1st!!! Yes!!!

Seriously, looks like I have no reason to part with my Audigy 2 quit yet.

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first!

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Thanks for the review. Was looking into maybe getting one of these soon but I'll stick with onboard for a while until I get one of the Audigy boards.

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i was so close to first :(

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All that mumbo jumbo doesn't look like it will have any real use for me.

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XTREME Yawn!!

It is Xtreme Fidelity with Xcellent Xquality for XTREME music and XTREME gameZ!!!!
No thanks! When will this XTREMEly stupid marketing stop??
I'm still using the nforce2 soundforge because my audigy didnt ship with Creative Mediasource which allows output of music to 5.1. Newer Audigys did ship with MediaSource and could handle 5.1 music output just fine. Needless to say I am XTREMEly pissed and creative and wont be buying something from them again.

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yeah those "extreme gamez" are actually just TWO, namely doom3 and bf2..which (i THINK) support x-fi....if at all. Was not clear in the review. The point is that they even said they did not hear ANY diff between this and "older" hardware.....

I think it's ironic that (at elast for gaming and occasional music listening) a $42 Audigy 2 OEM (which has 5.1 output btw) is AS GOOD as a card 10x the money.....and, in all honesty, i do NOT think that my ears are good enough to "notice" a 4db better SNR ratio or similiar nonsense....not to mention someone would have a hard time selling me this card :)

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The coloration from the poor frequency response and IMD sweep at 16-bit 44.1kHz really deadens cd auido and mp3s on the Audigy 2 line. Its not about a slightly worse SNR or a little less dynamic range. It's about poor sound reproduction and bad sample rate conversion.

Of course, gamers won't care as much about this problem. And we can help get around some of the issues by bypassing windows kernel mixer on Audigy hardware.

I wouldn't buy an X-Fi Elite Pro either. The price point is hard to swallow.

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Sample rate conversion does not seem to be an issue any more, right?
X-fi audio processor has SRC engine that converts to and from any resolution at 136dB THD+N. Check the review on digit-life. They say
"Judging from our measurements, the problem with a lot of distortions is a thing of the past now. The 44.1 kHz mode in X-Fi cards is no different from 48 kHz"
They also compared the quality of the new hardware SRC X-Fi vs the wide-spread real-time SSRC WinAmp plug-in, "notable for its relatively high quality and decent CPU load"
They conclided by saying
SRC of the X-Fi outperforms the SSRC plug-in and it causes no distortions - audible or visible on the diagram.



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media source is available for download from creative site. It is a few files all together but this software is for free if you have Audigy. 5.1. upmix option is not in media source but in the card settings that install with the drivers. I had Audigy and used Playcenter and than upgraded for free to Media Source. No problem. I used Audigy with tweaked driver for Audigy 2 to get more features and then eventually bought Audigy 2 ZS and used that with Software availble from their site. I had no problem with an upmix option. I cannot see your point here. Which version of the card do you have?

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