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Creative's X-Fi Audio Chip Reviewed
theraindog writes "The Tech Report has posted an in-depth review of Creative's new X-Fi audio processor. The 51-million transistor chip employs a unique audio ring architecture that pushes an apparent 10,000 MIPS, supports up to 128 hardware-accelerated voices for 3D audio, and can upsample and upmix stereo 16-bit/44.1kHz audio to multichannel 24-bit/96kHz. Creative says that the X-Fi's upsampling and upmixing capabilities can make MP3s sound better than the original CD, and although that claim isn't validated by listening tests, the X-Fi does sound better than other consumer-level audio cards. It also performs better in games, in part because precious few sound cards feature hardware acceleration for 3D audio."
I couldn't quite hear you.
liqbase
Ah, good old MIPS. I always love this number. The first thing they tell you in computer architecture classes is, "This is the MIPS value. People used to use it, but it's very much a bullshit number."
Missing link?- x-fi/index.x?pg=1
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/soundblaster
It's colored all pretty in green-link color, but it doesn't link to the page...
Soundstorm gave us a bit of hope but noone knows if that'll ever come back. I'm sure many gamers would just love to keep Creative bloat out of their system.
Does that mean that all the others only accelerate 2D audio?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I feel bad for Creative, they are pretty much the one and only sound card manufacturer (yes I know there are others but they are the most popular IMO). But is there really a demand for a bigger and better sound card from the average consumer?. How often are you in the middle of playing [insert game name here] and found yourself saying "man, I need a sound card upgrade, I'm just not getting the performance i need!!". In addition, when was the last time you thought of water cooling your sound card?.
My point is merely that sound cards provide great sound, but if your not in the Music industry, all the cards sound pretty much the same.
...But this guy sounds a lot better, regardless.
OK, actually, it sounds a lot better when it's connected to a Home Theater receiver/amplifier. Whatever. It's a far better way to spend your $100.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Reads:
The Tech Report has posted an in-depth review
Should read:
The Tech Report has posted an in-depth review
(Thanks to synthparadox for the link)
they'd put in a USB or PCMCIA form factor for use in my laptop...
MobileOptimized
Anyone know if/when we'll get drivers? Checking google, the ALSA developers don't seem too optimistic about getting specs etc. from Creative. :(
Porting Linux to a soundcard? I've never heard of such a thing. Sounds excessive, but I'll hear you out.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
The real question is does it run *on* linux...?
. . . why does Creative still refuse to include an optical out on its sound cards?
Yes you can get the live drive, but on a media PC that's designed to be on show, it makes sense to have the digital outputs out the back, where they can be easily concealed.
HiteC do one, as do turtle beach, why not Creative?
Sounds (no pun intended!) like someone at Creative is trying to BS me. How can make an mp3 sound BETTER than the CD? Unless they can restore the lost information in the sampling & compressing, it will sound... DIFFERENT from my cd, at the best. A. PS: This is one of the reasons why I chose a semi-pro product instead of a multimedia-jinglish-aluminium external box-sparkling thing :|
It would have to, in order for us to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things.
Creative says that the X-Fi's upsampling and upmixing capabilities can make MP3s sound better than the original CD.
In other news, Creative have created a new image compression standard that makes compressed images "look better than the original uncompressed version". A Creative spokesperson has announced that this compression standard uses the same technology as X-Fi to create information out of thin air.
Seriously, there is no way to make a recording that is compressed by a lossy algorithm such as MP3 sound as good as the original without creating information out of thin air. Of course, X-Fi can't do this, so it must be "guessing" what the original information was. This would of course mean that what you are listening to is just a moderately close approximation of the original recording that has had information added to it to sound "better" (by some Creative engineer's definition of "better").
-AT
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
upsample and upmix stereo 16-bit/44.1kHz audio to multichannel 24-bit/96kHz
Umm, how exactly does this work? Once you've sampled and quantized a signal you've already thrown out information--you can't get it back. Has there been some new development since I took digital signal processing, or is this simply marketing?
A few years ago I listened to a PC app that was destined for hardware that was ahead of its time.
It upconverted/upsampled, analyzed the headroom and expanded/compressed as needed, analyzed the noise floor and reduced it, analyzed the spectrum and EQ'd it, analyzed the stereo separation and expanded it.
After 9x the WAV (or was it VOC?) length, it sounded "better" 99% of the time.
They never got funding and the project died.
With powerful hardware, you'll definitely get a more aurally pleasant and more dynamic sound.
But is it what the artist intended?
Those fuckers killed Aureal. Creative has been on my shit list ever since...
So how does this compare to other sound cards? I've been told by others into pro-audio that the Audigy was an expensive over-hyped POS and sounds really bad compared to pro cards.
So how does this compare to low end prosumer cards like M-Audio and Emu? Or higher end more professional cards from RME, Apogee, Lynx Audio? Or is this really pointless? If there is DSP accelleration on this new card, I was wondering if it could have pro applications like VST reverb or something along those lines.
When is the PCIe version coming out? In fact when is any PCIe sound card coming out? Until them I am stuck with crappy on board sound with no hardware mixer... grrrr!
