X-Fi and the Elite Pro: SoundBlaster's Return to Greatness
by Derek Wilson on August 30, 2005 11:59 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
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Qualitative Analysis: Audio Listening
Over the short time that we've been able to spend with the Elite Pro, we have listened to way too many sounds to talk about every single piece by name. Instead, we will talk about the general experience that we had in a particular category of listening. This way, we will be able to mention the most important aspects of a particular function without getting bogged down in describing each sound that we heard.Compressed Audio Listening: This is one of the most important categories in today's listening experience. The SB X-Fi Elite Pro is very capable of reproducing MP3, Ogg, and other types of compressed audio streams. Of course, clearly hearing the cold, metallic, distorted sound of overly compressed audio isn't as rewarding an experience as it may sound. What else is all that processing power there for if not to clean up the sound on older files? We turned on the 24-bit Crystallizer and listened for a while. In some 128kbps MP3s, the Crystallizer helped to bring out the snap, crackle and pop, and generally gave life back to the audio (especially in compressed live recordings). In other cases, the experience was overtaken by the effect with already emphasized snare or bass hits becoming almost uncomfortable to listen to (like Massive Attack's Teardrop).
16bit / 44.1kHz Listening: The CD audio experience is much better under the X-Fi Elite Pro than on earlier SoundBlaster products. It used to be that without bypassing the kernel mixer, CD audio would sound a little washed out while playing on a Creative Labs product. The foreground could sometimes get smashed into the background. We had no such experience with the X-Fi. Even our live recordings sounded like they should. When we decided to try the Crystallizer here, our experience seemed less useful than our compressed audio experience. It generally just made music sound different. Poorly mastered audio could sometimes benefit, and in many cases, we didn't care if the Crystallizer was on or off, but there were times when we would have had a better time turning it off and cranking the volume.
DVD-Audio: Crystal clear and beautiful. No need for any filtering here. Unfortunately, try as we might, it is difficult for us to hear any difference in listening to DVD-Audio on an Audigy as opposed to the X-Fi. Each card sounds as good as the source as far as our ears can tell. For lack of a 7.1 speaker system, we were unable to attempt enabling CMSS-3D for upmixing the DVD-Audio beyond 5.1 surround.
Games: Unfortunately, there are not a great many games out there that support X-Fi yet. On our list are Doom 3 and Battlefield 2. We tested both of these games and attained good results. We weren't able to create accurate and repeatable sound tests, but from our subjective analysis of gameplay, we couldn't really discern a quality difference between older hardware and the X-Fi. We will be able to judge better the qualitative use of 127 hardware channels when more games come out built around using the resources that Creative has provided to the fullest. Our experience with the MacroFX feature was less than rewarding. The MacroFX feature of CMSS-3D is supposed to account for a realistic proximity effect for near-field sources. What it did was make our guns hurt our heads while already hard-to-hear friendlies become even less audible. Yes, the feature was effective in performing its task, but at the same time, we aren't quite sold on altering the game developers intended sound.
CMSS-3D and Headphone Listening: One of the heavily talked about features of the X-Fi is supposed to be enhanced headphone listening through positional audio techniques and CMSS-3D. Even with all the advanced algorithms for downmixing 5.1 sound to a spacialized headphone mix, audio played with CMSS-3D sounded rather muddied to this listener. Despite the addition of simulated environmental reflections, frontal sounds felt as if they were located near the sides of my head above my ears. Every listener is different, so your mileage may vary. Under games, CMSS-3D seemed to be more distracting than useful. It can be interesting for a change of pace, or to add a disturbing quality to games that makes you want to squint in anticipation of firing a weapon. Some people may like it, but we prefer gaming (and all other listening) without CMSS-3D enabled. Headphone listening on the X-Fi is excellent if only because of the high quality components used in its implementation. In our opinion, the sound quality enhancements that Creative promises headphone listeners through X-Fi are a hit or miss at best.
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JNo - Thursday, September 1, 2005 - link
In fact, if Anandtech could do a review of the HDA X-Mystique 7.1 it'd be appreciated as I've heard quite a few good things about this card, not least its reasonable price point and dolby digital live output.By the way, on a separate note, for all the people here giving anandtech grief, people should look at more than just one site before making informed purchasing decisions and anandtech did much better than tomshardware which was extremely partisan. Also, I would like to use and trust dedicated sound sites like www.3Dsoundsurge.com but unfortunately they are often too slow in reviewing new hardware...
DerekWilson - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
you can output sound digitally ... dolby sources (DVDs) can be output to a reciever, and audio can be output via SPDIF to a reciver as well ...What you can't do is take a source that's not already dolby (like music, games and the like), encode it to dolby, and then send it to a reciver.
Lwood - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
I found this on the ALSA mailing list (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel...">http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel...:"We are not going to get any support from Creative for the X-Fi chip.
We do not get support from Creative for any Creative chip that has a DSP
in it."
It looks like we won't see a Linux driver for the X-Fi anytime soon... :-(
sprockkets - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
Oh well, even nVidia's soundstorm worked in linux, and with the 5.1 encoding out.Reflex - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
I've had these cards in my lab and all I can say is that this is the first time I've ever really doubted Anandtech's credibility. This reads like a spiced up piece of PR from Creative, and subjective listening would not put this as the best consumer audio solution as so prominently stated on the first page of the review.Derek - What the hell is going on here? You don't even include any results from competing products to make such a statement. The war was over before a shot was fired is the impression this review gives. The fact that Creative finally has a card to match the specs that otehr cards have had for three years now makes it a 'revolution'? Sorry, I have been working with these cards for months now and they definatly are nothing special. Just expensive.
flexy - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
100% agree...tried to keep my complaints back, tho.Btw. nice nick :)
DerekWilson - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
Hello,We will be looking at more cards, and including an envy24 based solution is something that we intend to do in the future.
