Creative intros X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity soundcards
By Barb Dybwad 
posted August 8th 2005 4:30PM
posted August 8th 2005 4:30PM
So Creative has been touting their new Xtreme Fidelity
(X-Fi) audio processing technology which, in Sim Wong Hoo's hyperbolic way will of course revolutionize audio and
eventually replace all the high-fi equipment in your home. Today they officially announced the first sound cards based
on X-Fi: the Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro, X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS (yes, they really replaced that "i" with a "1" — tres
1337, dudes), X-Fi Platinum, and X-Fi XtremeMusic. All feature three processing modes specifically tailored for
specific tasks: entertainment mode, gaming mode, and audio creation mode. The four cards will be available this month
at Best Buy for $399.99, $279.99, $199.99 and $129.99, respectively.
[Thanks, Andrew_A]
It's not them - some dude games with the name fatal1ty and he's famous, I suppose.
He's sold his name to video cards, motherboards, presumably memory and one day I'll bet "Fatal1ty" branded case screws will be the norm.
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=262
http://www.fatal1ty.com/
I assume the name is for him and the fps stands for first person shoter.
Wow...those are spensive big-time! What has Creative's normal release pricing been (say for the audigy line?). I know plenty of sound cards cost big time bucks, but not mainstream versions!
Judging by the picture, it looks like they're using the same connector (white stripes to the left of the X-Fi box) for their front panel instead of the standard (from what I've seen) front panel connector. Yet again, I bet many people will be without front headphone & mic audio connections because of this.
Of course, because the very definition of something Hi-Fi uses
a) kiddy-speak,
b) costs less than a grand,
c) uses some variation on "extreme,"
d) and is sold at Best Buy.
Even if this thing was God's gift to Christ as Creative apparently wants us to believe, it's all worth absolutely nothing unless you have VERY good speakers to notice, the kind that you can't buy at BB.
Pass on this one, kids.
so what's really the different compared to conventional hi-fi.it suppose to be more in quality audio right?.. how we can tell that which one is x-fi and hi-fi.
http://errortest.blogspot.com/2005/07/custom-extreme-dekstop-look-yahoo.html
So do these new Creative sound cards resample 44.1khz to 48.8khz like the previous Live! series did?
Wha?! $400 for a m*the*f'ing soundcard? That soundcard better be dripping in goldplatings is all I'm saying. Mr. Hoo better be able to back up those claims of true "fidelity" (which I doubt). I could buy a really good amp for $400 mofo dollars.
So does this read to anyone else like they added 64Mb of RAM to the card (god knows why) and a bunch of packaged SOFTWARE and called it something new? This looks a lot like the Audigy 2 once you cut all the marketing out.
"Wha?! $400 for a m*the*f'ing soundcard? That soundcard better be dripping in goldplatings is all I'm saying. Mr. Hoo better be able to back up those claims of true "fidelity" (which I doubt)."
If it's for audio creation, $400, is *cheap*. So cheap that I would be skeptical of the quality.
But it could be a decent low-end solution for people setting up home studios, which is something I've been considering doing for a long time now. I might give this card a look at some point.
oh, no, not again.
Wait two years for "X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity V2" soudncards to show up and watch the driver support for this one dry up faster than you can say "Audidgy (V1)".
High Quality? Yes top-end hi-fi lovers really go for 3.5 mm jack plugs to link their equipemnt.
Sound Quality? The lack of EMI shielding to the analogue paths on both sides fo the board, means you should be able to hear that nice line noise from the inductor on the neighbouring PCI modem in your PC and all those lovely digital signals and fan coils inside your case in the highest of fedility.
I think I'll pass....
Nothing like sticking $400 worth of sensitive high fidelity audio parts INSIDE A FREAKING PC CASE.
Yeah, go buy an Echo Layla external sound card! That think will blow the Creative stuff out of the water.
I just picked up an M-Audio Delta 1010LT for $180 (MSRP $299) off of ebay. Beats anything creative could have made for that price.
For those complaining about the price, it makes perfect sense. There are no more "mainstream" or "low-end" sound cards, because that market segment is covered by motherboard integrated audio. All that's left is either pro equipment or overpriced "extreme" gamer stuff.