Wow, so this card is so obnoxiously unnecessary that it upmixes the sound to be better than it was? I gotta have this. ;)
That said, I have a creative Audigy2 ZS, and I consider it a great buy, considering that it costs only about as much as 10 good albums. It has an amazing bass and treble boost built in. Of course, I am using the ALSA drivers on linux, so Windows users might get more from a cheaper card with the official drivers.
Don't you mean 10 GIPS??
Bad moderator, bad.
no, LINUX runs IT! (and not just in soviet russia)
If such fanciful upsampling algorithms were able to be done, they would have existed already. But the fact is, is that the sonic "sugar" that this new Creative chip adds makes anyone who is reasonably knowledgable (and I mean in more than "I know what kilohertz means" way) just smack their forehead and groan.
This sounds like anti-aliased audio on a huge scale, and I rekon the audio this produces comes at a cost to the original audio's dynamics and in a big way. To put it simply, you can polish a turd and expect it to look better.
Hell, are there Windows drivers that don't explode on an SMP machine?
Nope? I guess it stays on the shelf, then...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
From the The Official Gravis Ultrasound Programmer's Encyclopedia:
I don't know if this was ever proven to be effective. Some people said that interpolation made lesser quality files sound "smoother". These same folks might also have had a lot of ink on their hands...
That line about MP3s sounding better at 96kHz is a bunch of marketing BS.
There are reasons for 24bit/96kHz, but upsampling just to play it out of a speaker isn't one of them. That's kind of like printing out something at 2400dpi only to scan it back in again at 300. At best, you're going to wind up with exactly the same thing, while at worst you're going to have a bunch of aliasing artifacts from the upsampling.
Upsampling for playback is worthless even if your source material is perfect CD audio. Taking something even worse than that (MP3) and upsampling it is just turd polishing.
Want better sound? Buy better speakers. And a sound card that has high-quality analog components. The digitial part is not the weak part of computer sound playback. Hard to market that, though: "Now with 10db more S/N! And better capacitors!"
24bit/96kHz is good for doing high quality recordings, then manipulating the sound and mixing it. Once that's done there's no point in distributing it in anything better than 16/44.1, if all that's ever done with it after that is playback. If you want your listeners to be able to do their own remixes, that may be another story, but then you have to distribute separate mixer tracks anyway...
314-15-9265
The thing that really bothers me, is no matter how much tinkering i do in windows, i cant ever seem to properly turn off the "sound enhancing" features apart from just NOT INSTALLING the extra creative stuff. AND THEY DONT ENHANCE THE SOUND!! They make everything sound wrong - unless your speakers are bad to begin with, in which case they slightly enhance the otherwise abysmal sound quality. Its like "Loudness" only its a pain in the ass to get it to STAY TURNED OFF (Loudness is for making tiny speakers sound "loud" as far as I know).
Anyways, when you actually have a GOOD sound system, it isnt susposed to require sound alteration apart from normal band-equilizer modification. All the sound-modifying effects Creative uses are based on the inherent concept of buying tiny, shitty, speakers. Which is a stupid idea.
Also, as far as I can tell, even the wizard doesnt even shut everything off, and Windows seems to like mysteriously turning 3D mode back on for no reason - then you have to go back and turn all the damn modes off again! I've "fixed" the sound on my brothers computer six times now!
Meanwhile, My linux box sounds fantastic - i could literally hear a difference in the sound quality after i upgraded from a SB. Live to an Audigy 2. In any case, once you get all the crap turned off in Windows it sounds the same as Linux.
"But is it what the artist intended?"
Sounds like the Greasemonkey issue all over again.
Did creative add GSIF (Gigastudio) support yet, or do we still need separate musician's and gaming cards? Using a third-party driver with GSIF support (i.e. www.kxproject.com) is a suboptimal option.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I think my subject line is more appropropriate than yours.
If there's one hardware firm I despise over any other then it's Craptive for that very reason. Aureal had some superb tech waiting to be unleashed. A3D 2 was superb and was easily a 10 frag head start in Q3 and HL, you could hear exactly where your enemy was and where they were coming from. A3D 3 was going to be even better until Craptive decided to bury Aureal in litigation. Then the vultures bought what was left of them and A3D lies in their vaults while they palm off their inferior reverb engine that is EAX.
I still take out my Vortex 2 card and cradle it thinking of what could have been. Now I can only dream of Creative going under and someone like Nvidia and the ex-Aureal engineers they employed for SoundStorm finally bringing us true positional 3D audio.
I don't care how good their latest chip is, creative can fucking rot in hell for all I care.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Fuck Creative Labs. Doesn't any one make cards that can do hardware mixing any more?
/dev/dsp emulation.
Dmix won't be good enough until it also works for applications using snd-pcm-oss's
[ ] No sound
[ ] PC Speaker
[ ] Gravis Ultrasound
[ ] Sound Blaster
[ ] Sound Blaster Pro
I think the moderator missed this announced card by Creative: Silent Card The SNR is way better.
"Upsampling for playback is worthless even if your source material is perfect CD audio. Taking something even worse than that (MP3) and upsampling it is just turd polishing."
That depends on weither you believe WAV-->MP3 to be one way. No one's studied to see if the MP3 psyacoustical model is reversable.
