Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic Card
The Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card harnesses the full power of the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor to Upgrade any existing library of MP3 or any music files to the Xtreme Fidelity audio standard. With the X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity 24-bit Crystalizer, MP3 music and movies are converted to Xtreme Fidelity, which delivers an experience beyond the original CD or DVD recordings. With the included Creative MediaSource 3 software suite, users can easily SuperRip all their digital music permanently to Xtreme Fidelity. In addition, MediaSource 3 also allows users to further enhance their music content with single-click access to rich features like X-Fi CMSS-3D, Smart Cross-Fade and Smart Volume Management. The Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card plays back audio with rich 109dB SNR quality.
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic Card Accessories
 Logitech Z-5500 THX-Certified 505-Watt 5.1 Digital Surround Sound Speaker System
Sound Blaster Digital I /o Module
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi I/O Drive Upgrade Kit ( 30SB025100000 )
Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX Certified Computer Speaker System (Black)
Logitech Z-2300 THX-Certified 200-Watt 2.1 Speaker System
Logitech Z-5300e THX-Certified 280-Watt 5.1 Surround Sound PC and Gaming Speaker System
Logitech 931689-0403 MX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse (Black)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Dual-Core Processor, 2.4 GHz, 4M L2 Cache, LGA775
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 ( 70SB061000000 )
Victorinox Swiss Army Ranger Pocket Knife
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic Card Reviews
That dedicated ram you see on the Fatal1ty cards is supposedly good for taking a load off the CPU for video games, but the list of video games supported for this feature is tiny and the games are old. It says "X-Fi" but it is not built with the same tech as all of the other X-Fi products. Do NOT buy Xtremeaudio. This is pretty much the highets tier in cards that's actually worth anything. It's all the same architechture, but the tiers higher than Xtrememusic have pointless additions that will only benefit a small minority. Get this or Xtremegamer. 10 minutes ago I was listening to music.
Would recommend this to anybody. Fatal1ty cards are a joke. I've been using integrated audio pretty much my entire career with music and the difference between that and this absolutely shocked me. The RAM on those cards also tend to cause driver conflicts on Vista systems. Now I'm listening to 'MUSIC.'. Don't get them. The bundled software's 'crystalizer' is a big part of that, but the general clarity and lack of white noise instantaneously makes it recognizable over integrated audio.
Beware of people giving this card a 1 star because of microphone/speaker conflicts.To run a mic and speakers, just plug your speakers in the analog jack and the mic in the mic jack. I'm very happy with this card and have had no negative issues with it at all, owning it for over a year now and using it daily. If your amp is weak, however, you will find all the extras of this card very helpful/useful to tweak the sound to your liking. Cheers. I paid $100 at Staples for mine with the purchase of a new PC. On a down point, I see they are up in price to $249. Conclusion: If you want to play your music through your PC, get this card. It has lots of functions for recording, playback, equalizer settings, crystalizer, bass-booster, smart-volume management, EAX effect soundstaging, surround functions, digital playback functions, and so on.
Also, Creative has been very helpful in sending me a proper Vista-install CD for this soundcard, since the original install-CD was not meant for Vista.
I sold my preamp and CD-player and can hook up my 460W amp directly to the computer and power a set of speakers marvelously.
Or, if you have a poorly recorded MP3 you can greatly increase it's sound quality by adjusting some of the sound card's optional enhancer functions.
This card has proven invaluable to producing high-end sound through my PC.
If you have a high quality amp you won't need all the bells and whistles of this sound card to get the right sound from your musical recordings (MP3 or CD/DVD).
I found that it works best this way, and not with a preamp.
The sound quality is outstanding and the options for tweaking the sound to your liking are numerous.
This sound card basically will turn your PC into a preamp/cd/dvd player with high-end results.
Done.
Creative has still not released drivers to address this. Card will not work with Vista x64 and 4+ Gigs of RAM. I highly recommend buying audio cards from a different vendor.
As a result, sound cuts out, pops, and crackles. Using Windows XP will increase the liklihood of excellent sound quality. If you're a high-end user, however, keep your receipt handy. I've been using Creative sound cards as long as I can remember, so it's quite a shock to discover that several problems are being reported with Creative's "X-Fi" line of sound cards. For example, removing my 3D drivers for my graphics card works around the issue, but at the cost of crippling graphics performance.
So, if your computer does *not* use high-end graphics cards or RAID hard drives, you could still get excellent sound and music from the X-Fi XtremeMusic and other X-Fi cards. This applies to both nVidia and ATI graphics cards. Since Windows Vista "Aero" makes use of 3D acceleration, this can aggravate sound issues. (If sound were water, the stream is not always flowing).
Other devices such as RAID drives, however, can't just be turned off like that. If that's true, then people may have to drop PCI sound cards entirely in favor of another sound medium such as HDMI, which newer graphics cards are beginning to support.
Since I'm no hardware engineer, I can only guess this would work, and this is the route I'll soon take. Without getting too technical, the problem appears to be that the sound card cannot get frequent enough access to the PCI bus in order to maintain a smooth stream of sound data.
The crackling issue can be worked around by reducing the load on the PCI bus. This card worked flawlessly for me on Windows XP, but as soon as I clean-installed Vista, annoying "crackling" sounds occur every time I do something graphically, such as scrolling a window.
To Creative's credit, the core of the problem seems to be a limitation of the PCI bus technology, not the sound card. Google "x-fi problem" and you'll see what I mean.
I'm into computers and haven't been able to make their drivers for vista work since may 2007 when I bought the card like many others as you will see if you do the search. It is not even remotely compatible with vista, just do an internet search with vista xfi xtreme music problems. It has been a complete waste of money for me. If you have Vista or plan on upgrading in the future JUST DONT BUY this card. Good luck choosing a good card.
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