Closer Examination

The Creative SXFI amp takes up very little volume as far as form factor goes, measuring in at just 67 x 17.5 mm, and I will give major props to the company for getting effectively everything I saw at CES 2018 with a much larger box inside this more portable product. It also looks and feels premium, which no doubt helps establish a strong first impression. It is about the size of my index finger, and the I/O section helps further justify it along with my phone that has, out of courage no doubt, decided to forego the dedicated 3.5 mm TRRS jack. The casing is black aluminium with a finely textured finish, and there is a chrome-finished ring at each end for some extra flair. On the front, we see a toggle button to turn Super X-Fi on or off, volume controls, and a play/pause button, which effectively makes this useful for media control, as well as markings in orange which contrast nicely with the black. On one end is the USB Type-C port for input, and on the other is a 3.5 mm jack for output. It is only on the back where the company name makes an appearance (as with the packaging), which makes me hypothesize whether Creative is wanting to make Super X-Fi a brand name of its own.


There is also a small indicator LED to the top left of the Super X-Fi toggle button, which lights up in a solid green when Super X-Fi is on, a solid orange when it is off, and blinks red under activity; such as when a new profile is being loaded on to the amp. Shown above is how the amp looks connected to my Android phone, as well as the two Creative headphones we saw before; the Aurvana SE and Aurvana Trio. This gives more context to how small and portable it is, which ends up being all the more impressive knowing how much Creative has packed inside.

Indeed, aside from the SXFI DSP processor itself, we also have an Asahi Kasei Microdevices AK4377 32-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC) which, in the Creative SXFI amp, can provide audio with an SNR of up to 120 dB and take in 2.0/5.1/7.1 channel, 24 bit/96 kHz audio as input. This is also an amplifier, as the name suggests, rated to power up to some 600Ω headphones. For mobile users on the go, the setup is more than sufficient for any portable pair of headphones, as well as many excellent audiophile devices in general.