review: sound blaster extrememusic

[CSN NewsBot]

I picked up a Sound Blaster X-Fi ExtremeMusic back in January of this year. I had been planning on writing up a review for this for a few months now, and well, here it is! Aren't you just thrilled? You should be. It's three pages of some of the basic card features. It could have easily gone onto more pages, but they would mainly be about setting up the card and tweaking it to no end.

While I don't have any fancy schmancy software that will analyze the peaks and valleys of each sound frequency output, but I have my ears. I can say that the overall experience over these past few months has been one extremely enjoyable experience for me. Provided you don't have low bitrate music on your computer, you will appreciate your audio all the more.

This review is my own personal take on the card, including a bit about setting it up and a bit on the actual sound quality that's generated. Needless to say, I'm quite pleased with my purchase. So give the review a go, you may just feel compelled to pick one of these up at some point, or not. Hey, that's really up to you!

[Ryosuke T]

x-fi fatality > extreme music =P haha.



too bad cs/css don't take advantage of the xram/ex 5.0 HD and etc



except bf2 and quake 4 which has AWESOME sounds!

[mr spoon]

Nice article Zips, good effort. Been researching a lot recently on sound card upgrades, one of the things I really feel is missing is Digital DirectSound support, or Dolby Digiatal Live, or DTS encoding. If you have Digital speakers with a decoder, you can only get stereo sound from any Creative product unless using software with Digital support and passthrough...what that means is no surround sound gaming with Digital speakers. The only alternatives I've found are the HDA Digital X-Mystique and Turtle Beach DDL cards, but they don't support EAX 3.0+. Shame really, as it rules it and Sound Blaster for users like me.

[Zips]

Ryosuke T wrote..

x-fi fatality > extreme music =P haha.



too bad cs/css don't take advantage of the xram/ex 5.0 HD and etc



except bf2 and quake 4 which has AWESOME sounds!

Yeah, I keep suggesting the addition of EAX 5 support in the Source engine on the Valve Dev Wiki... even mentioning it a few times on the message boards. So I can only hope it's added in the near future. It'd make CS: Source (grenades, AWP, gun fire) just sound amazing.



And the more expensive cards would have been nice to get, but I was on a budget at that time. I really didn't need something too fancy, and having gone from CPU-sucking on-board sound to this was just a night and day experience.

mr spoon wrote..

Nice article Zips, good effort. Been researching a lot recently on sound card upgrades, one of the things I really feel is missing is Digital DirectSound support, or Dolby Digiatal Live, or DTS encoding. If you have Digital speakers with a decoder, you can only get stereo sound from any Creative product unless using software with Digital support and passthrough...what that means is no surround sound gaming with Digital speakers. The only alternatives I've found are the HDA Digital X-Mystique and Turtle Beach DDL cards, but they don't support EAX 3.0+. Shame really, as it rules it and Sound Blaster for users like me.

Thanks!



Yeah, that's one of the common complaints I found about the card. I have Logitech X-530's which work just fine, so I didn't really have to worry about the whole digital issue. That was one bullet dodged there at least.

[Ryosuke T]

lol same for me. i have z5500 digital speakers =D DTS, Dolby and etc all decoded from the spekers. luckily the fatality comes with i/o bay which has the headphone outlet for me to plug in my headphones. but for my microphone i have to plug that on in the back of the sound card >=|

[acidsnow]

zips' ears must be so shexy.

[meowmeow]

Fatal1ty's products suck ass, from mice to keyboards and so forth, even Logitech has better quality.

[DaRk-AnGeL]

The xfi fatality is the single most worthless buggy piece of shit that I have ever purchased in my whole life. Way to waste $230 on a product that receives no driver updates at all, and the forum staff are incompetent at best.



My 2 cents.

[meowmeow]

No offence to Fatal1ty but he should just drop the whole product-endorsement deals.

[ultracooldom]

meowmeow wrote..

No offence to Fatal1ty but he should just drop the whole product-endorsement deals.

and lose out on loads of cash? i wouldnt drop dating your grandma if it got me loads of money :)



ps. i liked your article how it says you used your ears to test it and not apps and stuff, cause when it comes down to it, its not the app which is listening to it, its yourself :)

you said you used to think there was no point and onboard is alrate.

well... do you have a 5.1 surround sound system or just 2.1 like alot of people



does it actually make a difference for 2.1 or what cause i honestly dont think a sound card can make my sound any better... especially for such a high price, motherboard for 30quid and your sorted for life

[Zips]

You guys are pretty spot on with the Fatal1ty version. I wouldn't really understand why anyone would go with it when the Platinum is roughly the same in performance and features.



For the "low"-end though, I sure don't mind the ExtremeMusic. It does what it needs to without any of the extra BS I don't really need in a card.

ultracooldom wrote..

and lose out on loads of cash? i wouldnt drop dating your grandma if it got me loads of money :)



ps. i liked your article how it says you used your ears to test it and not apps and stuff, cause when it comes down to it, its not the app which is listening to it, its yourself :)

you said you used to think there was no point and onboard is alrate.

well... do you have a 5.1 surround sound system or just 2.1 like alot of people



does it actually make a difference for 2.1 or what cause i honestly dont think a sound card can make my sound any better... especially for such a high price, motherboard for 30quid and your sorted for life

I have a 5.1 system. My onboard sound can support 5.1 at the cost of higher CPU usage. For 2 or 2.1 systems though, there is a benefit to this card.



