If you have not read through my impressions of Creative's Super X-Fi headphone holography on the previous page, you really should. In many ways, it has points that would otherwise be present here, but I had so much to talk about that it merited a page of its own.

However subjective it may be, and unfortunate as the case may be, I want to stress here that Super X-Fi is not a gimmick. It does more than just provide a surround-sound experience with stereo headphones, especially based on the enhanced audio experience with stereo or even mono audio files. This comes from Creative's SXFI chip which, in their own words, "is specially designed for Super X-Fi processing, and packs 5x the computing power of Creative's most powerful Sound Blaster chip – while consuming less than half the power", one that "is a highly integrated chip" with "a large cache of fast memory to decode and process up to 8 channels of high-resolution 24-bit 96 KHz audio simultaneously. It even has audiophile quality DACs built-in." This is effectively a SoC built over 20 years of research and development by the company, enhanced all the more by the additions of intellectual property and audio engineers over the years.

For a company many feared was losing its way, especially when they released an audio card with RGB lighting at a time when many PC users were getting increasingly good onboard audio, this heralds Creative's impact on the audio market in more ways than one. I really wish you could hear the Super X-Fi experience as I did, especially with the personalized profile created by inner-ear canal recording, but this is akin to telling you to trust me and buy a good adaptive sync monitor without seeing one in person. This has the potential to be massive for the general audio market, and I can only hope Creative enables native iOS support and gets some demo units into retail stores for people to test it out more, and purchase the amp or other headphones with the SXFI DSP integrated, if only because I leave convinced and want others to be too.