Sound Blaster X-Fi

Launch reviews did not support Creative's claims of higher performance, however, with even the top-end 64 MB equipped model falling slightly behind the older Audigy cards.

[3] October 2006 saw a minor rebranding: the X-Fi XtremeMusic edition, which was in fact a highly capable gaming card, as it offers hardware decoding and EAX support, was replaced with the XtremeGamer model.

The other new product introduced was the X-Fi 'XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro', identical in function to the Fatal1ty FPS, but made more affordable by the unbundling of the I/O panel and remote control.

In 2007 Creative Technology unveiled PCI Express x1 and ExpressCard/34 versions of Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio during Consumer Electronics Show.

In 2010 the Titanium HD was added to the lineup, featuring a new DAC with 122 dB SNR and RCA audio outputs, but dropping support for Windows XP.

In addition to PCI and PCIe internal sound cards, Creative also released an external USB-based solution (named X-Mod) in November 2006.

X-Mod is listed in the same category as the rest of the X-Fi lineup, but is only a stereo device, marketed to improve music playing from laptop computers, and with lower specifications than the internal offerings.

[citation needed] X-Fi's resampling engine produces a near-lossless-quality result, far exceeding any known audio card DSP available at the time of release.

Creative Labs states that the primary function of the Crystalizer is to "restore portions of the sound which were lost during compression".

Rather, the idea is to reverse the effects of dynamic range compression, an analog technique that was and is used during the production of most 1990s and newer Audio CDs (with the exception of some classical music recordings) to make them sound louder at the same volume level setting, as it was found that subjectively louder CDs get more airplay and sell better.

Depending on the equipment used, CMSS-3D has 3 variants:[11] Enabling this setting will apply special filtering algorithms in order to improve localization for sound sources located very close to the listener.

Enabling this setting will apply special filtering algorithms in order to improve localization for sound sources located above or below the listener.

Although Creative was slow to embrace 64-bit drivers for the X-Fi lineup, most x86-64 architecture based operating systems are now supported.

Many of the X-Fi features however require the software applications provided by Creative in order to utilize the full capabilities of the hardware.

[17] On May 15, 2009 after some communications with Creative, SUSE developer Takashi Iwai finally got a mergeable version of their X-Fi driver.

[18] Support for Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD was added on January 25, 2012 in ALSA v1.0.25 release.

It is currently supported by advanced Linux ALSA driver modules but might require installation of additional packages from alternative repositories.

[20] X-Fi MB as a pure software solution has Windows as a system requirement[21] and thus does not provide Linux support.