My M-Audio Revolution 5.1 sounds much, much, much better than my SB Live and my mobo's built-in nforce2 Soundstorm at playing music in both Linux and 'doze, which I do more than play games (in 'doze). But then again I much prefer the Soundstorm for games.
... maybe most do though?
Most, if not all reviews I read say the Revo sounds better than Audigy 2.
>>there is no way to make a recording that is compressed by a lossy algorithm such as MP3 sound as good as the original without creating information out of thin air.
>>
Right. I bet Creative's gone the way of BOSE (damn their eyes) and made the audio "sound better." To lay-people at least. BOSE accomplishes this 'amazing' feat by boosting the level of certain frequencies and/or increasing the volume. In blind tests, many people say that a louder soundbyte sounds better, and so forth.
I personally just want accurate reproduction. I have a very nice receiver/speaker combo that does that trick, and a (now fairly old) Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card that has pretty accurate analog output.
Amusingly, Creative even has an affordable line of semi-pro cards that do a excellent job in sound reproduction. The tradeoff, of course, is that they don't have all the snazzy 3d game effects and so forth. I personally don't care. For my needs, if I were going to shell out $150-200 for a Creative sound card, the E-MU 1212M would be the superior choice.
Who knows though; I could be completely off-base. I'll reserve judgement until I read some professional comparisons and hear the thing for myself.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
The _usage_ of the "MIPS" here might be mostly marketing bullshit (as it doesnt make the sound "better"), its not compareable to PMPO or co.
Its just a bit decieving, because getting mips in audio chips is _REALLY_ easy. You are mostly dealing with 16 or 24bit integer values, in neat streams. You can build a whole function unit for a few 1000 transistors...
So just give the thing 50 adders, 50 mul-units, runn it at 100 Mhz and you get 10 billion possible instruction per second (which might be burned quite quickly if you want to do bigger effects on xx streams, but thats another matter).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I glanced through the article, and I saw in one section that they complained about the small number of jacks on the back, and that 3 analog isn't enough for 8 channel (7.1) sound systems. With my S750 speakers, they use a special cord type. two that are 3-channel (like a stereo one, but with one more black seperator for 3 metal "layers" beneath the tip of the jack), and one that is 2-channel for 8 speaker sound. And my Creative decoder and speakers both came with a 3-to-4 jack cable so they can hook into 4-jack speaker systems. Intelligent idea to cram more onto each plug, don't think it's a standard, but it should be.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
A lot of audiophile CD players and DACs do this; they upsample CD audio to 24 bit and 96 or 192 kHz before converting to analog. It's claimed that this improves the quality of the analog playback signal. I've never really bothered to try and understand it, so don't ask me. A Google search for upsampling audio turns up a few relevant articles in the first page.
Are you adequate?
That image technology has been around forever. Just watch an episode of CSI.
I was going to make much the same observation and then something occured to me:
Quality of sound is subjective.
It's why every crappy CD player and walkman comes with a Bass Boost. Boosting the bass doesn't make the sound more authentic than the original but, for the average listener with no idea what clear music should sound like, more bass is appealing and a selling gimmick.
Similarly, you upsample, apply smoothing algorithms, apply fractal algorithms, whatever, you may be able to give a perception of clarity, of spacial separation, etc. far in excess of what the original CD had. That doesn't mean it's what the artist and engineers intended, it doesn't mean it's more accurate to the original performance, but you'll still get the average 13 year old telling you that Britney's latest masterpiece sounds even better now.
So, you can make a track sound "better" to an average sampling of listeners without it being more accurate to the environment of the original recording. It's all about their definition of better.
For myself, and I know many others, the sound card is something you consider when building a new machine entirely. It is rare that something so good comes out that I feel compelled to upgrade the sound card. For me, when I build a new machine I get the new top of the line card then put my old one in my secondary work machine.
As others have said, a good set of speakers is really more meaningful these days than the card. Yes, definitely the card can make a huge difference. But the difference between an Audigy 2 and an X-Fi? Not significant enough to warrant a new purchase unless it is a totally new machine.
Which, by the way, I suspect that is where the majority of Creative's revenue comes from, Dell and others who buy their cards in large quantities for their higher end machines.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
While many might believe this is marketting BS, has anybody actually compared them? As someone has already mentioned, the Gravis Ultrasound could improve audio (I owned one).
e x.html also says MP3s sound better.
A review on Toms Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050818/ind
The card will also support multiple 3D positioned audio sources in real time.
While the card is excessive for most users, the card is still very impressive.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Dont believe the hype, because that is all it is. It is quite simple, you can not make an MP3 sound better than a CD. You can make it sound different, and different to you might mean better. But if you do math, there is no way to make something sound better than the original, only different. This always frustrates me when someone wants to explain why you should buy this or that because of special features. It just cant be done! Why not just advertise it as a kick-ass sound card that will blow your mind in video cames, or maybe it has great preamps that will help the sound, but please dont advertise that it will make your mp3 sound better than the CD. FWIW, if you want the best sound, get rid of the CD, the mp3, and get yourself a good analog turntable! Sorry, just my $0.02!!!
creative labs clearly believes in intelligent design since they believe something can be created out of nothing.
