Crikey, the gamer's X-Fi is pricey!

How would you spend $200+ to enhance gameplay?

  • GPU/CPU/RAM bump ("traditional" speed boost)

    Votes: 43 52.4%
  • PPU (Ageia PhysX)

    Votes: 21 25.6%
  • "APU" (Creative X-Fi)

    Votes: 6 7.3%
  • Thank you, come again! --Apu (Sorry, couldn't help it)

    Votes: 12 14.6%

  • Total voters
    82
Now this is good input! Thanks Synder. I figure the X-Fi will drive them as well if the audigy has the capability.
 
DSC said:
Big deal. Crap is crap, no matter how it's packaged. Just look at this lovely line.
In a press release, Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo said that by utilizing the X-Fi's 24-bit Crystalizer and CMSS 3D technology, music from your MP3s and CDs can sound "even better than the original studio recording."

Yes, and pigs fly out of Sim Wong Hoo's ass.
Actually, I think it has some merit. CD's only have 16-bit sampling, which is pretty limited in range.

Check this page: http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050705/x-fi-02.html
x-fi_crystalizer_01.gif

Top: original ------- Bottom: Crystalizer

I know Tom isn't the most credible person in the world, but his comments are quite generous.
 
extremetech
On the other hand, 24-bit Crystalizer function is hit and miss. It almost never makes something sound worse, but it does tend to make a few instruments stand out more—and not always when you want them to. It's a feature we could take or leave. It makes poorly compressed MP3 (128k) and the like sound better, but if music is encoded at 256k or better, and it doesn't do a lot for that, except sort of overdrive the wrong instruments sometimes. We usually leave it off, but someone with a lot of highly compressed music might like it a lot.

Improves 128k mp3s. I wonder how that works.
The only instance where I can imagine any improvement is for too loudly recorded audio where the waves are cut off at the top and bottom.
It may be possible to reconstruct the original sinus waveform from a simple bass instrument.
 
When I find sad is that for years, Creative keeps releasing incremental shit features (EAX1/2/3/4/5) and heavily market said features as if they are innovative when we had them 5 years ago in Aureal or Sensura APIs.

Wow, they have MacroFX now. About fscking time.

I hope ATI and NVidia get into the sound card game and kill off creative.
 
DemoCoder said:
When I find sad is that for years, Creative keeps releasing incremental shit features (EAX1/2/3/4/5) and heavily market said features as if they are innovative when we had them 5 years ago in Aureal or Sensura APIs.

Wow, they have MacroFX now. About fscking time.

I hope ATI and NVidia get into the sound card game and kill off creative.
/nods in agreement.

I refuse to buy any creative product. Id rather have no sound than sound provided by that crap company.
 
Considering all but the highest end card has the same DACs as my Audigy 2 ZS, what's the advantage to buying this? I got my A2ZS for $50, and that was the gamer's pack with like 5 top notch titles. LOL.

I mean EAX 5 sounds slightly incremental. The resampler sounds amazing, but SSRC plugins for Winamp are plentiful these days. Source audio in games often is of such low quality (thanks to development tards not know how to use MP3 encoders) that resampling is the least of the problems....
 
Well, till Nvidia, or someone else gets in on the game Creative has it pretty well tied up. I was very dissappointed when Nvidia didn't follow up on their SoundStorm. It had so much potential, and it definitely gave Creatives stuff a run for it's money.
I know it's been said before that they had something else on the burner, but if I remember correctly it wasn't a SoundStorm type solution.
Till then EAX 5 is pretty much what EAX should have been from the start. It looks to me like Creative has just about caught up with a company that they put out of business years ago due to litigation.

They pretty much smell of a monopoly @ this point considering that they own Aureals IP, and bought out Sensaura a spell ago. They have pretty effectively stifled any form of competition (heh, they even blackmailed a game company! :LOL: )
Suffice it to say... I don't like them, but till something better comes along I will be buying their product. I just received my Audigy claim # back yesterday so any product I buy will be reduced by 25% which is some small form of consolation.
 
radeonic2 said:
How come headphones have such high impediance?
One reason is that in a studio environment you often want to run multiple sets of phones in parallel off the same amp. (Without lowering the level too much and without blowing the rest of the phones if you plug some of them out).

