Originally posted by: LumbergTech
Originally posted by: QueBert
Originally posted by: Bad Dude
Originally posted by: videopho
Originally posted by: khicon
sorry for offtopic but .. how does this card compare to the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum card? Is it better? or same or what not? Thanks.
Better in music and in games too. You won't be disappointed.
How much better? I guess good speakers are needed first right.
just a guess, but I bet it's not much. I went from on board to Audigy 2, and with my $200 speakers, I noticed some difference, definitely not 100 bucks worth (how much the card cost me) I heard the X-Fi on demo at a computer store and I left wondering what the hell all the hype was about. Then I remembered it's Creative, a company that lives off the hype it creates
from my understanding it helps the most with headphones..although this may be just more hype as well..can anyone confirm?
Its supposed to offer a much nicer mixing for surround when using headphones.
The Audigy cards from Creative have been slammed because they downsample music, which causes loss of quality. I can't remember the exact specifics, but it was something like they would take all 48khz and downsample it to 44.1khz and then would upsample it back to 48khz, and when compared to other sound cards that used say VIA's Envy 24-bit chip, there was a noticable difference in sound quality when listening to music. Creative's cards stayed popular because for most people they were stepping up from onboard audio, which even Creative's card was significantly better than (until recently with the onboard Azalia, etc.), and also because Creative had the gaming side of things locked down, and so you'd get better framerates than using those other cards. Some people even ran Audigy with one of the others so they would get the positives of both.
With the X-Fi, Creative is still remixing the audio, but the processor is so much more powerful that the remixing is basically impercievable with just your ears (although some audiophiles I'm sure would probably dispute this claim, but they wouldn't be using any PC audio cards anyways), and they've found that even when using programs to test it reproduces a very close to original signal.
So, in short, Creative has caught up to the field in music quality, while retaining (and to some extent I guess you could say extending since they have added a new EAX) their stranglehold on the gaming side. They've also made some other improvements (like better surround mixing, which while they did improve for speakers a little bit, is supposed to be a lot better when using headphones), and so if you don't already have an Audigy 2 ZS, then the X-Fi is the way to go, otherwise its probably not worth it for you. And if all you care about is music quality, then you can do just as well for cheaper or do better with something else.