Thanks to the ever-encroaching Moore’s Law, it’s not unusual to see radical leaps in hardware design and performance in very short time frames. CPUs, memory, video cards and motherboard chipsets are constantly being updated. And then there’s PC audio, which moves forward in a much more disjointed way due largely to the sheer dominance of Creative in the add-in card market.
It has been four years since Creative unveiled the Sound Blaster Audigy, and although there have been numerous Audigy upgrades in that time, they were based on the same architecture. But with the release of the Sound Blaster X-Fi, Creative has launched a completely new piece of audio hardware.
The X-Fi range features a swathe of new technology, backed up by some outlandish-sounding claims. These include: the 24-bit Crystalizer, which upsamples music to 24-bit and improves clarity; CMSS 3D, which provides positional audio when using headphones or stereo speakers; EAX Advanced HD 5.0 gaming audio technology; and tools for high-quality audio conversion with low CPU overhead.
Several versions of the X-Fi are available, ranging from the $299.95 X-Fi XtremeMusic to the $929.95 X-Fi Elite Pro. APC Labs evaluated the top-of-the-line X-Fi Elite Pro, which combines a fully featured version of the soundcard (most noticeably it has the highest quality DACs of the X-Fi range) with a huge breakout box. This box has optical and coaxial SPDIF in and out, midi connectors, headphone jacks and a plethora of controls for volume and on-card features, like the 24-bit Crystalizer. It also ships with a sturdy infra-red remote control.
Labs testing focused upon the experience of using the X-Fi and as such should be treated as a subjective look at the hardware. It involved comparing the playback of a collection of MP3s, movies and games of varying quality through a first-generation Audigy card and the X-Fi Elite Pro.
The files were played with the 24-bit Crystalizer enabled and the X-Fi set to entertainment mode. While the claims of “better than CD” quality stretch the truth a little, there was a jump in the fidelity of sound, and previously unnoticed subtleties in the music became clearly audible. The 24-bit Crystalizer delivered a noticeable increase in sound clarity, and is tailored to improve upon the fair to middling sound quality delivered by most computer speakers and headphones.
The X-Fi supports EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 — which will be used in upcoming titles — and previous versions of EAX. One major addition to the gaming power of the card is what Creative calls X-RAM, essentially 64MB of onboard video RAM that’s used by the sound chip to cache high-quality samples in supported games. This gets around the bandwidth limitations inherent in the PCI bus, begging the question: would a native PCI Express implementation of the X-Fi need onboard RAM?
Like EAX, X-RAM will need game developers to code specifically for it, which could be a worry if it wasn’t for the fact that Creative is very good at garnering developers’support.
When the card was flipped over to game mode in testing, the sound quality was again excellent, with noticeable improvement over the Audigy. Some minor sound glitching occurred during a few games, however, this was caused by the early nature of the drivers rather than significant incompatibility.
Most importantly, using the X-Fi with high-quality settings didn’t impact in-game framerates, reinforcing the fact that a decent discrete soundcard takes a load off the CPU.
Creative’s Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro delivered the best all-round PC audio the APC Labs team had ever experienced. While the increase in sound quality was small, yet noticeable, over the Audigy series, it’s a vast improvement over the all-too prevalent integrated audio solutions. If the sum total of your PC audio experience is revelling in the dings and dongs of Windows, this is overkill. But for those who take music, movies and gaming on their PC seriously, it’s an incredibly compelling, if somewhat costly, replacement.

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