Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro
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Creative has been going strong since the days of ISA sound cards because its family of audio products moves with the times. This is reflected well in the new four-strong range of X-Fi cards of which the leader is the Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro under review. The X-Fi cards span a price range from about £100 to £250, offering enthusiasts add-in alternatives to the on-board audio that is common in many of today's PCs.
http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=3580
Re: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro
Sorry if it offends anyone for bringing up such an old topic!!! Hopefully you see my point.
I was thinking of some new Speakers and new Sound card. I tend to think of Creative Labs first, so I popped over to their website and looked at their top of the range offerings, I then as you do hunted for some reviews, to my shock I noticed that Creative Labs have slowed right down with development to almost a complete stand still.
Almost every year since 2000 there had been a new Creative labs card, i.e. with the 100's of Live! versions and 100's of Audigy versions. But now they seem to be doing nothing exciting. The X-Fi is still their premium card over 2 years down the track. I also notice that their top of the range speaker system Gigaworks s750, which was reviewed in June 2004, is still their premium speaker product.
All they've recently released is a few low cost stereo speakers and a cheapo PCIe card. They have pretty much dropped Cambridge Soundworks from their line of speaker products.
Does anyone know what Creative Labs is up to? Are they enjoying too much of a monopolistic position?
Re: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro
Hardly - they've never had so much effective competition as now and I think their market share reflects that.
They've recently been concentrating more on things like headsets with microphones, mp3 players and so on.
Re: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite Pro
Quote:
Originally Posted by
kalniel
Hardly - they've never had so much effective competition as now and I think their market share reflects that.
They've recently been concentrating more on things like headsets with microphones, mp3 players and so on.
Also with the arrival of Vista, and the "contraversial" removal of Hardware accellerated audio aka EAX, it levels the playingfield somewhat, as previously on winXP the X-FI used EAX5, whilst all other solutions could only emulate EAX2. So now the only difference really is the sound quality and the companies drivers.. and Creative have been very lax in that department, the fact they only support the X-fi in Vista and all the other drivers are still "beta" over a year later doesnt inspire confidence.
I still own and use an original Audigy card on Vista, although its only recently i started using it again when i found some homebrew drivers for it. it sounds marginally better than the cheap (non-HD) onboard solution on my mobo, but theres no noticeable difference with 3d audio in games.