Sound Blaster X-Fi Issues Explored

Specsaver said:

u r both s arent u

whatever u say guys no matter what DDL can be had for £15 with Asonic card.
If anyone wants hardware acceleration, proper bit matched playback, full EAX support etc they can have X-Fi for less then £50
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-043-CL

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I actually think the X-fi range's specification is fantastic. It is not soo much about the hardware but the below-par technical support and bugs, and frankly with creatives money and power these problems should be solved.

Yes you probably could get a DDL card for £15. But what about Dolby Ditigal EX, DTS, DTS Neo, and Prologic xII.


X-Fi Xtreme Music may be £50, the same price range as Auzentech's X-plosion which features DDL, DTS, and DTS Neo through optical/coax, unlike the X-Fi Xtreme Music

I was just about to start looking for a sound card when I started following this thread.
Now I am not sure what to buy.I wonder what kind of luck anyone with a system close to mine has had.
I found one on Ebay {used} with the description,.. "It's too much sound card for me"???
Wonder what that REALLY means?

Specsaver said:

u r both s arent u

whatever u say guys no matter what DDL can be had for £15 with Asonic card.
If anyone wants hardware acceleration, proper bit matched playback, full EAX support etc they can have X-Fi for less then £50
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-043-CL

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aww poor baby got his (_o_) kicked now hes sulking.


you can get ddl/dts playback support out of those cheap cards, but its not real time encoding its playback of PRE-RECORDED STREAMS so if you attempt to force it to real time encode a non ddl/dts sorce on the fly it cant/wont.

oh and your great "openal support"

PS. Auzentech have offically advertised Vista and Open AL support!!

Compatibility

Q : Are Auzentech Soundcards compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista?
A: Our developers are hard at work on the Microsoft Windows Vista™ drivers. In the meantime, return here for regular updates.

Latest News about Vista Compatibility

01/18/07
We are pleased to announce that Vista-compatible drivers for our Sound Cards should be available the first week of February. As soon as the drivers are posted , this page and the download page will be updated.

11/22/06
This feature clarification is a response to support questions concerning the lack of DirectSound™ hardware acceleration in Microsoft Windows Vista™.


Dolby® Digital Live and DTS® Connect will be supported.
Auzentech will continue developing support for OpenAL

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orignal sorce AUZENTECH WEBSITE!!!

try this for some links to reviews that compare you POS creative card(pos because creatives drivers and support suck.) with auzentech cards
http://www.auzentech.com/site/company/review.php#xmeridian

oh and check these charts!!!

128voices :O wow same as creative, look better 7.1 sound auzen=24bit-192khz x-fi= 24bit 96kiz, wow guess ur cards not the best ROFL

now you can admit your full of crap or you can just look like an @ss

Keep it civil guys. I see feathers starting to get ruffled.

polaris, im not mad, i acctualy find his fanboi "you down own it" or calling us potsmokers funny.
truely funny part is that he dosnt know ANYTHING about the auzencards other then they arent creative cards and thus must not be any good..

had he owned ANY of their cards he wouldnt be saying the x-fi is sooo great and flawless.

you may want to give him a pm let him know that personal attacks arent good tho, as some people would have found the potsmoker implication as an attack/accusation

actually ashen,your the one that seems like the fanactical auzentech fanboi to me.your the one constantly trying to show how much better the auzentech is over the x-fi.

and i dont know shisen about auzentech either,but i wish you'd stop going on about how much better it is than the x-fi.talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

what does it really matter? people buy whatever they like,whatever you say.just let people make their own mind up what they want to buy.

acctualy i like auzen,razor and anybody who makes a card thats not creative, creative drivers suck, they will suk till they bother to fix them, but thats probbly not gonna happen because they are still making $ off their cards in droves.

clearly you have x-fi and think its the best thing in the world, your bias based on your GOOD LUCK with x-fi working for you, many others dont have GOOD LUCK and endup with mass problems with x-fi, read the creative forums massive numbers of posts about problems with creative x-fi cards and drivers, then go and deal with those problems yourself for a few weeks, trust me its not a user error thing its a creative sucks thing.

use the attachments and links i gave to take a look, ur x-fi dosnt look so much better after you do, infact it looks kinda pathetic

if i'd have known about all the problems before i bought it i probably would.nt have.and no i dont think its the best thing in the world.at least i'm not making post after post about how crap one is compared to another one which you think is the best.

true i have had no problems with it.i DO agree with you on the bloated drivers tho',that has always bugged me about creative,and i have looked at the forum and all the poor sods who are having problems.if i could go back i would probaly buy the auzentech one instead.i have only ever bought creative coz i dont know diddly about any others.you have certainly opened my eyes on that front.

and dont think i am having a pop at you either coz i aint.you just seem a little biased towards the auzen which makes you seem like the fanboi is all.try to be a little more neutral eh.if the x-fi is worse than the auzen,so be it but you dont need to keep going on about it.i will accept it is probs better from reading what you have put.but that may be down to creative being a bit lax with the drivers more than hardware problems.

please dont lets turn this into a flameathon.

i post this stuff because at least 3 times a week since i have been posting here somebody asks something about sound cards be it "is pci sound better then onboard sound"
or "is this sound card better then that soundcard" if there was a sticky pointing people at the soundcard threds that would be helpfull, would let people read them first and if they didnt, well then people could just ignore them till they READ THE DAMN STICKY!!!

sorry but answering the same question 50 times in a row does start to get old, well at least to me i duno about you, you could very easly like answering the same questions over and over and over and over and over and over and over..........................

