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The heavily increasing number of main boards which have an on-board sound solution began to be threatening for Creative’s business model.

But they have come up with a solution: A generation of sounds cards which would, by their specifications, beat all mainstream computer sound solutions available.

I will give you some facts that show you how much we needed this commercial big bang of sound cards.

EAX 5.0, a.k.a. the never ending story

It nearly looked like Creative tried increasing their sales by tuning up the EAX version number for some time, but this optical illusion didn’t last too long.

To me, EAX 2.0 was totally unnecessary because it showed no difference to version 1.0. Between EAX 1.0 and 5.0 you will notice a minimal difference. That is, if the game fully supports EAX 5.0.

Unluckily, Creative is selling EAX 2.0 licenses to other manufacturers. This means that some 3D on-board sound chips are shipped with EAX 2.0 support, so they can keep up with an X-Fi.

A rare exception are hardcore gamers: They will notice a slight difference in some 3D games with EAX 5.0 support.

X-RAM, X as the ex in ex-girlfriend: Something that you don’t need.

Another way of making money out of waste: Pay an additional 40$ for “X-RAM” (Most likely the codename for old RAM parts found on Hong Kong’s electronic waste market) and you will get some more fancy modules brazed on the circuit board.

The necessity of these modules was proven by many review sites: The difference between a version with and without X-RAM is about 0.1% of CPU usage - defragmenting your harddrive will give you bigger speed improvements, guaranteed.

Crystalizer

The so called “Crystalizer” which is supposed to regenerate the sound quality of MP3 files which was lost during the conversion process may at first sound like a nice idea.

But software programmers know: Information which is lost while converting data with lossy compression algorithms can’t be recovered.

A better solution for this: Encode your MP3 files with a large bit rate, for example 320bit. This is nearly CD quality.

CMSS-3D

OK, if you use headphones with this sound card, CMSS-3D makes it worth it buying the X-Fi. When I tried my X-Fi with headphones I could notice an improved sound quality.

But who uses headphones? Gamers and music producers. For all others this feature is uninteresting.

Warning, special case: X-Fi Xtreme-Audio

If you buy this X-Fi model and play games you will feel disappointed, noticing that it does not have a gaming mode, which was a totally unnecessary move by Creative since it is a software based restriction only. Also, EAX hardware acceleration was removed on this version.

If you investigate a bit deeper you will notice that Creative used an old Audigy chip (which is still good though) on this one, so it is not even an X-Fi. Again, they sell old parts for a new price

Operating systems supported

Here you can see that creative has targeted the gamers with this sound card: Windows XP is fully supported, Windows Vista lacks Dolby Digital and DTS, MacOSX is not supported at all and finally, after 2 years, they have released a Linux driver for 64bit CPU’s. Getting this driver to actually work is nearly impossible: Only a few have reported that this driver worked on their Linux installation.

Windows Vista support

Microsoft has programmed Vista in a way that the CPU would decode Dolby Digital and DTS signals. This has been done in order to improve the effect of DRM in protected movies: It’s making it harder to rip or copy them.

What does that mean for the X-Fi on Vista? Simple: Hardware acceleration of Dolby Digital and DTS decoding is not supported. Vista does that automatically for you, regardless if your sound card supports it or not.

EAX on Vista is another story. Microsoft has disabled that but creative has now released new software and drivers which make it possible to play EAX on Windows Vista. The software is called “ALchemy”, see the news on Creative’s page: The free application that provides multi-channel audio for legacy games titles running on Windows Vista.

I’m a music producer, should I really go for this sound card?

No! There are much better solutions for music producers. For an example, look on the homepage of RME Audio.

But don’t be surprised by prices of up to 1199$. An X-Fi stands no chance against these.

Do you own an X-Fi sound card?

Yea I do. It is waiting to be sold on eBay on my table. I switched to on-board sound.

The problems started on Windows XP: I could either choose the old drivers which had a really nice interface, or I could update to new drivers that would remove the interface. On Windows Vista there were many complications while I tried to install the drivers. And now, on Linux, it is not being supported at all.

Between an X-Fi and my on-board sound I couldn’t hear a big difference.

So I dumped it.

FAQ

Q: What does X-Fi mean?
A: X-Fi stands for “extreme fidelity”. The word “fidelity” stands for the accuracy with which the sounds are being reproduced.

Q: What is the CPU usage of the X-Fi compared to on-board sound?
A: The difference is minimal, it lies by around 1-5% improvement when using an X-Fi sound card. With more and more multi core CPU’s on the market, the CPU usage which an X-Fi saves is playing an always smaller getting role.

Tags: hype, innovation, x-fi

Posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 12:15 pm in Hardware.
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