NVIDIA reported revenue of $1.0 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended May 2, 2010, up 2 percent from the prior quarter and up 51 percent from $664.2 million in the same period a year earlier. On a GAAP basis, the company recorded net income of $137.6 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2011. That compares with $131.1 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, in the previous quarter and a net loss of $201.3 million, or $0.37 per share, in the same period a year earlier.

Gross margin increased to 45.6 percent for the first quarter fiscal 2011 from 44.7 percent in the previous quarter and 28.6 percent in the same period a year earlier.

• Revenue grew 2 percent quarter-on-quarter to $1.0 billion
• GAAP net income increased to $137.6 million, or $0.23 per diluted share
• GAAP gross margin improved to 45.6 percent

Creative Labs, Inc. today announced the Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Wireless Headset is now available at AAFES, Amazon.com, Apple.com, BestBuy.com, Blizzard.com, Creative.com, Dell.com, Frys.com, Newegg.com and Tiger Direct for $159.99. "As the leading innovator in precision audio for PC gaming we were well positioned to develop a headset that could live up to the high standards set forth by Blizzard Entertainment games," said Steve Erickson, VP and GM for audio and video at Creative. "The Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Wireless Headset is a result of this, providing an unprecedented combination of wireless technology, THX TruStudio PC technology for enriched audio performance and a unique design that stands out from anything else available to gamers."

Creative Technology Ltd. today announced the PCI-E Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD and USB Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD, setting the gold standard for PC audio with the first discrete audio card and USB digital audio system to include THX TruStudio PC audio technology.

"The Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD and Sound Blaster X-Fi HD provide the highest quality audio playback of any sound products we have ever introduced, over a period of time where we have sold more than 400 million Sound Blaster cards," said Steve Erickson, Vice President and General Manager of Audio and Video at Creative. "We are thrilled to announce that our newest additions to the Sound Blaster line include THX TruStudio PC audio technology, bringing together two of the most respected names in sound quality to provide an unparalleled audio experience on the PC."

Auzentech, Inc today announced the immediate release of the Auzen X-Fi Bravura 7.1 sound card, a full-height, custom designed PCI Express sound card built around the Creative PCI Express audio processor. The Auzen X-Fi Bravura 7.1 promises "breathtaking" audio for music and movies with DTS Neo:PC & DTS Interactive. And when it's time to unwind with your favorite PC Game, you won't be left behind with EAX 4.0.

Below are the Auzen X-Fi Bravura 7.1 sound card Key Features, Innovations, and some inside information on how Auzentech designed the card for optimal performance with both Digital and Analog audio.

MSI, a world-wide leading manufacturer of computer components and systems, today in conjunction with THX and Creative announced its new Big Bang gaming motherboard, the first ever to implement THX TruStudio PC with Creative EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 audio technology.

Big Bang features QuantumWave audio processing, combining THX TruStudio PC with Creative EAX ADVANCED HD 5.0 to deliver the most powerful and realistic gaming audio performance available from any motherboard.

THX TruStudio PC provides groundbreaking PC audio technologies, the result of collaborative research and development from Creative and THX. Together, these technologies deliver the fullest audio experience for music, movies and games, while remaining true to the intention of the artists who created it.

Creative Technology Ltd. today introduced the Creative Sound Blaster Easy Record which helps users effortlessly convert their favourite music from cassettes, LP records, CDs or MDs to digital form via a convenient plug and play USB connection. The Creative Sound Blaster Easy Record comes bundled with Smart Recorder software which guides users step by step in recording music and has the option to import recorded tracks directly to their iTunes libraries. Together with a myriad of line-in connectors for external audio equipment such as CD players and turntables, the Creative Sound Blaster Easy Record provides users unrivalled convenience and ease in recording their personal music collections.

The Creative Sound Blaster Easy Record works with desktops, notebooks and even netbooks. Users only need to connect it via a USB port with no drivers required for basic recording, and it is compatible with Windows 7 / Vista / XP. Besides the Stereo RCA inputs, there is also a 3.5mm Line-In connector for MP3 players or mobile phones, and a Headphone-Out for monitoring the audio during recording. The compact design of the Creative Sound Blaster Easy Record makes it convenient to carry around, granting users easy and portable recording on the go.

Creative Technology Ltd. today announced the Creative Inspire S2 Wireless, a compact speaker system which grants users wireless music freedom for new generation compact notebooks, PCs or mobile devices with wireless music playback via its built-in wireless receiver or any notebook or PC with a USB port by means of a plug and play USB Bluetooth transmitter. Users can also play and control music on the Creative Inspire S2 Wireless speaker system from other Bluetooth-enabled devices anywhere within a maximum range of 10 metres.

