Good review. A couple of things though:
One of the unsung heroes on these cards is the Dialog Plus feature for me. I can't see any review anywhere supporting this feature and I feel this is pretty overlooked. I do not watch any movie without it, because it makes the dialog that much clearer.
Creative includes a new quad-core sound processor on its Sound Blaster Z series cards. The processor can basically handle all the signal processing you might want. True hardware acceleration only works with ALchemy supported titles, but it is highly overrated since any modern PC will easily handle the miniscule load generated through the audio of games.
I have to disagree completely with this statement. I tried playing several games with EAX software processing and it was absolutely terrible. CPU usage on cores would randomly spike to unreasonable levels, which in turn causes sound stuttering, delayed audio, etc. To add insult to injury, it sounded worse than onboard with muddled sound due to the driver latency. I would like to add that these cards work nearly flawlessly with any EAX enabled game in Windows 7 -- I cannot say the same for my Xtreme Gamer, at least not in Windows Vista/7/8.
I completely agree about the unnatural gain. My SB Recon3D has a similar problem. Creative attempted to substitute a proper OPAMP circuitry with brute gain on its headphones jack. Anything above 20% software volume is intolerable, and quite some fidelity is lost at that volume. The line-out jack is too weak for my cans. The front-panel jack uses a cheap ribbon-cable between the card and the jack. Creative's approach to the headphone amp jack is similar to Realtek's recent attempts at compensating for its cheap sub 90 dBA SNR CODECs with high gain. Most recent Creative cards are not for audiophiles at all.
Getting the right settings out of these cards takes a lot of messing around with the equalizer. I have about 4 different gaming profiles, 3 different movie profiles and 7 different music profiles. Having the right one with the right task makes all the difference between a good and a terrible sound. Oh, and turn off THX TruStudio Pro when listening to music, especially with headphones, because they will ruin the sound of any song on anything other than speakers.
Your last sentence I don't get at all -- I don't ever remember these being marketed as audiophile-grade cards, so the complaint seems unfair. These are a hassle-free GAMING AUDIO upgrade from on-board audio with the best game compatibility -- that's it. This may not sound like much, but Xonar have nothing that can compare to this thing in terms of compatibility -- anybody that has used any Xonar's horrible GX emulation knows that for a fact.
Unless you're running XP, most definitely yes.
I owned an Audigy MP3+ PCI and vowed it would be my last Creative card. Several years later I was in Circuit City when they were closing the doors and against my better judgement picked up an X-Fi Titanium Fatality. I have since renewed my vow that this will be my last Creative soundcard. I still believe that they make decent hardware but their software is pure CRAP.
It's the other way around now. This is the most hassle-free sound card I've ever had and I've gone through several Xonars -- but it's definitely not the best sounding for anything other than games, by any means.
Actually even the modern systems can't keep up with proper 3D sound. Play any EAX 4.0 or EAX 5.0 title and you can clearly see a performace difference between X-Fi and onboard soundcard.
The lagged game feel was so annoying i couldn't play much with the onboard.
But i'd really wish Creative would make a proper APU (Audio Processing Unit), bump up the specs a bit (256 3D sounds wouldn't hurt) and push EAX a bit more. All the software 3D positioning engines are rubbish and i miss the EAX 4 already in most of modern titles. Hell, most of them sound and feel a lot better if you use ALchemy on them though it doesn't work on all of them.
I totally agree. Comparing software emulated EAX to hardware-accelerated EAX is like comparing Nvidia's PhysX on a CPU vs on a dedicated GPU.
P.S. if these sound card had a blue colour casing I'd seriously consider moving up to a ZX/ZXR from my Recon3D Fatal1ty (I'm wondering just how much of an improvement these are compared to my Recon3D). And for God's sake Creative, either dim the stupid LEDs, completely get rid of them, or use tri-colour ones and let us decide the colour co-ordination and brightness level through the driver inside our rigs.
