo headphones and the effects are excellent. Especially the surround sound using standard stereo headphones which has to be heard to be believed. The quality is limited by the 'phones used.
im too much of an audiophile/pedant to ever want to use anything that changes the music, so i would buy it then turn everything off
Yea, Intel HD audio encodes 5.1 DD AC3 on the fly. Works great imo. Still software driven but is extremely low cpu utilisation and works better than creatives shitty CMSS. dom - if it aint vinyl, u dont wanna know, right?
close bindi, if i cant get it on vinyl or at worst cd and if its played through something that isnt seperates or japanese/chinese or shite.
Creative claims it can magicagacically remaster MP3s to sound better than the original CD, to be DVD-A quality, like a 24-bit studio recording. Pure ********. They also claim it can take 2 channel recordings and turn them into 5.1 recordings (they probably also claimed it would be better than a real 5.1 recording), which is also pure ********. This card may be quite powerful and nice for gaming, maybe even have a good DAC and amp circuit, but don't buy into the Creative marketing ********. I doubt it would come anywhere close to dethroning E-MU or Terratec cards in sound quality - but it might bridge the gap between gaming and audiophile soundcards. I have two sound cards in my system - an Audigy 2 and an E-MU 1212m. Using a digital cable and the digital out on the Audigy 2 and digital in on the E-MU, I get incredible sound for music out of my E-MU, and incredible sound out of my Audigy 2 -> E-MU through the digital out for gaming - since the audio doesn't go through the Audigy 2's joke of a DAC or amp circuits. The combined cost of my sound setup inside my PC is $255...granted I bought the Audigy 2 years ago...and well...granted this X-Fi probably costs well over $255...well...you know I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose the only saving grace of this card is that it has some awesome EAX effects (or rather, the hardware to process newer versions of EAX better, since EAX is just software, or mostly anyway). Well, that is the saving grace, along with the fact that...you know...it doesn't take up 3 PCI slots like my rig.
Didn't they lie about the Audigy, claiming that it was 24 bit but in reality the processor downsampled to 16 bit, then upsampled it again to 24? Or something like that?
The funny thing is that they say that integrated audio has bad quality. That's only true if you use the analog outputs because it's the DACs that are bad. If you use the digital output, there shouldn't be much, if any, difference as long as the sample rates and bit counts are equal. Indeed, while I can easily tell the difference between integrated audio and a professional sound card if it's analog, there is virtually no difference when it's digital. I'm glad that Ashlee Simpson sounds just as good through an ECS motherboard's S/PDIF as through an Audigy 2. I don't know about X-Fi, though. I'll have to actually listen to find out. Now, while I don't see how it's possible to make a MP3 even more like the uncompressed original, "better" is a subjective term and it is possible to make it sound better to some people. Valves don't really reproduce the original waveform any better than transistors, they just add some harmonics that some audiophiles like.
well yes most people will like the sound and prob wont notice a difference as they are using creative/logitech/dell etc speakers. but people who actually like to recreate music properly will stick well away from this.
None of the Audigy cards can handle a 44.1KHz stream (what CDs are encoded as, and therefore how nearly all music is), they resample to 48KHz. The main problem with this is that the hardware resampling is terrible on these cards, they can upgrade the 48KHz DACs all they want (and they have, on the new Audigy 4 Pro the 48KHz reproduction is excellent) but this key problem still remains. Most people who have no choice but to live with it, and care about the sound (and if you don't you must have tin ears or £5 speakers, cos the Audigy resampling is actually painful) will use a software resampler like the one in Foobar2000 to get the stream into 48KHz so the card doesn't have to fudge it itself, this does take processing power though. A far better solution (and one that seems to be popular at places like head-fi, and hi btw Emon ) is a soundcard with an excellently clear line-out, like the EMU 0404, for music and an Audigy for games. If this X-fi thing can do the job of both, fixing the by now very old and very complained-about resampling issue and providing a good line out whilst providing all the EAC stuff and compatibility that gamers crave, then it'll do even better than the Audigy line. Oh, and they need to sort their drivers out
This is why i like my setup of: Intel HD audio dolby 5.1 software upsample to 48kHz/5.1 --> S/PDIF --> Exitigy input --> 5.1 output Works for me, but compared to my house mates proper stereo setup with separates it's a POS