The Creative Inspire S2 Wireless speaker system continues to retain the Creative Inspire tradition of "best in class" performance, this time with superior wireless playback for unrivalled performance. Incorporating apt-X technology, the high-performance audio codec from APTX, the Creative Inspire S2 Wireless speaker system provides Bluetooth transmission with minimum delay and outstanding sound quality. It also possesses a compact form factor, minimising its footprint without any compromise on component and sound quality, ideal for discerning users who shy away from bulky or low-grade speaker systems. With each palm-sized satellite speaker measuring a mere 7.4cm x 7.3cm x 10.3cm, the Creative Inspire S2 Wireless speaker system blends perfectly into small spaces, making it the perfect companion for notebooks, PCs or mobile devices.

Creative Technology Ltd. today unveiled the Creative Sound Blaster Arena Surround USB Gaming Headset, a cutting-edge, all-in-one gaming headset powered by renowned Sound Blaster X-Fi technology, and also announced the availability of the Creative Fatal1ty Professional Series Gaming Headset MkII. Designed with the rigorous needs of gamers in mind, both headsets provide the ultimate gaming experience for those serious about immersing themselves in the game.

Creative Technology Ltd. today announced the Creative Sound Blaster Wireless for iTunes, a breakthrough for more than 100 million people who listen to iTunes music and Internet radio on their PC or Mac. The Creative Sound Blaster Wireless for iTunes upgrades the PC or Mac to a premium wireless sound system that enables users to use the iTunes interface. It is about the size of a thumb drive, and it just plugs into the USB connection on the PC - it is as easy to use as iTunes itself. The Creative Sound Blaster Wireless for iTunes is the perfect solution for everyone who has iTunes on their PC or Mac, allowing them to listen to their music wirelessly and enhancing the quality of the playback.

Coupled with a Creative Wireless Receiver, the Creative Sound Blaster Wireless for iTunes allows users to wirelessly connect the PC or Mac to speakers or headphones when they listen to their iTunes or MP3 music. Users no longer have to connect speakers or headphones directly to their PC or Mac, because it plays back music wirelessly throughout the home. Now users can take their notebook PC or Mac from one room to another while they listen to iTunes music without skipping a beat. The Creative Sound Blaster Wireless for iTunes enables users to select up to four specific rooms where they want to wirelessly play back their music or they can broadcast to unlimited systems throughout the home.

Creative Technology today introduced the Creative Inspire T3130 and Creative Inspire T6160 speaker systems that uphold the Creative Inspire line's reputation for merging high performance and value.

These new speaker systems were engineered with optimised component selection and tuning to deliver the best sonic experience and superior loudness with minimal distortion. The Creative Inspire T3130 and Creative Inspire T6160 speaker systems are able to pump out smooth audio at high decibels that meets the needs of music lovers, movie fans and gaming enthusiasts alike.

Featuring proprietary technology and sleek designs, the speaker systems were built to stand out acoustically and aesthetically, making the Creative Inspire T3130 and Creative Inspire T6160 speaker systems distinctly superior in their respective classes, while remaining competitively priced.

Auzentech, Inc. announced shipment dates today for the highly-anticipated X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound card. Reviewer shipments of the X-Fi HomeTheater HD will begin the second week of July. According to Auzentech the sound card will also go into full production at that time, enabling customer shipments to begin at the end of July.

"We are excited to officially announce shipment dates of the X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound card," said Stephane Bae, president of Auzentech, Inc. "We appreciate the patience of all our customers, distributors, and dealers who have waited anxiously for this sound card."

Auzentech announced today the immediately availability of the X-Fi Titanium I/O Drive for purchase from the Auzentech Online Store. According to the Auzentech website, the X-Fi Titanium I/O Drive is "the ideal way to harness the power of connectivity for select Auzentech PCI Express X-Fi Sound Cards. With the ability to go straight to gaming mode with the push of a button, Headset Connectivity, volume controls and the ability to record your own music, the I/O drive expands your system with a wealth of options."

Creative Technology today announced their latest Aurvana Air earphones. Using premium materials and Creative's EaseFit ear-hook design, the new Aurvana Air earphones will provide listeners with superior comfort over long hours of extended use. The Aurvana Air earphones have a 1.2 m long Oxygen-Free Copper (OFC) cable, a gold-plated 3.5 mm jack and come carefully placed in a leather carrying bag. Each earphone holds one 15.5 mm Neodymium magnet driver, with frequency response of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, impedance of 32 ohms and sensitivity of 102 dB/mW at 1 kHz. The Creative Aurvana Air earphones are supposedly arriving at stores now, and they should cost around 200 Euro (ouch). For more information, please click here.