I'm not sure if any of the previous Soundblaster cards have this, but in the CMSS-3D settings there is a new option called "CMSS-3DVirtual" that appears when you select anything below a surround sound setup.



It attempts to simulate a surround sound experience through headphones, or stereo (2/2.1) speakers. It does an adequate job, but it's certainly no substitute for true 5.1 speakers.

[SubNeoN]

i doubt hl2 or css will have eax 5.0 ever implemented since it has it's own surround sound and eax engine built in, hence the echo's and reverberation you get from the game even WITH crappy onboard..

i've got this card n i love it nice review and yes fear shows it's potential VERY well, as does condemned

[Ryosuke T]

meowmeow wrote..

Fatal1ty's products suck ass, from mice to keyboards and so forth, even Logitech has better quality.

every fatality product sucks. his mobo, vga fan, mouse, keyboard and etc.



i like the fatality sound card mainly cause of the use i have for the i/o bay that comes with it =)



plus the x-ram helps alot =) too bad no games take advantage of this except BF2 and Quake 4 =P. if you ever come to my pad youll have a ear orgasm when you hear the monster sounds when im playing bf2. >=D



no fatality will not leave the endorsement. he's mkaing $$$$ while you're hating him =P so no use talking smack about him

[ash-]

Edited by [user="370517"] @ [time="1147934070"]

The "occlusion" and eax-like effects in CS:S, HL2 and the source engine in general sound superior to creatives EAX. The reverb effects in the tunnels on dust sound absolutly amazing and just blow away any similar effects that any other developer or hardware manufacturer have ever done. DoD is even better; I love hearing the machine guns being occluded through buildings. It'd be both a shame and a blessing if creative licensed/bought out Valves technique for occlusion and reverb.



The EAX effects in FEAR are both terrible and amazing at the same time. Terrible you ask? The occlusion effect very abruptly cuts off when you go from one room to the next. You can test this by standing in a room and tossing a nade outside the room. Step outside in the middle of the explosion and the occlusion effect disappears! This can be very annoying when you hear the guards radio chatter noticeably changing in quality as you enter and exit rooms. The effect also seems to be underdone, ie explosions going off two rooms away don't pack the amount of "oomph" that you would expect. EAX sounds very nice though despite these cons.



BF2 doesn't seem to benefit much from EAX except when you're flying a jet. You can actually hear jets roaring past you and pinpoint where they are just by the sound alone! Other than that I was really disappointed when I heard BF2 on ultra quality for the first time. While it was a step up from my previous onboard sound; I was expecting an enormous difference in quality ala graphics cards.



The worst thing about the X-fi is the drivers. I probably wasted atleast 5 hours of my lifetime trying to get this fucking thing to work. I disabled my onboard audio, installed the drivers off the CD numerous times, installed the drivers from creatives website numerous times, ran driver cleaner pro, disabled startup programs, you name it. What I find to be especially hilarious is how pretentious and time consuming the installation CD is. Every time you pop the disc in it shows you a stupid unskippable CG intro that lasts about 30 secs. The installation goes smoothly but it freezes for what seems like 5-10 mins when it comes time to install the actual drivers themselves. It's almost as if creative planned this out purposely in order to annoy people. Did I mention that I had to go through this process numerous times?



Then when you reboot and try to access the audio console or any of the other bloatware programs you get the dreaded "The hardware supported by this application is not detected" error. Strangely enough the hardware does function properly although you cannot switch modes or mess with the crystalizer, the two most important features. I finally got to the bottom of this silly error and found out that I had to leave CTFXISPI.EXE, CTHELPER.exe, Notiman.exe, and CTXFIHLP.EXE in my startup and constantly running in the background or else the bloatware programs will refuse to start. I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of these programs are but I believe they alert the bloatware apps to the presence of your soundcard. Perhaps they are some kind of middleman apps that talks to the driver?



So why did I get this annoying error in the first place? As soon as I installed the card I did the obligatory sweep of my startup to disable the obligatory bloat apps that new hardware tends to bring in its wake. I believe this is one of the main reasons that many people have problems with the x-fi series of cards (and probably soundblaster cards in general).



Also, don't even bother asking for help on creatives forums cause the mods and devs are just as retarded as the users that try to "help". The engineers that worked on the actual hardware itself knew what they were doing but everyone else that is working for creative from the software developers down to the laughable tech support people are so inept and retarded that it's not even funny. Tis a truly good piece of hardware though. I hope creative goes under so a more respectable company can buy their IP.

[Ryosuke T]

lol guess you must have some kind of bad luck or something =P



<--no problem installing/detecting every x-fi hardware when first booting a new pc.