Games enthusiasts may appreciate the superb quality, hardware-accelerated EAX effects, and music fans may like the enhancement processing, but whether these justify the price is questionable. The X-Fi XtremeMusic and its pricier siblings are packed with features, but ultimately they’re niche products. We also found we had to manually adjust for a 12ms synchronisation error when recording using ASIO drivers in both Acid Pro and Ableton Live. However, this flexibility also means casual musicians may become baffled by the options. This makes the X-Fi worthy of consideration for music production, and its flexible ASIO routing and access to four high-quality DSP-powered effects add to its appeal. 96kHz ASIO support was added in the Audigy 2 ZS, but it’s only now that Creative’s ASIO drivers support 44.1kHz recording and playback – by far the most commonly used sample rate. Previous Sound Blasters were limited in music-production roles because of their fixed 48kHz sample rate, which meant that the ASIO drivers vital for music production were also locked to this frequency. Marketing aside, the 24-bit Crystalizer has the overall result of making percussive sounds louder, which can sound more satisfying than simply turning your speakers up. The conversion to 24-bit will, in itself, make no difference to the sound quality. Creative’s claim that this restores even an approximation of a 24-bit master recording is wildly optimistic at best: what it’s really doing is reversing the level compression used to make tracks sound as loud as possible on the radio. In reality, it’s a multiband expander that looks for transient peaks in the audio (such as drum hits) and boosts them at their dominant frequencies. The 24-bit Crystalizer converts 16-bit audio signals into 24-bit signals and, according to Creative, restores the information lost during mastering for 16-bit distribution formats such as CD and MP3.

Creative sound blaster x fi xtrememusic