I consider myself an audio enthusiast and bit the dust and upgraded from my Audigy 2 to the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music when I noticed my local Best Buy clearing those out and replacing them with the cheaper (and inferior) X-Fi Xtreme AUDIO card.
After disabling all the audio enhancments (CMSS-3D, SVM, Crystallizer) all I can say is WOW! On pristine source material, CD's, lossless audio, DVD-A I noticed a HUGE improvement in sound over the Audigy 2 with my Klipsch Promedia 5.1 Ultras. The sound is much fuller, the bass has better definition and midrange has better detail. My computer system now sounds that much closer to my reference JBL/Yamaha/Denon home theater setup.
To be fair, the audio enhancement may improve sound on less than ideal audio sources and computer speakers but they only served to muddy or disorient the sound on my setup.
Highly recommended. HUGE improvement over the Audigy 2 (which in itself killed integrated audio) Would be nice if the drivers/software took up a smaller footprint in Windows XP but just a minor quibble. Snap these up while you still can.
I purchased mine at the beginning of September; towards the end of October, it started developing dreadful popping/crackling noises. RMA'ed it, the new one did the exact same thing.
After searching Google, I found others having the same problem. A post on Creative's own forum has nearly 1300 messages on this subject. http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&message.id=31426. Six months later and still no fix.
Stay away from this junk that Creative refuses to fix. I made recordings of the crackle/pops at http://www.digitaldynamo.net/x-fi.
Also, this link http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/search?submitted=true&type=message&q=cracks%2C+pops&logic=AND&page_size=50&fuzzy=false&prefix=false&refine=false&sort_by=date does a search for "cracks, pops" across the whole forum. You'll see that similar problems have existed with their sound cards back since 2004.
Lawsuits will be coming soon.
I used my Asus P4C800-E integrated 5.1 digital soundcard and thought it had great sound. I waited for the X-fi and bought it at Best Buy the other day. Installation was a breeze. The software package is great. Then I played my MP3s, and let me tell you, the sound that came out of my speakers was unbelievable. I never thought my Logitech 5.1 speakers could sound so clear and crisp. All the instruments in the music were rendered precisely. This soundcard made me realize that my speakers are actually pretty good, and the sound quality was strictly related to the soundcard. The games, especially new titles, will play smoother, and sound awesome. The card has three modes including one for gaming, entertainment, and music creation.
Bottom Line:
If you love to listen to music, watch movies, and play games. The $129 x-fi card will blow you away. This will probably be one of the best investments you made for your pc.
Sound blaster has done it again, they made a better product than the Audigy (1&2) series.
I have this card hooked up to an Altec-Lansing GT-5051 speakers and its just amazing. So crisp, bass is nice and smooth.
I am extremely saisfied with this card and would highly recommened it to any PC user.
Some of the reviews said that "god must have a xfi music" and he could be right. It is the best bang for the buck sound card that Creative has to offer (I haven't had the chance to examine other highly claimed brands).
What you get for your money if a powerful sound processor for all your movies and music, plus EAX 5.0 for your games. Now all you need is a good set of speakers, which can be 2.0 all the way to 7.1. The gold plated behind of the card ensures minimal disruption to your sound quality.
Now on the other hand you have the 2.18.13 Vista drivers which cause Windows to restart 5+ minutes. They are the latest driver and are from over a year ago. Seriously?! Yes, Windows 7 got an update that fixed this problem, but apparently Creative don't care about their Vista clients. But the problem is semi-easily solve by installing 2.18.8 drivers or older (its difficult since they are hard to find). Other stuff that irritate me are that some of the functions work only for a set of people, but pose no real gain. The X-fi Crystalizer makes the high and low frequencies more loud, which ruins the mids; the SMV puts all the sounds in a single volume zone, resulting in unnatural sudden volume rising and dropping; and the CMSS 3D makes the whole sound blurry (it can produce good effects on headphones though).
Still, the X-Fi Music has all the X-Fi goodness the X-Fi Audio does not and a much lower price than the Titanium/Fatal1ty series.
I have had this card for a week and it has been the best upgrade to my computer yet. It makes my worst sounding mp3's sound great. I would recommend this card to anyone that like to listen to music. Installation is easy and creative had one driver update that I installed after I loaded everything. I have had no problems with there software and I am running XP media Ed. Believe the hype and buy it!!
Having used creative cards since the mid 80s I have always wanted sound that was as good as my music system could do, creative has finnally satisfied the audiophile in me.
with 3 modes entertainment, games ans music creation with 24 bit crystalizer the recordings made from my lp collection is so good at 44.1k samplng that i am redoing the 1500 recordins don previously and then attack the other 2700 lp's in my collection
The Best Sound Card available to the public.
Why would anyone still buy the Audigy Series when you can gey another card from the same brand that is 100x better.
Definitely worth the money, a serious improvement over the standard integrated audio.
Bought mine from BestBuy. $140.00 with tax. Lower prices online, but with shipping and having to wait, basically the same. The soundcard is connected to my AV receiver, connected to a 6.1 JBL outfit of speakers. These are not computer speakers. So the price of the card was nominal compared to my investment for the speakers. And worth it.
Simple to install. PC cover off. Slide card in. PC cover on. Software was an easy, albeit large(380 MB), install as well.
Software is excellent. It was what actually drew me to this product. Obviously, the product was going to perform well and that wasn't my concern. But making the product easy and a joy to use, now that's the key. One panel, very easy to use, organize, find & play all my music files, regardless of origin or type. I really love it.
Performance: A lot of talk going around that this product makes your low quality MP3s sound like CD quality. Well, uh, close, but not quite. That is not to say the sound is not excellent, because it is. Far better than the "digital" music channels on my cable box. But, it's not fair to compare a CD quality file to an MP3 file. I'll give you an example.
I ripped a music file using the SuperRip function (which seems to be nothing more than WMA lossless with some tweaking) and ripped the same file using the highest quality MP3 encoding the Creative software provided. SuperRip 164MB file 5475kbps. MP3 12MB file 320kbps.
I did this with 10 more songs from various CDs. I then had my friend play the SuperRip and the MP3 of the same song in varied sequences. Without watching what he was doing, I was able to correctly identify which file was which 100% of the time. However, when all 22 files were placed in a playlist and played at random, I was not able to consistenly identify whether the recording was the higher quality version or not. Truthfully, I was really just guessing.
I could not justify using 164MB of space on my hard drive for one song ... not when I can easily fit an entire CD (and more) in high quality MP3 format into the same space. So for me, the SuperRip function is very useless.
Overall, I love the product. Not quite CD quality, but fantastic fidelity out of a compressed music file and pretty hard to tell the difference. 9.5 out of 10 in my opinion.