Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic Card | List Price: $99.99
Discount Price: $139.50
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Brand: Creative Labs
Binding: Electronics
Release Date: 2005-09-15
Features: - Delivers clear, crisp music playback and surround sound over headphones or multichannel speakers
- 24-bit X-Fi Crystallizer enhances MP3s and movies to sound better than they do on their original CD or DVD
- Utilizes a 2-step quality enhancement process to process and then remaster your audios for optimal sound
- Modular architecture optimizes performance with dedicated modes for music, gaming and audio creation
- Your music will sound cleaner, and high-action movie scenes will seem more realistic than ever
Be Warned [Posted on 2007-11-08]
I'll keep it short but I am very very frustrated and will never by Creative products ever again.
first of all the microphone jack and digital out are the same so no chatting with speakers on possible.
second the card is simply incompatible with most of Creative's own speaker sets!! (in my case the DTT3500)
do yourself a favor and buy another brand (or keep your Audigy)
Waste of money [Posted on 2007-11-26]
If you have Vista or plan on upgrading in the future JUST DONT BUY this card. It has been a complete waste of money for me. It is not even remotely compatible with vista, just do an internet search with vista xfi xtreme music problems. I'm into computers and haven't been able to make their drivers for vista work since may 2007 when I bought the card like many others as you will see if you do the search. Good luck choosing a good card!
Beware! X-Fi cards conflict with higher-end devices. [Posted on 2008-01-09]
I've been using Creative sound cards as long as I can remember, so it's quite a shock to discover that several problems are being reported with Creative's "X-Fi" line of sound cards. Google "x-fi problem" and you'll see what I mean. This card worked flawlessly for me on Windows XP, but as soon as I clean-installed Vista, annoying "crackling" sounds occur every time I do something graphically, such as scrolling a window. Without getting too technical, the problem appears to be that the sound card cannot get frequent enough access to the PCI bus in order to maintain a smooth stream of sound data. (If sound were water, the stream is not always flowing.) As a result, sound cuts out, pops, and crackles.
The crackling issue can be worked around by reducing the load on the PCI bus. For example, removing my 3D drivers for my graphics card works around the issue, but at the cost of crippling graphics performance. This applies to both nVidia and ATI graphics cards. Other devices such as RAID drives, however, can't just be turned off like that.
To Creative's credit, the core of the problem seems to be a limitation of the PCI bus technology, not the sound card. If that's true, then people may have to drop PCI sound cards entirely in favor of another sound medium such as HDMI, which newer graphics cards are beginning to support. Since I'm no hardware engineer, I can only guess this would work, and this is the route I'll soon take.
So, if your computer does *not* use high-end graphics cards or RAID hard drives, you could still get excellent sound and music from the X-Fi XtremeMusic and other X-Fi cards. If you're a high-end user, however, keep your receipt handy. Since Windows Vista "Aero" makes use of 3D acceleration, this can aggravate sound issues. Using Windows XP will increase the liklihood of excellent sound quality.
No drivers [Posted on 2008-06-06]
Card will not work with Vista x64 and 4+ Gigs of RAM. Creative has still not released drivers to address this. I highly recommend buying audio cards from a different vendor.
Great...if you need it for high-end sound via the PC [Posted on 2008-08-28]
Beware of people giving this card a 1 star because of microphone/speaker conflicts...To run a mic and speakers, just plug your speakers in the analog jack and the mic in the mic jack. Done.
This card has proven invaluable to producing high-end sound through my PC. I sold my preamp and CD-player and can hook up my 460W amp directly to the computer and power a set of speakers marvelously. I found that it works best this way, and not with a preamp. If you have a high quality amp you won't need all the bells and whistles of this sound card to get the right sound from your musical recordings (MP3 or CD/DVD). If your amp is weak, however, you will find all the extras of this card very helpful/useful to tweak the sound to your liking. Or, if you have a poorly recorded MP3 you can greatly increase it's sound quality by adjusting some of the sound card's optional enhancer functions.
This sound card basically will turn your PC into a preamp/cd/dvd player with high-end results. It has lots of functions for recording, playback, equalizer settings, crystalizer, bass-booster, smart-volume management, EAX effect-- soundstaging, surround functions, digital playback functions, and so on. I'm very happy with this card and have had no negative issues with it at all, owning it for over a year now and using it daily.
On a down point, I see they are up in price to $249. I paid $100 at Staples for mine with the purchase of a new PC. Also, Creative has been very helpful in sending me a proper Vista-install CD for this soundcard, since the original install-CD was not meant for Vista.
Conclusion: If you want to play your music through your PC, get this card! The sound quality is outstanding and the options for tweaking the sound to your liking are numerous.
Cheers.
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