Wow...this is quite a negative response so far! I've read a few preview articles that have the reviewer raving about a serious leap in audio SQ and some amazing 3D effects with stereo headphones, etc, etc. From the few articles I have read, this card will be a great purchase. I'll get the 129 one probably!
Here's one link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050705/index.html
It's worth $400 dollars if it's EXTREME!
I think they need to put mor x's and use more variations of Extreme. (kidding)
How much is "Fatal1ty" making of this? I wish I could be a good gamer and make millions dollars while exploiting my peers!
"X" is so yester-year. "360" is the new "X". I'll buy a 360-Fi 360treme sound card, but no way am I wasting my hard-earned cheddar on some "X" card. Pfft.
Pshh... Just get an M-adio Revolutions 7.1 card... creative exaggerates everything they sell... and falsely advertises( remember that 24 bit card that doesnt actually have 24 bit audio )
#16
Get a brain dude. Everybody knows toms is bought and paid for by the sponsors. They slipped up a few times during the whole nvidia driver scandal and since then it's been obvious that they cater to advertisers, not the readers. They've also been outed as a company that accepts and will in some cases, more or less demand money from companies.
Nobody with half a brain reads that site anymore.
I saw a demo of this technology at E3 and also met Fatal1ty in the same booth. Seriously... the difference in sound quality is amazing! The X-Fi is supposedly supposed (?) to convert any audio to DVD quality audio in real time. Example- your 128 kbps mp3s will now sound better than your cds of the same track.
Wow, I read about half that review and stopped. Are you so dense you couldn't see that they were paid to promote it? They didn't have anything bad to say, and they used a gratuitous number of exclamation marks. Toms disgusts me. The only site I trust these days is anandtech, he might be getting presents or whatever, but I can't tell.
Its not even THX certified yet Creative owns a chunk of the company. I must say, a 3.4Ghz sound chip is pretty interesting. Can't wait to see this in a Mac after Apple buys up Creative out of bankruptcy.
#20 (ko123)
so, "nobody with half a brain reads" toms anymore? what's the alternative then?
what do you read to keep yourself well (and fair!) informed about hardware products?
apart from engadget of course ;-)
Been years since I bought a 'hi-end' sound card.
Ah the good old days of the SB Live! I thought it was such a steal at $100 for the MP3 edition (so many people believed it came with a nigh magical MP3 recording chip...heehee), until I got one that was even better for $9 at Fry's.
Though that $9 card didn't quite give you the same experience, and after so many years I found I missed the accompanying buzz every time I moved the mouse (kidding...).
Did they ever fix that by the way ?
Then they started including 5.1 surround with optical in/out on the mobos I buy and I just said 'Heck, why waste the PCI slot ?"
It's all about the marketing...
Here are a few more links:
http://gear.ign.com/articles/617/617336p1.html
http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-22364-2435-x-x-x
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1813922,00.asp
I guess everyone's been bought, right KO??
"Wha?! $400 for a m*the*f'ing soundcard? That soundcard better be dripping in goldplatings is all I'm saying. Mr. Hoo better be able to back up those claims of true "fidelity" (which I doubt). I could buy a really good amp for $400 mofo dollars."
For a $400 dollars, forget gold plating. This card better have silver plating, for it is a better conductor than gold.
For $400 I better get some of those stupid Swarovski crystals that all the hep cats are diggin' these days.
$400 sound card...and this jackhole says iPods are overpriced.
I wonder if they'll finally duplex their midi interface? Who would buy this thing for "music" creation when you can do so much better from Emu - or just software nowandays...ie gigasampler with a built in optical interface on the MB? Do that...
That's funny #25, because those really are all shill sites.
http://www.ghoulgamers.com/viewtopic.php?t=2184&sid=3a889d3e75ae8a45ab041c652e11a1ca
Extremetech is less a review site and more of a traffic whore site, they review shit like monitors but not with a standardized test suite, which is stupid. Seems like they review whatever they get, whether that's because they get perks for it or just because they want to more reviews for more traffic, I'm not sure.
And FYI, gamespot and IGN merged a long time ago, they are BOTH THE SAME COMPANY.
Gamespot is also sleazy, they used to make you (still do?) use a download manager that collected personal information on the user.