I always had bad experiences with stable machines becoming unstable after installing Creative's drivers, and never liked that you can't seem to just install what seems like a driver but have to screw up your system with what seems more like an application suite / (buggy) driver combo. What's worse is that despite the bloat Creative's stuff never has the features that I actually want in a sound card.
The only salvation for my SB cards has been the 'kx project' drivers:
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1
(sorry I don't know to enter a URL here...)
If you are a musician these drivers have the features you actually want; WDM, ASIO, GSIF - other than the sound floor (on my SBLive) they make the card competative with a mid level music card. No bloat and I've found the driver to be solid, though the UI is rather yucky.
That's like saying you can make JPEG look better than the uncompressed image. Yes, you can improve the quality of MP3 by careful interpretation of data and perhaps extrapolating information for higher frequencies (which most often suffer from MP3 compression -- MP3Pro does something similar), but it will NEVER be as crisp and clear as the original material, let alone better.
Not that you'll be able to hear the difference on your $20 desktop speakers you got at the 'Shack anyway.
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
It's why every crappy CD player and walkman comes with a Bass Boost. Boosting the bass doesn't make the sound more authentic than the original but, for the average listener with no idea what clear music should sound like, more bass is appealing and a selling gimmick.
Generally, adding bass makes the sound more audible at low volumes (or when the earbuds are only halfway in your ear).
I've never seen CSI, but how do they add information to an image? Surely that violates the laws of information theory?
with little insight and no sense of humor.
I used my last mod point to mark it funny.
lheal, #86013.
I am, to this day, probably more bitter about Aureal's end than about any other failed tech company other than the one I was personally involved with. (Don't ask, you've never heard of them.) I still have my MX300 in a drawer, on the off chance that someone with a soul gets an internship at Creative and leaks the driver source so that it can be updated for XP and Linux 2.6. And I will neverever buy a Creative product in my life: it's almost five years later and they still haven't managed to come up with a positional audio codec half as good as the one languishing in their vaults...
And dear lord am I ever enjoying watching Apple stomp Creative into bloody chunks in the DAP market. Couldn't happen to a nicer pack of thieves.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
... when I got to the part about Creative not using Dolby Digital Live because it's not DRM'ed enough. These guys were taking DRM seriously even before Microsoft made it a priority. Doesn't that make them Officially Evil?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Okay, Creative is still missing one key thing. I want a card that can encode (NOT decode) to Dolby Digital (EX) or DTS (ES) in real time! None of this ProLogic II or Neo:6 crap, or using 6 (or 8) analog outs. I want to be able to run an optical cable from my sound card to my stereo and get a multichannel digital stream that I can play around with.
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
Now, if you handed me a completely random picture that looked like TV snow, but with a small part cut out, could I regenerate that missing piece? No way. But hand me a picture of George bush's face with a small piece cut out, and I can recreate that piece very accurately. The point is, most data has some structure that we know about, outside of the particular source in question.
This is precisely the same reason why lossless compression is possible. Can FLAC compress arbitrary sounds samples, or png compress arbitrary images? No, of course not. But since (almost) all sounds and images of interest have common properties, we can make alternate representations in which data most likely to be of interest is represented by shorter bitstrings.
Wow, I just spit my coffee all over the place. Thank you.
Yes, but people like us who care to tinker with drivers end up using Linux B-)
Unless they have to use a lot of donated hardware that lacks working drivers for linux or bsd-ix86 systems.
Creative forces you to buy more of their own product by making funky digital out. If you get a single PCI slot card with no bells and whistles, Creative makes every last I/O a miniplug. Outputting two digital signals (front and rear, separately) on a stereo miniplug allowed Creative to force customers to buy their PC speakers rather than outputting a standard multichannel encoded SPDIF signal on an RCA jack.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
for the record, speakers don't decode digital signals.
Yet. Just wait until the record labels mandate it. Search this discussion for "DRM".
Yes, I still have my old Santa Cruz PCI card laying around. Nice to see that they're still making newer cards.
What I'm curious about is whether the Turtle Beach cards now support front audio jacks on the newer cases. (One of the reasons my game box is currently using the on-board sound.) Once I started using cases with front audio ports, it became a bit of a pain to use my old Santa Cruz card.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
It's why every crappy CD player and walkman comes with a Bass Boost. Boosting the bass doesn't make the sound more authentic than the original
Yes it does. Like any other built-in equalizer, Bass Boost compensates for deficiencies elsewhere in the audio path. It's often used to work around the low-frequency suppression inherent in the tiny speakers used in budget headphones, and it's a lot cheaper to implement in every player than bundling it with a pair of Sennheiser headphones.
the bad thing about this card is their is no 64 bit windows driver
i havnt tested it out in linux (just built a new machine and bought this card)
another thing i hate is the fact that the card offers 3 modes (a so called feature!) that means if you want to play games you should switch to GAMES mode (other wise you cannot use EAX or other features) if you want to watch movies you should goto entertainment (so you can change sound setups and offer effects) or if you want to make music their is a mode for that as well, luckily i can get good enough sound using GAME mode so i do not have to mess with it, but its their and it can become bothersome.
will it be able to send the 3D sound generated throught the optical connection or it will still send only 2 channel ?
