300 times better than before…? That’s about one aspect of the new Creative sound card. With headphones on it can replicate sound coming at you from almost any direction… A magazine I was reading said that this is the first sound card to get truly excited about. So for those of you that weren’t aware of it…thought I’d post this link: soundblaster.com/products/x-fi/technology/
[quote]It’s very hard to express just how good the card can sound with all its bells and whistles running, but to quote our own ears-on at this year’s E3, “Before switching on the Crystalizer, the audio would sound perfectly fine, seeming to contain nice bass and clear highs. Switching on the Crystalizer was like pulling out a set earplugs that had been dampening our ability to hear correctly.” Though testing an audio system at E3 with all its noise and hooplah is certainly not ideal, and thusly we were a tad hesitant after our listen at E3 to claim that what we’d heard was actually that good, we can now confidently say that, yes, the card is that good.
The 24-bit Crystlizer works its magic by finding the holes, chopped areas and generally any piece of the original audio that had been destroyed by compression and attempts to recreate the original (or sometimes even better) audio. Again, the result is simply outstanding. Bass is immensely more responsive and has an entire level of presence that simply wasn’t there before. High-end is cleaner, crisper and rings much more naturally than without the Crystalizer. One of the coolest aspects is that the card brings out pieces in the mid-range that generally get lost in the mix. Snare drums pop much more naturally with the Crystalizer working its magic, as does a ride cymbal’s bell.
Moving into gaming and movies results in scarily similar results. Gunshots ring so clear that you’d swear you were at a shooting range. Scraping metal during car crashes screeches so well it’ll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. And bass-pounding explosions have so much more depth and character to them that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without an X-Fi in the first place.[/quote]
quote from: gear.ign.com/articles/644/644186p2.html
I ordered one of these for my new comp. At first the guy wouldn’t order it for me. I wrote a list of things I wanted and he handed the list back to me and beside the X-Fi card he wrote “Not needed motherboard has 7.1 sound” :loco: .