IGN isn't a review site, it's a game and discussion site that sometimes reviews hardware. Usually it's shit. They don't have pictures, no standardized system to review stuff. All they want is to get you addicted enough to buy a subscription to their premium shit.
#24
I already mentioned one site I more or less trust, anandtech. There are a few others. Rage3d, hexus, designtechnica and xbit.
#25
Here's a quote from the comments page on an obscure extremetech review.
"Is this Ziff-Davis spreading FUD in the old tradition again?? (remember, this is why ExtremeTech exists - ZD had a bad rep for doing overtly biased reviews, like comparing an office benchmark between a box with 32meg RAM vs one with 64 meg ram and concluding that the CPU in the 32 meg box was slower based on those benchmarks)..."
Ziff Davis owns a bunch of publications, including extremetech.
Here's some interesting reads.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22332
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/06/1719216&tid=149&tid=137
Another reason these sites do this is because sometimes they get access to stuff really early. The advantage? Well, it means that you get hardware 10 days early, and your review is finished by publication time, the other guy's isn't.
If you've ever heard of the HP evangelist program, you know what I'm talking about. It's the reason I haven't gone to davesipaq for over a year. He's a piece of crap that signed an agreement. It meant the people who signed would be given early access to hardware, but they also had to abide by HP's rules, which meant censoring/moderating/deleting posts from their forums. Davesipaq is the only one I know of that complied. Well, he can enjoy his early hardware, his site sucks.
Hey KO, good reads...thanks for sharing...how bout we back the anger down a notch. It ain't exactly the way to really enlighten people about corruption in the review industry. Calling the readers of such sites idiots doesn't win people to your side of the argument at all. If "EVERYBODY knew" about this corruption, than no one would be reading these unnamed and "completely bought" sites anymore, and they would go out of business. I read the Tom's article a ways back and remember they said some good stuff about x-fi...doesn't mean I buy every little tid-bit they spit out, but rather I use a collection of sites and such to find out what's up with products, tech, etc. I was just simply pointing out numerous articles that previewed the tech and thought there might be some good stuff in store - no reason to jump down my throat! Good grief dude...Creative has made some good products in the past (even if exagerrated), so I am looking forward to X-Fi...do we have anything else on the horizon?
I can not believe all the negativity regarding this product. First, this card sounds awesome I heard at e3 and it sounded great. Second, this is the most powerful audio processor out right now for the pc. M audio has nothing on this. This product has great sound and great features. Go take a look at the soundblaster website. If creative is bosting about anything on this product that is not true they will get sued for false advertising. So back off the bashing of this product till you listen to it. Or just keep complaining like the hopeless losers that you all are.
Pro audio bottom line: If you want top quality, you cannot do analog conversion inside the PC case. Spend your money on products from a company with a slight clue. For the amounts listed here, you could actually get some decent audio equipment. See #13 re: Echo Layla, or check out USB2.0/Firewire interfaces from Edirol and Presonus.
Would be interesting to see if they manage to improve the sub-par quality of their drivers this time around. My Audidy 2 ZS is poor in that area, I can barely get it working and only if it's in a specific PCI slot.
Creative lost me as a customer years ago. They have done nothing but get lamer and lamer since the Live 5.1 card. For pro audio and recording it's all about M-Audio, MOTU, Turtle Beach, etc. or for just playback a nice onboard digital I/O hooked up to a decent decoder/amp.
Fatal1ty is the guy who won that Quakecon lan championship and won the Ferrari, isn't he???
I heard that this is so X-treme that you can fart into its microphone and the sound cards processes it and it comes out sounding like Mozart. By the way Royale (#21) there is no way that a 128kbps file can be improved to sound better than the original CD. Once an MP3 is created it has lost part of the original sound, and no matter how x-treme the card is it can't put the missing parts back. Perhaps the cards makes MP3's sound better than some other card, but it can be better than the lossless original.
Thanks for pointing that out lupinstel. I almost fell out of my chair when I read this.
"Example- your 128 kbps mp3s will now sound better than your cds of the same track."
I'm kinda over the whole "internal sound card" thing because of the EMI issue, and after the SBLive I sure am not going to buy anything supposedly "pro audio" from Creative, but it's certainly possible to make an MP3 more pleasing to the untrained ear than the original audio.
