PC Peripherals Creative announces X-Fi line of sound cards with 4 variants

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CREATIVE TODAY ANNOUNCED its new Sound Blaster X-Fi line of sound cards, powered by the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor.

The new products will be available from early September of this year, ranging from £99.99 for the Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music (it's Xtreme), to £249.99 for the X-Fi Elite Pro. Also in the line is the X-Fi Platinum, retailing at £149.99 and the X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS - designed specifically for gaming - at £179.99.

In a press release, Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo said that by utilizing the X-Fi's 24-bit Crystalizer and CMSS 3D technology, music from your MP3s and CDs can sound "even better than the original studio recording."

Creative is saying that the Xtreme Fidelity sets a new standard for audio, with the products achieving a minimum of 109dB SNR and up to 116dB in the Elite Pro version. The Xtreme Fidelity processor supposedly includes over 51 million transistors and is capable of more than 10,000 MIPS.
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Source | Inquirer
 
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Four variations of the Sound Blaster X-Fi will hit stores later this month. The X-Fi XtremeMusic is the most basic of the bunch and will retail for $129.99. The Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum features an in-bay media drive like Creative's previous Platinum edition cards and will be priced at $199.99. The Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS, which has been branded as pro gamer Fatal1ty's signature audio card, will sell for $279.99 and features 64MB of X-RAM and the same multimedia bay as the Platinum edition. The highest-end version of the series is the Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro which also features 64MB of X-RAM as well as an external audio bay.
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Source | IGN
 
PCI or PCIe??

And it seems somewhat expensive..... 129$ for the basic model.... but I guess the price will drop after sometime.

and in the Platinum and basic version, I guess the only difference is the drive bay....

And what is this new 64 MB XRAM??
 
They are definately PCI.
The onboard "X-RAM" would serve as a buffer. I guess you could think of it as being similar to L2 cache?
on-board memory that game developers can use for offloading audio files. X-RAM allows for both extended audio storage, allowing developers to use higher quality source audio, as well as a faster storage medium than constantly transferring the audio from a system's main memory to the sound card, which allows large audio files to be constantly accessed without putting a burden on the PCI bus.
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^^ i think the existing audigy 2's should be good enough till the x-fi drops in price a bit... and maybe there could be a price drop in the audigys when the x-fi cards launch.. anyone have a clue as to how long before they phase out the audigy line?
 
Should be really nice for gaming, considering the powerful APU and the buffer ram. Plus the kickass surround effects on headphones, would be simply awesome. Let's see how it fares in music along with the gaming.

I guess a live 24 bit for music + X-fi for gaming would be a nice option if for some reason, X-fi sucks for music, just like audigy 2.
 
The crystallizer is a software bit-depth enhancer, no big deal. You can use a player like foobar to upsample , and increase the bit-depth. The only gain that you get while increasing the bit-depth is that you can pass the windows kernel mixer which has a limit of 14-bit (14 * 6 = 84 DB). All decent cards can bypass the kernel mixer using the kernel streaming or ASIO from a good music player.
You cannot gain what you have already lost while compression :)
You cannot increase the quality, but only make sure you dont lose anymore in the playback.
 
Well I guess the only use of the crystallizer resampling is to reduce cpu usage. Foobar generally reports around 15-20% cpu usage if i enable resampling in slow mode. BTW amol did ur live 24 bit come with an ASIO driver or r u using asio4all?
 
amol0010 said:
The crystallizer is a software bit-depth enhancer, no big deal. You can use a player like foobar to upsample , and increase the bit-depth. The only gain that you get while increasing the bit-depth is that you can pass the windows kernel mixer which has a limit of 14-bit (14 * 6 = 84 DB). All decent cards can bypass the kernel mixer using the kernel streaming or ASIO from a good music player.
You cannot gain what you have already lost while compression :)
You cannot increase the quality, but only make sure you dont lose anymore in the playback.
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U can use the dbpoweramp also to do the same...as u rightly said,whats lost in compression,cannot be got back..
 
@ chaos,
Nope live 24 bit doesnt come with an ASIO driver, i am using kernel streaming @ 24 bit depth. Resampler @ 48 khz PPHS.
 
Try ASIO... sounds a bit warmer(better or not depends on ur perception) than kernel streaming. I find the sound of ASIO to be better than KS. BTW is there any real difference between PPHS and SSRC? I cant notice any :P
 
Chaos said:
Try ASIO... sounds a bit warmer(better or not depends on ur perception) than kernel streaming. I find the sound of ASIO to be better than KS. BTW is there any real difference between PPHS and SSRC? I cant notice any :P
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ASIO + foobar2000 = tons of distortion :( using soundstorm..

dunno why...the sound is fine, suddenly distortions appear..(khaaa kharr sounds ) close player, start again, gone. after sometime, distortion.
 
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