Edit: Enthusisasts will also argue - with some merit -that it's better to have a higer output dedicated headphone amplifier with lower sensitivity phones than to have a cheapo low output amp with lower impedance phones. Follow those arguments too far and you're quickly into big $ woodoo territory, so I won't go there.

Also remember that headphone sensitivity is mesured at 1 milliwatt at ear level, while normal loudspeaker sensitivity is mesured at 1W at one meter.
 
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Zaphod said:
One reason is that in a studio environment you often want to run multiple sets of phones in parallel off the same amp. (Without lowering the level too much and without blowing the rest of the phones if you plug some of them out).

Edit: Enthusisasts will also argue - with some merit -that it's better to have a higer output dedicated headphone amplifier with lower sensitivity phones than to have a cheapo low output amp with lower impedance phones. Follow those arguments too far and you're quickly into big $ woodoo territory, so I won't go there.

Also remember that headphone sensitivity is mesured at 1 milliwatt at ear level, while normal loudspeaker sensitivity is mesured at 1W at one meter.
I see:D
I'm happy with the quality I get from just the logitech 5300 headphone out, but my phones are broken, only 1 headphone works.
I could fix it but I dont care much since I can usally play my speakers loud enough, although not nearly as much quality.
 
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/multimedia/creative-x-fi.html

Digit-Life has exposed the truth behind the Crystalizer.

In practice, it took me less than a minute to figure out what Crystalizer really was. This technology is similar to what we have seen in Intel with its HDA, in the bundled Intel Audio Studio.

Indeed, a record is remastered by a well-known mastering plug-in called "multiband compressor". Just to make sure I was 100% correct, I compared Crystalizer with three mastering multiband compressors: Waves LinMB, iZotope Ozone, Steinberg MultiBand Compressor. These plugins changed the audio character similar to Crystalizer.

Our measurements showed that besides the multiband compression, the signal level is raised approximately by 3 dB. So that any quiet records would seem subjectively better even without the compressor.

"Louder is better" trick, won't fool most people that know audio.

24-bit Crystalizer technology has a right to life, but the way this technology is announced with a portion of wishful thinking is disappointing. In reality, Crystalizer does not expand, but narrows down the dynamic range. It really uses 24 bits, but this is done only to avoid the rounding error accumulation (it's normal practice, no modern DSP works in the same resolution as the original data).

Like I said folks, marketing hype and lies are what you pay Creative for. The same people that sold the Audigy and claimed it was a "24bit 96KHz" card. :LOL:
 
Izotope Ozone operates at 64-bit resolution. Or at least uses 64-bit calculations.
http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/

I've been using the Winamp plugin for like 5 years and use the full-blown edition to master CDs. Amazing tool.

I wouldn't say that comes out of a multi-band compressor, if that's what Crystalizer is, is bad at all. It really can make music sound a lot better. Izotope Ozone though allows massive customization, and that is necessary since every type of music and quality of recording needs unique settings.
 
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Whelp it seems there is a reason there isn't a PCIe version...
http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=3005

Quothe the raven "PCIe is designed for graphics, and high data transfer, but audio sends very small packets, and the overhead can be very big! Moving the data across PCIe is much, much higher than PCI. So, what we have to do is go back to the drawing board, and work on the transport part of the chip, and re-design it to add more silicon to overcome some of the problems we had with PCIe. So, for us to come up with a PCIe solution is going to take a while because we have to overcome the problems we're facing with that bus."

Anand review here: http://www.anandtech.com/multimedia/showdoc.aspx?i=2518

I'm really curious to see the rest of what Digit-Life has to say about the X-Fi. So far they're comments seem pretty well balanced.
 
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