Just boost the low and high end of the frequency spectrum. It'll fool a 15-year-old gamer every time.
Lossless audio cannot be matched, but if you have plenty of mp3 songs, you may want to enhance the way they sound.
Many systems have been developed so far to meet this goal,
I daresay it is more sophisticated that just boosting low and high end.
Well, anyway this is just another attempt to add some clarity and crispness to the source which is not perfect.
Which occurs a lot. I do not have my music collection stored on SACD or DVD-Audio, do you?
So I can't see why you guys get agitated so much about that one.
And another thing: although I find all the comments on corruption on various review sites highly interesting
this whole discussion has little to do with the card itself. This made me search other sites. Looking for more factual information I went briefly to hardwarezone.com
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=1946&cid=3
and eventually to Creative site - to look up the actual specs, they are covered pretty well here. Have a look, if you have not yet:
http://www.soundblaster.com/products/x-fi/technology/architecture/specs.asp
Myself I am impressed with the processing power of the new chip that - according to Creative - can be configured to serve either gaming or audio processing.
#Raindog: they claim it is a brand new chip, miles-away from your old live card ;)
..which served me well, btw, althought that was few years back..
#21, Royale
"The X-Fi is supposedly supposed (?) to convert any audio to DVD quality audio in real time. Example- your 128 kbps mp3s will now sound better than your cds of the same track."
You're an idiot.
"I saw a demo of this technology at E3 and also met Fatal1ty in the same booth. Seriously... the difference in sound quality is amazing!"
Creative's wet dream is to have consumers as uneducated as you.
(all) I want in a soudn card is :
1) optical digital output (no/little EMI worries).
2) Support some "standard" 3D sound positioning system used by the majority of games and HARDWARE ENCODE this information to 5.1 / 6.1 /7.1 on the digital oputput. - so I may use a optical digitial input cinema amp (Yamaha, Denon etc.etc.)
3) have stable drivers, that are supported/updated for many years.
4) Perfect sound playback consistency i.e. no skipping, popping, stalling or any kind of drop-out no matter what (moderate) level of CPU utilization or PCI bandwidth is used. i.e. good driver / interupts and a widly comptible PCI or PCIe implementaion over all common chipsets (AMD, VIA, INTEL, SIS).
For the time being The Chaintech $25 PCI card with VIA Envy24 chip meets all those requriements for me, except for item (2)....
....Something my now redundant ($150) Creative Audidgy 1 could not do on any point in it's miserable life.
Maybe you got things mixed up, but I believe, it was IGN and GameSPY, not GameSPOT that merged. Far as I know, Gamespot is part of the CNET network, which far as I know, may or may not be involved with IGN. But I'm gonna say I doubt that. Anyway, calm it down a notch. You've got too much anger in you.
Stupid fools.
This is not a proffesional Audio Card. It is a High End for SEMI- Professionals. If you dont want to spend to much money, buy the cheap Versions, but if you are a gamer, you should pay the price. Audigy is a good card as well, but lacks on onboard memory and has got no really good Midi support. Audigy chips are noisy at using EAX effects too. The onboard memory will bypass the biggest shit of an Audigy card or something like this (streaming sounddata over the PCI Bus) by buffering the Sounds on the card so you will get an amazing performance boost in games. AND: STUPID FOOLS! YOU CANT GET THE SOUND IN GAMES WITHOUT AN AUDIGY OR THIS NEW ONE HERE. Onboard sound Users and users of cheap cards will lose everytime because they will not heare any footsteps from an enemy behind him in a game. Only EAX cards with high quality will provide this great sound. So dont bug this card, buy it or shut up. If you dont need it, shut up. Its not for you, its for an gamer like me, or a man who loves music at a high quality support. Should i explain the biggest problem on a Soundstorm chip from Nvidia. Interupt sharing brings noise to your ears while moving the USB Mouse. Newer drivers dont support Soundfonts as well, like the Envy 24 doesnt support eax3 or 4 as well. If you dont need XI-FI stay on your 86 DB noise Cards and tell others the nonsens of good Soundquality at a price ~ 100. On a professional system you would get one Dac for this price.
sry for my bad english, im german