ALC889 or Creative X-Fi?

anerky99 · Rated XXX Joined: 06 Apr 2009 Posts: 219 Location: UK

At the minute im having a look round at soundcards for my system cos i have a 5.1 surround sound system but for things like music and basic videos all that gets used is 2 channel stereo which seems abit of a s waste. Was looking at creatives X-Fi range as they have the CMSS 3D system that is supposed to upmix music and videos to surround sound. Ive currently got the Gigabyte EX58 UD5 board with the ALC889 realtek codec.

Anyone have any impressions of the X-Fi cards or the CMSS 3D software??

Thanks for any help Smile

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(TSC)Bender · Rated NC-17 Joined: 11 Feb 2008 Posts: 162

Unless you have a reasonably good audio setup and/or are an audiophile, you most likely won't notice much of a difference. Just had a friend sell his X-fi a few months ago cause there wasn't much of a noticable difference in audio quality to him. I could tell a clear difference with my rather modest $100 headphones though.

I currently have an X-fi Xtremegamer Fatal1ty edition that I got for free. CMSS-3D works reasonably well, for both speakers and headphones. The upmixing does a good job at separating the channels to accomodate the extra speakers. 5.1/7.1 to two channels on speakers is less impressive, but gets the job done. The highlight for me is the CMSS-3D virtual surround for headphones. It does an excellent job downmixing 5.1 to headphones for positional audio in games, although it lacks the depth of a regular 5.1 speaker system and makes the sound a little tinny to create the effect. Perfect for multiplayer FPS though.

Also beware of the X-fi Xtremeaudio, it's just a rebranded Audigy card.

anerky99 · Rated XXX Joined: 06 Apr 2009 Posts: 219 Location: UK

Yeh i know about the Xtreme Audio card. Was looking at either the Gamer or Titanium editions tbh. The main reasons i am seriously looking at them over the onboard audio is the upmixing of stereo music and videos to 5.1 for my speaker setup. they arent overly expensive at all but it would be nice to have the rear speakers used as they are right behind my head lol. And the Crystaliser sounds good as i tend to compress all my music down to 128kbs for use on mp3's and such.