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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."
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.
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.
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...
You're right that Creative's Windows drivers are bloated, unstable and downright nasty. But the open-source emu10k1 drivers for Linux are actually quite good, and I've found that with a little tinkering, I can get my Audigy2 sounding better in Linux/ALSA than I can in Windows/DirectX. The best part? Zero bloat, and the drivers just work with no extra crazy software required. I just want to hear sound for goodness sake, not run friggin' Creative OS. I wonder if this new card will also have open-source drivers?
I'm with you with Creative cards on Linux...they just work and work pretty well. As far as the poor Windows users go why does Creative feel they have to punish them so? I thought the idea was to sell cards, not piss people off.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You're thinking of the Aureal Vortex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A3D). A3D simulated a low-detail version of the 3D environment and calculated reverb based on the reflections inside that environment.
A3D died off years ago, and Aureal was bought out by Creative. EAX still can't come close to A3D's capabilities.
For an idea of the A3D generation, Quake 3 supported A3D for 3D audio, though it was later removed when A3D died off.
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
... and moderaters are stupid who bother at all, and don't use "overrated" and "underrated" ... because you don't m2 over & unders.
/. is broken to hell and back.
Go ahead, waste your mod points on me: I'm trashing this account down from excellent karma to nothing so I can restart.
Oh, and I m2 everything negative as well. The moderation system on
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
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.
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?