Actually, I think it has some merit. CD's only have 16-bit sampling, which is pretty limited in range.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.
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.
/nods in agreement.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.
123radeonic2 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).radeonic2 said:How come headphones have such high impediance?
I seeZaphod 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.
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.
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).