Introduction

Ever since the SoundBlaster AWE 64, we have been waiting for a Creative Labs product that lives up to the SoundBlaster legend. The bar was set very high with the pre-PCI generation of SoundBlaster products and Creative became the de facto standard in PC sound. The Live! and Audigy product lines didn't bring about the same revolution in sound for which Creative was known. Rather than advancing by leaps and bounds, the industry has slowly and steadily been creeping forward over most of the last decade.

With the launch and availability of the new SoundBlaster X-Fi line of cards, we could again see a discrete step in performance and quality that puts this new technology head and shoulders above its predecessors. Aside from the usual incremental moves forward, X-Fi includes a new architecture for sound hardware (which Creative calls an Audio Ring Architecture), high quality sample rate conversion (SRC), a very powerful DSP, and the option of including 64MB of RAM on the sound card itself. Putting all this together gives us a card that offers the highest quality and performance in consumer audio with today's software, and the potential for even more quality and performance should developers choose to take advantage of the power offered.

The SoundBlaster X-Fi Elite Pro is the best non-pro sound solution for audio listening, features and recording. In addition, the potential for higher quality and performance for sound in games is unique to the upper class of the X-Fi line. The downside, and our biggest concern about the product, is price and value. Is the top of the line worth the $400 premium? We hope very much that this article on X-Fi technology and the SoundBlaster X-Fi Elite Pro will answer that question.

The X-Fi Audio Ring: Powerful and Flexible
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  • JNo - Thursday, September 1, 2005 - link

    In fact, if Anandtech could do a review of the HDA X-Mystique 7.1 it'd be appreciated as I've heard quite a few good things about this card, not least its reasonable price point and dolby digital live output.

    By the way, on a separate note, for all the people here giving anandtech grief, people should look at more than just one site before making informed purchasing decisions and anandtech did much better than tomshardware which was extremely partisan. Also, I would like to use and trust dedicated sound sites like www.3Dsoundsurge.com but unfortunately they are often too slow in reviewing new hardware...
  • DerekWilson - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    you can output sound digitally ... dolby sources (DVDs) can be output to a reciever, and audio can be output via SPDIF to a reciver as well ...

    What you can't do is take a source that's not already dolby (like music, games and the like), encode it to dolby, and then send it to a reciver.
  • Lwood - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    I found this on the ALSA mailing list (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel...">http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel...:

    "We are not going to get any support from Creative for the X-Fi chip.
    We do not get support from Creative for any Creative chip that has a DSP
    in it."

    It looks like we won't see a Linux driver for the X-Fi anytime soon... :-(
  • sprockkets - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    Oh well, even nVidia's soundstorm worked in linux, and with the 5.1 encoding out.
  • Reflex - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    I've had these cards in my lab and all I can say is that this is the first time I've ever really doubted Anandtech's credibility. This reads like a spiced up piece of PR from Creative, and subjective listening would not put this as the best consumer audio solution as so prominently stated on the first page of the review.

    Derek - What the hell is going on here? You don't even include any results from competing products to make such a statement. The war was over before a shot was fired is the impression this review gives. The fact that Creative finally has a card to match the specs that otehr cards have had for three years now makes it a 'revolution'? Sorry, I have been working with these cards for months now and they definatly are nothing special. Just expensive.
  • flexy - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    100% agree...tried to keep my complaints back, tho.

    Btw. nice nick :)
  • DerekWilson - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    Hello,

    We will be looking at more cards, and including an envy24 based solution is something that we intend to do in the future.

    We do include a result from a competing solution -- the Gina 3G is a pro audio card which has excellent audio quality. The Elite Pro is closer to a pro audio product in the component selection and construction.

    envy24 based consumer products don't score as well as the Gina 3G from what we have seen. Granted we do have to test this for ourselves, but we would certainly expect the Gina 3G to outperform something from Terratec or M-Audio.

    That being said, the X-Fi outperforms the Gina 3G in just about ever test we ran.

    It is very difficult to subjectively compare audio between cards. There have been some cases (the audigy line) where there was a very clear problem with the aural experience. With the X-Fi line, we can no longer say that we can hear problems with the audio.

    We spent days listening to this card, the Gina, and the Audigy 4. We frankly disagree with the statement that subjective listening does not put this card on par with the best audio solutions out there. We found no reason in our subjective listening tests to conclude otherwise.

    On top of that, after simply listening to the card for days, we ran the RMAA tests. These tests showed clearly that not only was the card void of any issues, but that the quality of the output was much closer to the source than any other card we tested. These two points add up to the conclusion you disagree with.

