The wait for the PCIE soundcards has ended

Jan 12, 2007 10:16 GMT  ·  By

Don't you just love Creative? And I don't ask that because I know the answer but because this Hi-Fi brand has always been known for not paying attention to the customers. Now don't get me wrong, they've been pretty successful over the years, especially with all the hype regarding EAX. The launch of the Soundblaster Live back in 1997 was probably the most important event in the history of the company since they have been selling Live based products until 2006 (all SbLive and a Audigy 1-4 products are based on the emu10kx DSP excepting SbLive 24bit and Audigy LS/SE).

As I've said, the emu10kx line was indeed a success especially among gamers. But the output quality of the audio has always been somewhat crippled by the fact that all emu10kx APUs have an internal processing clock fixed at 48KHz (also known as the 48KHz bug!). Motive for which VIA's Envy based audio cards were superior in the quality of the output.

Then X-Fi came and changed all that. The internal clock could now be set at any needed parameters, the quality of the music got better and so did the ASIO drivers. EAX was kicked out with the arrival of Vista but OpelAL works even better. Unfortunately, until 3 days ago X-Fi only existed in PCI form. And that explains why I said that they are not paying any attention to the user's needs. Everyone has been expecting a PCIE version of the X-Fi for more than a year. And no one from Creative cared until now.

The PCIE X-Fi showed up at CES carrying a small X-Fi chip, an unknown audio codec, no onboard memory and midi MIDI port but it had S/P DIF connectors and five analog connectors needed for a 7.1 setup. The lack of onboard Ram makes me think that this will be a value solution (so is the PCI Xtreme Music version which also lacks the Ram). And the $129 price tag proves just that. Availability is still unknown, but we hope it will hit the retailers soon.