We do include a result from a competing solution -- the Gina 3G is a pro audio card which has excellent audio quality. The Elite Pro is closer to a pro audio product in the component selection and construction.
envy24 based consumer products don't score as well as the Gina 3G from what we have seen. Granted we do have to test this for ourselves, but we would certainly expect the Gina 3G to outperform something from Terratec or M-Audio.
That being said, the X-Fi outperforms the Gina 3G in just about ever test we ran.
It is very difficult to subjectively compare audio between cards. There have been some cases (the audigy line) where there was a very clear problem with the aural experience. With the X-Fi line, we can no longer say that we can hear problems with the audio.
We spent days listening to this card, the Gina, and the Audigy 4. We frankly disagree with the statement that subjective listening does not put this card on par with the best audio solutions out there. We found no reason in our subjective listening tests to conclude otherwise.
On top of that, after simply listening to the card for days, we ran the RMAA tests. These tests showed clearly that not only was the card void of any issues, but that the quality of the output was much closer to the source than any other card we tested. These two points add up to the conclusion you disagree with.
And as we said, if this card performs better than the Gina 3G and the Gina performs better than consumer level envy24 parts, it stands to reason that the X-Fi would outperform just about everything but a LynxTWO ... and even then we would need to run some tests of our own ...
The big problem is that at these incredibly low noise levels, high dynamic range, low distortion, good separation, etc... it is very difficult to hear differences in the audio. To the average person, the audigy 4 Pro, Gina 3G, and X-Fi will sound exactly the same. To a hardcore audiophile, we wouldn't doubt it if the X-Fi won their hearts. The X-Fi (in spite of its features) can provide a very true-to-the-source signal with less coloration than all but the best pro audio cards out there.
For musicians, the high quality provides a better platform for work than the rest of the pack -- unless, of course, balance audio is desired.
Show me a consumer audio card that matches the specs of the X-Fi ... From the tests other people have performed on the LynxTwo B at 16-bit/44.1kHz (the unofficial standard in PC audio quality), the X-Fi posts http://audio.rightmark.org/test/lynx-two-b-1644.ht...">better numbers in every category but frequency response (and it's darn close in that area)...
The high end components used do not make the X-Fi Elite Pro "nothing special" ... They make it nothing most people will need. And certainly, between this and other products that use good quality components, most people won't notice much (if any) difference.
We very much agree that the card is too expensive. And please rest assured that we will be comparing this card to an evny24 based solution -- and hopefully a lynxtwo -- in the future.
Thanks for the feedback,
Derek Wilson
yacoub - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link
Look into the BlueGears X-Mystique. It's pretty much the best PC soundcard available at a reasonable price right now - and it's not Creative so there's no assorted bloatware to install.Reflex - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
Derek -I am not trying to bash you here, however you have to understand that when you start an article by proclaiming something the best in its class, but then your test does not include the other solutions in the class at all, that things seem fishy.
I work with audio devices for a living. I've worked with the X-Fi since it was a prototype(as have a couple dozen other people in my lab). Certainly it is an improvement over previous Creative efforts, and at first we were a bit wowed by the paper specs and proposal. However after working closely with it for months, I honestly can say that no one here feels its anything special. Perhaps some of that is the novelty wearing off, but in any ad-hoc test with someone who hadn't heard it before, they could rarely tell the difference between it and an Audigy, and the M-Audio Revolution generally was said to produce clearer sound. Not that our tests were scientific or anything, we weren't trying to write articles for publication.
I'd really suggest some blind tests with a variety of content. I think you may be suprised to find that while for MP3's the X-Fi sounds good, for CD's and especially SACD's the mid-range is poorly reproduced. Make certain you use a wide range of music, and prefferably classical numbers that you know very well.
Something else is you could list what type of speakers/headphones and recievers you are using, if you are testing with something like Klipsch then your credibility would go down considerably for anything but games and action movies, after all the card cannot make up for poor speakers(when measured by reproduction accuracy, not volume).
I would suggest establishing a baseline and going from there. Based on my experience, in the 'consumer' segment the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 is a good baseline, however any baseline that you could compare against would be beneficial to strengthening the credibility of the review. Granted anything audio is subjective, but when you say something is 'better' you need to at least be able to point to some specific reasons as to why.
And finally, the section that read like Creative marketing PR was your explanation of their audio architecture. There is nothing inherantly 'better' about the approach Creative is taking, it is simply different, there are both advantages and drawbacks. Furthermore, while they make the product seem like the 'next generation of audio' no one has managed to get a commitment from them to support the upcoming Windows Audio Architecture that will be a part of Vista, without that support they will be behind several others. Their lack of support for Linux is also a drawback for many.
Thank you for the effort, I hope that this feedback will help you improve your audio reviews in the future. I have read AT since the beginning and rarely doubted what is posted here, there just seemed to be some rather glaring flaws in how this review was handled. At least in my humble opinion.
DerekWilson - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link
Thank you very much for the helpful feedback. Some of your suggestions will absolutly make it into future audio reviews.I would tend to disagree with your assesment of Creative's architectural direction. If the intent is to very heavily process many audio streams, then the flexibility and power are helpful. This could be a boon to game designers or electronic musicisans looking for some hefty sample rate or dsp power.
For straight up listening to a single source or recording the architecture is unnecessary.
I agree that windows driver and linux support are drawbacks as well.
We absolutely appreciate and need our readers feedback. Thanks for taking the time.
Derek Wilson