    And as we said, if this card performs better than the Gina 3G and the Gina performs better than consumer level envy24 parts, it stands to reason that the X-Fi would outperform just about everything but a LynxTWO ... and even then we would need to run some tests of our own ...

    The big problem is that at these incredibly low noise levels, high dynamic range, low distortion, good separation, etc... it is very difficult to hear differences in the audio. To the average person, the audigy 4 Pro, Gina 3G, and X-Fi will sound exactly the same. To a hardcore audiophile, we wouldn't doubt it if the X-Fi won their hearts. The X-Fi (in spite of its features) can provide a very true-to-the-source signal with less coloration than all but the best pro audio cards out there.

    For musicians, the high quality provides a better platform for work than the rest of the pack -- unless, of course, balance audio is desired.

    Show me a consumer audio card that matches the specs of the X-Fi ... From the tests other people have performed on the LynxTwo B at 16-bit/44.1kHz (the unofficial standard in PC audio quality), the X-Fi posts http://audio.rightmark.org/test/lynx-two-b-1644.ht...">better numbers in every category but frequency response (and it's darn close in that area)...

    The high end components used do not make the X-Fi Elite Pro "nothing special" ... They make it nothing most people will need. And certainly, between this and other products that use good quality components, most people won't notice much (if any) difference.

    We very much agree that the card is too expensive. And please rest assured that we will be comparing this card to an evny24 based solution -- and hopefully a lynxtwo -- in the future.

    Thanks for the feedback,
    Derek Wilson
  • yacoub - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link

    Look into the BlueGears X-Mystique. It's pretty much the best PC soundcard available at a reasonable price right now - and it's not Creative so there's no assorted bloatware to install.
  • Reflex - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    Derek -

    I am not trying to bash you here, however you have to understand that when you start an article by proclaiming something the best in its class, but then your test does not include the other solutions in the class at all, that things seem fishy.

    I work with audio devices for a living. I've worked with the X-Fi since it was a prototype(as have a couple dozen other people in my lab). Certainly it is an improvement over previous Creative efforts, and at first we were a bit wowed by the paper specs and proposal. However after working closely with it for months, I honestly can say that no one here feels its anything special. Perhaps some of that is the novelty wearing off, but in any ad-hoc test with someone who hadn't heard it before, they could rarely tell the difference between it and an Audigy, and the M-Audio Revolution generally was said to produce clearer sound. Not that our tests were scientific or anything, we weren't trying to write articles for publication.

    I'd really suggest some blind tests with a variety of content. I think you may be suprised to find that while for MP3's the X-Fi sounds good, for CD's and especially SACD's the mid-range is poorly reproduced. Make certain you use a wide range of music, and prefferably classical numbers that you know very well.

    Something else is you could list what type of speakers/headphones and recievers you are using, if you are testing with something like Klipsch then your credibility would go down considerably for anything but games and action movies, after all the card cannot make up for poor speakers(when measured by reproduction accuracy, not volume).

    I would suggest establishing a baseline and going from there. Based on my experience, in the 'consumer' segment the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 is a good baseline, however any baseline that you could compare against would be beneficial to strengthening the credibility of the review. Granted anything audio is subjective, but when you say something is 'better' you need to at least be able to point to some specific reasons as to why.

    And finally, the section that read like Creative marketing PR was your explanation of their audio architecture. There is nothing inherantly 'better' about the approach Creative is taking, it is simply different, there are both advantages and drawbacks. Furthermore, while they make the product seem like the 'next generation of audio' no one has managed to get a commitment from them to support the upcoming Windows Audio Architecture that will be a part of Vista, without that support they will be behind several others. Their lack of support for Linux is also a drawback for many.

    Thank you for the effort, I hope that this feedback will help you improve your audio reviews in the future. I have read AT since the beginning and rarely doubted what is posted here, there just seemed to be some rather glaring flaws in how this review was handled. At least in my humble opinion.
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link

    Thank you very much for the helpful feedback. Some of your suggestions will absolutly make it into future audio reviews.

    I would tend to disagree with your assesment of Creative's architectural direction. If the intent is to very heavily process many audio streams, then the flexibility and power are helpful. This could be a boon to game designers or electronic musicisans looking for some hefty sample rate or dsp power.

    For straight up listening to a single source or recording the architecture is unnecessary.

    I agree that windows driver and linux support are drawbacks as well.

    We absolutely appreciate and need our readers feedback. Thanks for taking the time.

    Derek Wilson

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