The Audigy 2 isn't really "good enough" because the card is Broken(tm). It cannot do sample rates other than multiples of 48kHz and forces anything else(read: your entire mp3 collection) to be resampled with a less-than-stellar method.
Alas, it also happens to enjoy great linux and game support.
My car stereo is an mp3 player, and has had the antenna unhooked for almost 3 years. When I finally hooked it back up, my friend asked me what was wrong with my stereo, since it had WAY too much bass. I had to explain compression and subjective sound for bad stereos, blah blah.
Anyway, it's interesting how bad people can butcher sound for the average person.
Well I have to respond to this. You had a good post going here for a bit, then:
This is precisely the same reason why lossless compression is possible. Can FLAC compress arbitrary sounds samples, or png compress arbitrary images? No, of course not. But since (almost) all sounds and images of interest have common properties, we can make alternate representations in which data most likely to be of interest is represented by shorter bitstrings.
TOTAL FAILURE. Lossless compression is (Hence the name!) lossless, like zip or sit. Ie., if you have a row of 20 zeros, you can compress that to one zero and information that says "This times 20." This is smaller then 20 0s (->"0x20" as a made up example) but can perfectly reproduce the original. So FLAC can compress arbitrary sound. DUH. You are talking about lossy compression, which throws away unheard data.
You can get optical out and decent sound for way cheap.
"Creative Labs, the worst thing to ever happen to sound card industry."
the runner up was
"Creative Labs, holding back soundcard innovation for over a decade"
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Yeah!
Creative says that the X-Fi's upsampling and upmixing capabilities can make MP3s sound better than the original CD
Horse shit.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If it ain't supported by the ALSA project, then it don't exist in my book. How am I supposed to get excited over something that don't work on the platform of my choice: Linux? Sure it sounds nice and all, but unless Creative is open with the specs on this thing, it sure ain't going to have too many Linux users applauding their new design. And if it ain't supported by ALSA, the probably means that unCreative either locked up the specs or it sucks. So anyone involved with ALSA who can verify how much this chipset sucks? And if anyone mods me troll, I hope your nuts rot and fall off. This ain't no troll. This is truth that I speak, ain't it my brothers?
That image technology has been around forever. Just watch an episode of CSI.
That's actually not as whacked as it first seems.
You *can* improve the resolution or quality of an image if you have a video stream to process. It may be possible that Creative is doing something similar with the audio stream.
I doubt it would produce output more accurate than from an compressed CD source, but it's conceivable that they found a way to make it sound significantly better than a "standard" lossy format decoder.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I believe what he was getting at was can _compress_ arbitrary sound (not _can_ compress). Feed it random data (white noise) and I'll bet $20 that it ends up as large (if not larger thanks to container overheads) than the "uncompressed" source. Yes it's quite capable of running it's algorithm on the data, but it's not capable of garunteeing that the output will be smaller than the input.
.RAW input), though I doubt you'd get any reasonable compression (even if it wasn't noise!) since the way in which sound is redundant is far different than the way in which images are.
:)
Heck, you could feed PNG sound data and it would be happy (provided the compressor allowed
Just one AC to another
I have bought the card last week, i have plugged it in today in no time, it take's up a psu cable (just as a hard drive) as a nice blue logo (nice addition to modded case) first thing i did was to hook up my jackson guitar in it to test one of the 2 preamplified 1/4 Jack that comes with it. The DAC makes its job well and the noise reduction is very good. Too good in fact that i had some trouble hooking up the hardware effects at first (before finding where to put on effects in the Xfi's pannel) , the noise reduction still give's me a hard time, it works too well. In a 30 minute trial to get to know the main reason to buy the Elite : Does the external module works to record guitar, voice and Bass -> Definitly. It comes packaged with Cubase and WaveLab and Ampli-tube, so everything is there to get started to rock, and do not forget that you can have 8 simultaneous Hardware effects that feels just like any pedal effects would (thrust me i heard worst distortion...metal zone anyone ?) So i definitly recommend this to home musicians who are gamers and want to be able to do anything, not just be able to record in a specialized software like protool cards without 3d accel. I bought the card directly on the site for 399$ US. Its not such a high price, because you would normally have to buy an ASIO sound card and a mini-console with 4 amplified I/O to have the same result.
My worst fears where that in the past Creative was well known to have horrendrous drivers and bloated install, this one has a package wich only install the tools for audio creation if you asks for it. Remember also that the elite pro comes with 64 MB of onboard RAM, wich frees up a bit of the main RAM for audio processing, tough I do not know if it makes a big difference.
For those that say its the speakers that makes a difference, try listening to AC98 onboard for 2-3 years, even with good speakers, you can still ear noise when nothing plays at high volume. Same speaker with this card feels like heaven.
A satisfied customer
If you take pure random noise and feed it through FLAC, it will come out the far end BIGGER than when it went it, or at best the same size. FLAC will not be able to COMPRESS it.
FLAC will be able to handle it, with no problem, and when you decode the FLAC you will get identical samples to what you fed into FLAC.