HiFiMan has come up with a new high-fidelity portable media player, the HM-801. Unlike consumer-ended product appearance and feature-sets of PMPs such as Apple iPod, Microsoft Zune or Creative Zen, this one sits in its niche of audiophile products, emphasizing on audio output quality and support for high-bitrate lossless audio formats.

To begin with, the HM-801 uses a unit design that is uncompromising from a sound perspective, featuring a modular amplifier section and the highly regarded Burr-Brown PCM1704 DAC capable of 24-bit/96 KHz. That, coupled with the OPA627 Op-Amps, which have quite the reputation among audiophiles, is bound to give you world class sound quality on the move. Supported audio formats include WMA (including Pro and Lossless), MP3, FLAC, AAC, Ogg-Vorbis, and WAV (PCM,MS-ADPCM,IMA-ADPCM). Its storage is care of an SDHC slot, that will support SDHC cards with capacities as high as the standard supports.

The HiFiMAN PMP also features an analogue and digital line out (via coaxial SPDIF) so that you can feed your portable DAC or amplifier with a good signal. Uncompromising sound quality on the move is bound to cost big bucks and the HiFiMAN is also quite costly at $700, which is $600 at launch due to discounts that include donating $10 per purchase to audiophile website Head-Fi.org. The bigger charity of course would be that you are getting this with $100 off. And this is even without a memory solution you have to buy the SDHC card yourself.

MSI, the worldwide high-end graphics card and professional motherboard brand-manufacturer, today proudly announced a new series of audio products - Syren series. As the name, the dreaming sound of Syren can hypnotize every person that she wants to. The person who is hypnotized can't help falling in the dreaming sound, feeling comfortable and satisfied. This is the most important feature of Syren series: "dreaming sound." The latest Syren series products include "SyrenSound X-Fi" high-end sound card, "SyrenPhone Gaming" professional gaming Headphone, and "SyrenSpeaker mini" Mini-Q speaker, targeting the user who seeks for pure and clear sound.

GIGABYTE Technology CO., LTD., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today is pleased to announce GIGABYTE X58/P45/P43/P41 series motherboards now support Creative's latest Sound Blaster X-Fi technologies, delivering a premium audio quality and listening experience for your PC.

X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity is the new audio standard from Creative that makes your music and movies way better. It breathes life into songs, restores detail, and expands the music to surround sound. For music lovers or gamers, X-Fi technology delivers superior 3D audio solutions. At the heart of X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity lie three key technologies; X-Fi CMSS-3D Virtual, X-Fi Crystalizer and EAX ADVANCED HD 4.0.

JC Hyun Systems, a premier leader in car infotainment systems announced the RUNZ CI-7100 Car Infotainment System, the world's first car infotainment system which is developed exclusively using Creative's award-winning Xtreme Fidelity (X-Fi) technology to enhance the overall in-car audio experience of motorists. The audio experience of watching movies or listening to music in cars with X-Fi technology will be truly amazing.

Auzentech, provider of high-quality consumer sound products, is pleased to announce the retail availability of its Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 soundcard. The Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 is the first low profile native PCI Express audio card that Auzentech has designed especially for gamers and audiophiles. Compared to the X-Fi chipset reference design, the Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 has improved circuitry and components. It also marks the first time a Creative 20K2 PCI Express audio processor has been available in a low-profile board, as well as the first time it has been available in a third-party soundcard. The X-Fi Forte is equipped with 64MB X-RAM, supports EAX 5.0, and most of the latest standards in processing sound from audio and video files. Please click here for more information. The card's retail price is $149.99.

Following Creative's announcement of its big release for this year, the Zii, the company went back to product launches of what's it's known for the most: consumer electronics. Enter HS-1100 Tournament Gaming headset. This piece will lead Creative's fleet of gaming headset.

Although the "X-Fi" term is out of its product name, the headset does incorporate native X-Fi logic. While the headset connects to the audio source using standard 3.5mm jacks, the local X-Fi logic provides X-Fi Crystalizer and VoiceFX (a voice morphing feature). This eradicates the need for any related software to be installed on the PC. The heatset features active noise cancellation to help gamers in rather noisy environments such as LAN parties and competitions. It features 40mm neodymium drivers for sharp and accurate sound effects. The HS-1100 will hit the shelves around April this year, at an expected price of over US $160.