also note that there arent alot of high end soundcard makers out there anymore, auzentech and razor are about it for high quility cards :/ but seems like more companys are starting to get into that market so we may have more options to offer soon then razor,auzentech,creative.

and if you think that the drivers for creative carrds are bad to you imagin being on 56k again and needing to update ur drivers because the poping/static/perf issues are unbarable then finding out the basic driver pack is 130mb *crys at thought*

creative could fix these issues they have the resorces, but they dont want to take the time when they are making $ hand over fist without fixing them.

so i offer GREAT alterntives to people who just want their pc to work and work well without any worrie about "when i get this is it going to work or is it going to pop/click and drop system perf"

if there where other high end cards avalable i would point ppl to them, in another threds i pointed out that tuttle beach has some nice cards, but they are harder to find in my exp eather alwase being sold out or in many cases being priced higher then the auzen cards but having lower analog audio quility.

a agree this shouldnt turn into a flameathon, save that for other forums where if you post something about vista you get 30 prople who havent even tested it jumping up ur arse that its great (neowin forums, ewwwww)

This thread is fantastic and should be stickied. Moderators could you extract the advice SpoonMuffin, Ashsen Suger and myself have provided and put it into a sticky. I think it is improtant newbies have a sound sticky so that we dont have to answer questions like "Is PCI cards better than onbard", or "is EAX better than DD/DTS".

Thanks, appreciate it. Get back to us!

there are a crap load of these threds if you search for soundcard or sound card or pci audio its endless, truely endless
same with psu threds, never ending questions

I really don't see anything special about this thread, especially when it starts to devolve into members calling each other potheads and so forth.

Here I can summarize all 60 posts:

"X-Fi is bad becuase it has compatibility issues and creative's drivers are bad too. Nobody should buy them. Auzentech is good everyone should buy them"

"That's not true! I love my X-Fi! Auzentech isn't any better!"

"You don't know what you're talking about blah blah blah X-Fi is crap."

"sound cards increase FPS in Games and sound better"

"No they don't onboard is just as good or better"

If you do a search you'll find the exact same arguments in at least two different threads. Running a search on the X-Fi in these forums or on google will easily turn up this information. I truly am sorry if I'm sounding like a jerk, but it's the truth. If you can convince someone else to sticky it I'll, of course, leave it stickied.

lol, yeah true, i'm not impressed with the constant putting people down and name calling.
Throughout I was diplomatic as I respect both Creative and Auzentech!

i could bring up that your view is probbly a bit scewed by the fact that you have an (assumibly)probbly free x-fi

and i never said everybody should buy auzen, but if your wanting a soundcard thats got better audio quility then x-fi without all the problems and bloated drivers of creative cards auzen,razer and anybody else using the cmi 8768,8768+,8787,8788 such as turtle beach, is a better choice, problems with these cards with uptodate drivers are FAR fewer then those with x-fi.

ofcorse looking back the thred does turn into bickering by people who own x-fi against anything bad said about it.

i dont own eather, but when prices drop i probbly will get an 8787 card simple because they are better then the compotition.

and onboard can be quite reasonable, realtek is so/so and needs uptodate drivers to be worth the bother, ADI1988 fully supports EAX2.0 and lower(infact from my reading adi chipsets a few gens back even supported eax2.0 and lower FULLY) cmedia onboard audio(hd audio mainly) from what i have been reading lately supports eax with current driver sets, also they all have workable vista drivers that are under 30mb with mixer and all.
creatives mixer+driver are 130mb!!!!!

so yes i will stick with onboard audio or cmi based cards over buying an x-fi or other creative card, i prefer drivers that are updated fairly regularly, arent oversized due to bloat, and JUST WORK!!!

yes its that old "it just works" thing again

Darren said:

lol, yeah true, i'm not impressed with the constant putting people down and name calling.
Throughout I was diplomatic as I respect both Creative and Auzentech!

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dont remmber name calling? dont think i did, but then again the guy above called us potsmokers so.....ROFL (if yall knew me you would know pc's are my drug of choice, never smoked up and been drunk 3times in my 28years of life, hangovers suck)

AshenSugar said:

i could bring up that your view is probbly a bit scewed by the fact that you have an (assumibly)probbly free x-fi

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Honestly, and with no sarcasm, I have to tip my hat to you for creating a decent, effective insult. I value my impartiality and strive to be as objective as possible. You still fell off the mark though.

To answer your question. No, my X-Fi wasn't free, I'm am not a hardware reviewer and receive no money from TPU. Although I am satisfied with it, If I had to buy another sound card today I would probably buy one of the auzentech sound cards. This is because they are supposedly better for listening to music and that's mainly what I use my X-Fi for. I haven't noticed much of an improvement in gaming when I compare my Soundblaster Live! to my X-Fi, but I can hear a difference in the quality of the music I listen too.

I tried to stay out of this thread because I've posted my views on the X-Fi and soundcards in general on a multitude of other threads. I only wanted to keep this thread on track and keep it from devolving into another worthless, closed, soundcard thread. Unfortunately you managed to draw me in once again.

sorry it was sposta say problem free!!!!! sorry for the typo i would edit it but this does the job.

EDIT had dysxleia and said sya insted of say.

also wanted to point out that till you have delt with the problems that x-fi can have on any number of systems you really cant appriciate how frustrating it can be, spend a week trying to get a card working and consistantly having creative tell you that its irq conflicts, or your ram or your cpu or your motherboard, then you stick in another high end audio card like an Maudio card and have it work FLAWLESS from the start, thats when you start to dispise creative support!!!!(not to mention the full sblife 5.1gold/plat drivers that never did arrive for x64)