The way FLAC works is to find common things about the sound, and replace the sample data with codes that can later expand to the original sample data. If the sound is noise, and it's random enough, FLAC will not be able to find anything it can encode. Thus FLAC is stuck passing the original data unchanged, and probably FLAC has to put some framing data around it so it will be slightly bigger.
So, OP was correct, because he or she meant "compress" in the sense of "make the output smaller". Or, as the original words said: FLAC "...can make alternate representations in which data most likely to be of interest is represented by shorter bitstrings."
The same applies to PNG. Random enough image data will leave it unable to make a smaller output, but you will still get the original data back when you decode.
I saw one comment from a sound engineer somewhere..... "Creative is telling you that, given a pile of hamburger, they can make a cow."
As a former long-time Creative customer who has been burned many times and have seen many others burned, I'm no longer interested in Creative products. What I am interested in is this:
t goddl/
http://www.hidiaudio.com/products/mystique.html
http://www.bluegears.com/soundcard_xmystique.html
That's right, a card that can perform real-time Dolby Digital AC3 encoding (aka Dolby Digital Live, or DDL). The spiritual successor to the nVidia Soundstorm!
Turtle Beach has a card with the same chip, although their driver support is a bit lacking in comparison:
http://turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards/m
And this is the chip that drives them both:
http://cmedia.com.tw/product/CMI8768_plus.htm
The cards are pretty affordable - newegg has them both for under $100. Personally I'd rather go with the X-Mystique due to better driver support and on-board coax output (even though both cards come with optical cables, IIRC).
I guess Terratec has an Aureon 7.1 card that has DDL as well, but they don't market their cards to the U.S.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Basically all pro cards from the low end up are designed to do one thing only: get audio in and out of the computer accurately. You pay for more ins and outs, better converters, etc, but all they do is play and record sound.
The Creative cards from the Live on up are all DSPs. They are designed to convolute sound. So in a game if they want it to sound like you are in a parking garage, they give the proper commands to the card and it convolutes the sound to do it's best appromation of a parking garage. This leads to both lower CPU usage and more realistic sound than doing the processing all on the CPU.
So the problem is, because of this consumer focus, sacrafices were made. One was that the Lives and Audigys output (and input) only one sample rate: 48kHz (Audigy 2s have 96kHz, but only in special cases). They'll accept any you like under that, but sample rate convert that. They do an ok job, but not great, distortion is introduced that you can see on a scope and hear on good equipment. So they are right out for good recording. Also, they kinda chepskated on the converters for the cards, so they are noisy, compared to others in their price range.
But, for all that, they are real, no-shit, DSPs. If you get the OSS kX drivers (http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1) you can actually write your own assembly programs for the DSP and control what it does.
Now the X-Fi is extremely exciting as it fixes most of the problems people had. For one it has three different modes it can be set in. In pro mode it dispenses with all teh resampling crap and does accurate 1:1 bit capture at any sample rate up to 96kHz. In other modes where it does resample, it does it with a kickass high-order filter that introduces essentially no distortion.
I am unsure if it has the ability to function as a VST plugin built in, but certinaly nothing precludes it from doing so. It's a powerful DSP and has the capability to route sound in and out of it.
So, really, it's not comparable to pro cards. They are designed to do different things mostly. There are some pro cards that feature DSPs, but very few. These days in pro work, the effect processing is done in software. It's more flexable and real time is non-critical. However in a game, you can't dump 20% of your CPU in to doing a single high-quality reverb, so having a DSP is a real boon.
Personally, I use both. I have an M-Audio Firewire 410 for pro, an Audigy 2 for consumer. I imagine that'll become an X-fi very soon here.
... two of the best pro synth makers on the market. It's disgusting that a low-end POS (and I don't mean "point of sale") soundcard company could take over two high-end synthesizer houses, leaders in the sampler/workstation market, and cannibalize their incredible chipsets for *home PC sound cards*. What a waste.
Imagine if all the bands in the late 80s and 90s had to compose their music on a SB16. That's how shitty 'Creative' has been for the music biz as far as I'm concerned. Bleah.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
I can post a demonstration, if you like. In MODs and the like better resampling makes a huge difference. Using something poor quality, like a nerest neighbour for resampling sounds like shit. A good cubic spline algorithm sounds pretty good.
However with regards to CD playback, it's more questionable. In theory, you can improve quality. Instead of playing 44,100 samples per second with 65,536 voltage levels per sample, you do 88,200 samples per second with 16,777,216 voltage levels per sample. Now the intermediate samples you don't just make copies of the ones next to them, you use an advance interpolation algorithm to figure out what they should be.
When viewd on a scope with sufficent resolution, this will be a smoother wave. Great, but can we really hear the difference? 44kHz sampling, which gives a maximum playback frequency of 22kHz is pretty much past the limit of human hearing. There's debate about if we can percieve ultrasonic sounds, but it's questioable. Ok, so if you can't hear those interpolated samples, what do they buy you?
Also it won't be as good as just starting out higher rez in the first place. Advanced Gravis is correct that a GUS interpolating an 8khz sample sounds better than a software program not doing it, but it still doens't sound as good as a sample at 44khz.
