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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."
they'd put in a USB or PCMCIA form factor for use in my laptop...
MobileOptimized
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.
It stands for Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed.
Fortunately the term is obsolete, and instead we have really accurate metrics like PR-ratings, NetBurst MHz and AMD's "+" numbers.
I think the moderator missed this announced card by Creative: Silent Card The SNR is way better.
It is fairly easy to make an algorithm to improve the quality of losslessly-encoded sound.
In fact, I just came up with two genre-specific filters:
Rock music*: fout(x) = x * 1.1
Rap music: fout(x) = x * 0.0
(* preliminary research on the rock music filter was done by Spinal Tap Ltd, et al)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
How can make an mp3 sound BETTER than the CD?
Add bass. It *will* sell.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.