Zii has taken us by surprise for sure. It's not affiliated with life-science, it's certainly not a PC audio processor. It's a multi-core processor the size of a postage stamp, that its makers claim to possess raw computational power to rival that of a supercomputer. Zii stands for "Zen Two" or Z II, it is a combination of the ZMS-05 processor, a system board, middleware and an optimised OS. Soon to be announced at CES, Zii might well turn out to be Creative's most important product, even more so than SoundBlaster. VR-Zone provided some details ahead of Creative's announcement.

Late December last year, Creative started a teaser website for the company's "new direction", the Zii. Back then it was courteous enough to give us a clue about what it was about and how big a deal it was, with its rather bold tag-line "Everything you know is about to change". Today Creative dispatched emails to all those who registered for updates on the website, revealing a lot more about Zii, and we can tell from what's given, that Creative has embarked upon something big, which makes its digital audio product lineup look irrelevant to the matter.

The Zii, according to Creative, is inspired from nature's building block of life, the stem cell. A stem cell is a basic cellular unit found in multi-cellular organisms that holds the potential to divide and differentiate into the many different kinds of cells an life-forms have. Here's a revelation: Creative claims to have devised a stem cell-like silicon that can "grow and multiply into different solutions and eco-systems", it can be seen as something parallel to the process in which life functions, only that it's going to be silicon doing it. Creative goes on to add "With an investment that spans over 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years, the world is poised to experience a breakthrough that will better lives beyond our imagination." Given the state the world economy is in, Creative states that the technology is recession-friendly and will in-turn unlock countless business opportunities based around the technology and its expansion. Creative will be throwing a lot more things out of the box at the upcoming CES event. The Matrix era of artificial life is beginning not to sound too much of an imagination.

Known for decades as a company that specialises in digital entertainment products, Creative is up to something new. The company is working on what it calls "Stemcell Computing". It is reportedly making a processing chip or architecture called Zii. A teaser micro-site of the same has been launched. The Zii processing chip is expected to give Creative the new direction the company has been striving for, with announcements of products incorporating the Stemcell Computing technology being expected at the upcoming CES event. Not much is known about Creative's plans at this point in time. The teaser goes with the tag-line "Everything you know is about to change", so we are expecting something big, or significant at least.

Creative updated drivers for its Sound Blaster X-Fi series sound cards to version 2.18.0008. The driver covers all X-Fi series sound cards based on the CA-20K series audio processors, that includes the X-Fi Titanium Series, Xtreme Gamer Series, Xtreme Music, Platinum and Elite Pro. The new drivers add to the capabilities of the sound card in a Windows Vista environment, notably Dolby Digital and DTS decode for certain models, a feature that was lost in the transit between Windows XP and Vista. DVD-Audio playback for models which included the MediaSource DVD-Audio Player application has been re-established as a feature in 32-bit Windows Vista.

Fixes relating to issues such as audio popping/crackling during AC-3, PCM or Dolby Digital through digital outputs of the card, have been brought about. The driver also fixes erratic CMSS-3D behaviour in the Audio Creation mode. The driver can be downloaded from Creative Worldwide Support website.

Auzentech has unveiled the X-Fi Forte PCI-Express sound card. The Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 is the first Low Profile native PCI express audio card that Auzentech has designed especially for gamers and audiophiles. Compared to the X-Fi chipset reference design, the Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 has improved circuitry and components.
"A large percentage of our customers are both gamers and audiophiles," said Stephane Bae, president of Auzentech, Inc. "Increasingly, they are requesting a low-profile sound card with 'mind-blowing' audio playback for music, movies, and games. We created the Auzen X-Fi Forte with these customers in mind."

Auzentech, an exclusive Creative partner, informed recently that it has revised the release date for its Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD soundcard to the last week of January 2009. The Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD soundcard was originally scheduled for release sometime in September or October of 2008.
"I regret delaying the product release," said Stephane Bae, president of Auzentech, Inc. "The decision came suddenly due to strategic marketing changes by our partners. These partners have been instrumental in making the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD an industry-supported audio solution. When it is released at the end of January, it will include the necessary software to access the advanced HD capabilities of the soundcard-and much of that software comes from our partners."
The Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD is a premium sound card, that will compete well with ASUSTeK's recently launched Xonar Essence STX. When released it will offer PCI-e x1 interface, Creative's 20K2 sound core, 64MB X-RAM, HDMI 1.3a output and some of the latest audio technologies in the market, such as Dolby Digital Live, DTS Connect, ASIO 2.0 and EAX 5.0. The card is also said to be able to output multichannel audio from Blu-ray discs with no downsampling, and play high bit-rate audio such as Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream without altering the original sound. For more information, please visit Auzentech.