Photoshop does that too. Three kinds, actually! "Nearest neighbor", "bilinear", "bicubic"
Tell me Mr Creative, what good is a new processor if you are unable to make stable drivers?
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
MIPS - said before, Meaningless.
24bit/96KHz - Lots of crap has been made with this label. Please tell me something about the DACs they use. I'd rather have a good (professional) 16bit/44.1KHz board than a consumer-level 24bit/96KHz one.
'better than CD quality' - how? why? The only way to do this is by interpolating. How does it know if something is an MP3 artifact or if it's part of the music? How will it react to music that's encoded with OGG or AAC (and therefore has other compression characteristics)? Will this be 'better' like applying an unsharp-mask over a JPEG-compressed image which results in ugly squares?
...if they started doing some real audiophile stuff with computer sound? I find it funny reaing all these posts about DSP and how people hope that there will be more DSP options with the next creative sound card. Guess what--in the recording industry, digital does not nessisarily equal good. In fact, when talking in terms of amplification, be it amplifing a guitar or any other instrument, tube driven analog amps are still the weapon of choice. I have a solid state amp with awesome DSP, reverb, everthing. It cost 400 dollars. I just bought an "analog" tube driven amp with no DSP which cost five times that and sounds infinately better. So by doctoring up sound on a computer via shitloads of DSP isn't nessisairly better. To audiophiles, it will probably make it sound worse. What would be neat is if they figured out some way to include a tube preamp on the acutal card. Then mabye watercooling for a soundcard wouldn't be such a crazy idea after all, because even 12AX7 tubes get really hot. And yes, optical out would be great too.
ffs /.
That was the grandparent's point.
In "CSI" and other bad Hollywood fiction, the Computer Nerd(TM) randomly hammers the keyboard to activate the "enhance" function in a glitzy GUI application (prominently featuring spinning CSI/FBI/CIA/NSA/FOO logos).
This will make e.g. a car licence plate become perfectly legible from what originally was a 3x4 pixel portion of a satellite/surveillance cam image.
Fort someone like me who's both a physician and a computer nerd, it's outright painful to watch CSI! They get both forensic medicine/pathology and computer science so horribly wrong.
(Please excuse my bad English. I'm a damn foreigner.)
Ah cool. I misunderstood. I thought CSI must have been some realistic based-on-fact show.
In the context of digital signal processing MIPS refers to the number of multiply-accumulate operations per second, including incrementing buffer pointers. It is a well-defined number and comparing it is not meaningless even across different architectures.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
It may be a BS number to end-users. However, when you are developing, especially low-level, real-time processing etc, it is an important number. You know in advance you need not bother with processor X or Y if it doesn't meet the MIPS requirement of your algorithm (we are not talking about word processing here). Yout statement is correct in sofar that the MIPS numbers quoted are often difficult to achieve as they require full exploitation of the pipelining of the processor. In other words: if you cannot parallelize your code well enough, a part of the processor will be sitting unused 'wasting' MIPS. But the number is not useless.
Most audio encoded by MP3 or other lossy codecs doesn't encode anything the top band at all so this process will not improve anything in that case.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Got a SB16 Vibra16 (no, nothing 16bit about it) which I ditched for a cheapo Trident4Dwave DX (most excellent).
If wanted to make a switch or my 4Dwave craps out (which I expected the day after I bought it and actually saw it but never happened), what would you recommend for best quality/price (~$50-$100)?
Maybe if we're lucky a math geek will happen by and explain it all to us.
It's just like every other "realistic based-on-fact" show: it's close enough to look cool to the general public, but it makes experts laugh or cry. This is true across many domains; ask a cop what they think about the typical cop show, or a lawyer about the typical courtroom drama show, or a survivalist about "Survivor".
Honestly, who needs dolby live encoding?
It is just one of these things to make people "buy more".
It makes sense only if you have a $1000 receiver, but most people including myself have analog surround setups that are pretty good (Klipsch, Logitech, Teufel to name jsy a few) and cost less money!
I really do not see any point in getting a sound solution with a dolby live encoder and this is not only because I had nothing but problems with nForce2 Soundstorm. Full EAX support instead makes much more sense to me.
So I was looking for a dedicated sound card - after I spent weeks fiddling with my Soundstorm drivers - and never got it to produce crackle-free sound in half life 2 for example.
I got X-Fi and I am glad I did, sound in games is good, no crackles and such, installation was smooth and I do not need to buy new soundcard for a few years at least.
It is my first soundblaster card so I have no grudge from the past as many others here seem to have. If I knew what you know from experiance maybe I would not buy. But it is too late now, and, fingers crossed, X-Fi works fine!
All the stuff that Creative's marketing department spews about MP3's sounding better than the original CD could be "right"... Sound is subjective, and for all I know the X-Fi probably applies bass boost, treble boost and mid cut similar to the "ROCK" equalizer preset that can be found on any portable MP3 player or car stereo. Which for lots of people, makes music sound better.
:)
(of course, this doesn't mean it's not a load of crap. There's still that whole 'information theory' thing to deal with...)
But anyway, taking a 44.1/16 file and upsampling it to 96KHz, keeping it at 24 bits after upsampling instead of dithering/truncating to 16 bits, *then* driving a DAC with the resulting 24/96 signal will give you excellent sound quality. Assuming of course that you have a good interpolation filter - since the X-Fi is an audio processing monster, there's no reason they can't do a good job of it.
Lots of CD players have "4x oversampling DAC" stickers on the front - this is the same thing. The incoming 44.1 audio is interpolated 2 or 4 times using a digital filter chip, and the resulting 88.2 or 176.4KHz audio stream is then fed to a pair of DAC channels. The result is less distortion, less high frequency garbage and less mangling of the audio signal by the analog filter that follows the DAC. Which is a good thing.
And the X-Fi has some good things - while most common wavetable chips which do linear or simpson interpolation to do a sample rate change, each "voice" on the X-Fi uses an ASRC (asynchronous sample rate converter) to perform it with far less distortion. Which means with a good patch set, it will be a very good sounding MIDI card.
My only complaint about the card is that I'll never be able to get my hands on the specs to program it... Oh, and I probably won't buy one because I'm still bitter about Aureal.
First of all, anything except a Weiss Linear EQ, or similar is going to induce phase distortion and make it sound like shit. Do you presume to have better speakers AND better hearing (which I am sure you don't) than someone like Bob Katz, or Bob Ludwig, etc? I doubt that you can make better choices compressionwise than they can and have on most songs.
When it comes down to it, you are (were) doing roughly what they do on the radio- trashing the signal. Bob Katz has a great chapter on the whole process in his main book on audio mastering.
The only thing that matters to me on a sound card is the Clocking, Lowpass filtering, and D/A.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Well, assuming the image is from security camera footage, there's a technique to generate high resolution images by compositing multiple frames together. It was covered on slashdot previously, and, it was recently demonstrated on a recent episode of Killer Instinct, a new crime-drama on FOX.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, I'm confused here. What, exactly, is a "hardware accellerated voice?" By "voice" do you mean "channel" or are you referring to its MIDI capabilities? And what, exactly, is "accellerated?" What goes faster in this "accelleration?"
This is nothing but pure, unadulterated bullshit pure and simple. You can't get sound that wasn't recorded; if you do, what you have is called more properly distortion.
Distortion is often useful; e.g., if your original recording is a bit "tinny" (say, you have a crap tape recorder) you can add bass, distorting the signal back the orther way from the original distortion. But it's still distortion.
"Upsampling" (which I assume means converting a 44k sample to, say, a 96k sample) would do nothing but add to the file size. It's not going to sound better than the original. Now, if the original signal was sampled at 96k samples per second instead of the standard 44.1 it will sound better, as there will be less aliasing, but if teh original is 44.1ksps then that's the very best you'll get from that particular sample.
Otherwise we could sample at 11k, save a ton of disk space, and "upsample" to 44.1. Sorry, folks, but physics gets in the way.
MP3 is lossy. Once you throw away those bits, you can't get them back. Ripping to MP3 and re-burning those MP3s to CD (like my daughter often does) is NOT going to result in a CD quality copy of your CD. It will sound no better than the MP3 no matter what you do to it.
Now, the "upmixing" really isn't. It's the same thing they've been doing for sixty years, turning mono into pseudo-stereo.
The bottonm line, however, is if you want better sound, buy better speakers. The speakers are the weak link in your audio chain. No matter how good your speakers are, better speakers will sound better.
This guy and this guy got it right. Extra nerd points for those two gentlemen.
Worst thing about CSI is that the general public actually believes it. Lots of criminal trials are being lost because juries expect the prosecution to have brilliant computer simulations and genetic profiles of every person.
(warning: extremely hateful rant)
Is it just me, or has Creative Labs failed to deliver any great products in the last decade ? Everything after SB Pro has been flaky, software-bugged malaysia-cheap garbage with 23 tonnes of hype and 0.03 grams of prowess.
The last Soundblaster I tried was the first Audigy, and man did that one ever suck. I returned it a few days later, after enduring countless sound glitches, instability, incompatibility, and driver hell. Good riddance! The Live had less "features", but in this case it meant "less things that can go wrong" and it worked for me, for a while at least.
Today, I'm sticking to the inbuilt audio on my NForce motherboard. Aside from the very occasional stutter (for which Windows is more to blame than any hardware), it's worked fine for me. Yes, it is a tad noisy to my audiophile ears, and I could easily solve that by using the S/PDIF or optical ports. It does environmental audio, it does 7.1, it does everything a sound card should do: it plays sound. It even does ASIO at 16-20 ms, which ain't bad at all for onboard sound. What more could I need/want that a Soundblaster does any better, and justifies the steep price ? The only selling point I could see is real-time Dolby Digital encoding, which Nforce2 had but was not included in later chipsets to cut costs. Sound is sound; you glue together a bunch of DACs and a FIFO and call it a day. EAX is cute, but could be done in software like we did in the old days. Are you trying to tell me a 3 ghz CPU can't do resonant filtering and phase tricks ? Puh-leez!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Which reminds me of Lessig's assertion that the RIAA is concerned about artists the way that ranchers are concerned about their cattle.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.