review: sound blaster extrememusic

[mr spoon]

Ha yeah, I've always found Creative's drivers to be absolutely awful, unreliable and clunky. I never update if I can help it, I'm always so happy that I've managed to get them to work that I don't want to upset the balance. My old Soundblaster Live has been pretty faithful though.

[3unknown3]

Mmm, yeah I have a Soundblaster Live. Easy install and simple. But now, Creative is making useless piece of crap install wizards and software with silly animations. I noticed this when I got a newer Creative MP3 player. I absolutely hate those new "flashy" themes with animations in newer software (ex. Windows XP). I miss the days when you could pop in a CD and just install the software instead of having animations and effects stall the process. But whatever.

[ultracooldom]

my friend went from onboard sound to a 40quid sound card, noticed NO difference... onboard sound is capable of doing everything nowadays anyway

[philjwill]

Edited by [user="400647"] @ [time="1148060320"]

If you want to go for übersound, buy an externbal 8-track sound BOX from carillon, don't know if they still make these, but just look up carillon, if you wanted an amazing gaming pc with amazing graphics and sound, go for one of these, these are professional sound pc's, and you will notice the difference with rhese, because those nice sennheiser £150 headsets will actually be used for something they're made for, instead of those onboard soundcards, the advantage of the x-fi series is not the amazing drivers*cough* but the build quality and the amplification, look at it, the connectors are gold covered for a reason, that reason is that gold is an amazing conductor, the little £0.05 socketsd in tyhe back of your pc are rubbish, there's a whole lot more than this to it, it's just that the engineers knew what they were doing...although I am still an advocate of professional equipment, i think i may just buy an extreme music for my gaming rig, wich is completely crap and not worth the extra £500, i reckon from what i've read it's probably a good enough buy, it will certainly outstrip any onboard sound, as for the comments on £40 soundcards not makin,g a difference, what kind of speakers/ headphones is he using?

note: if you do look up carillon systems, it's not the core systems i speak of, those come without some of the nifty bits..

[SubNeoN]

actually i believe the main reason they use gold is because it's pracitcally innert(sp) copper is a better conductor but reacts with just about anything it touches, uncluding air.. thus they use gold PLATED connectors to lessen this and stop crackling



to the other guy, if your friend didn't notice a difference, then he needs better speakers its as simple as that.. or eyes since onboard sucks up your fps bad too

[quanta]

Half-Life 1 had EAX support. Not many games do anymore. I think it's because Creative charges an arm and a leg for licensing rights.



Creative really has a fight, considering all the quality, "free" integrated motherboard sound.

[ultracooldom]

rofl, dont talk about GOLD PLATED!!!



you go to PC World and everyone of their cables are gold plated for about £15 more when you can buy regular cables for about 50p



you try the gold plated cables and theyre exactly the same. think your kidding yourselfs because you realised you've wasted cash and dont wanna feel bad about it.

[Shonkmeister]

Hi there, good review zips!



Having recently just bought this very same card, I was interested to read your review, and I have to agree a very nice read it is too. :)



Personally I'm very happy with the sound from the card. the only minor gripe I have is with the speakers / headphone arrangements, surley for the price Creative could have made it a little bit more gamer friendly by allowing us to have both plugged in at the same time. Too many late nights clambering around the back of my PC fumbling badly. I remember an old Hercules card I had which basically had a DIN plug which allowed this....I dunno if this would affect sound quality all these gold plated people may get upset :unsure:



Anyway I now see Creative are going to sell the I/O Drive bay seperatley, which I think I'il be buying if anything just for an easy life!! ...Just can't seem to find any for sale in the UK..damn looks like I'm waiting for a while.

[Supersonic^]

As if you couldn't tell already, I enjoy quality sound.

128kpbs mp3 would suggest otherwise..



http://www.ubernet.org/?p=UberStandard

[SubNeoN]

yes in the short term NONE gold plated to gold plated is hard to differenciate.. over long term, after whatever the metal is used has reacted/oxidised or lost it's shiny tint..



and the gold hasn't... you'll notice..

[texhawke]

Yeah, "Gold" is kinda pointless untill you start moving your system around or are contantly un-plugging and re-plugging things in. It doesn't make the sound quality better (if your entire wire was gold it would make sound quality worse), but it does give you better contacts (gold is softer and more resistant, so it contacts plugs "fuller" than other connectors).



My position on EAX is "Developers should always AIM for using it, and Creative should allow developers to help expand it." Sound positioning is often better than custom software controlled games, and the quality blending effects cannot be achieved any other way...Unless you like making CPU hogging games. Creative really needs to get in touch with MILES/VALVE. Not sure which one is resposible for the sound in Valve's SOURCE engine.



I love VALVE's "LEFT/RIGHT CHANNEL" implemenatation of distance effects in "SOURCE". So simple (almost lame), but actually quite effective. EAX can only filter and modulate the sounds. VALVE can actually record two completely different sounds exactly to their liking. You would think that Creative would have come up with that idea, and then implemented it in addition to the modulation and filtering effects. They could give developers much more powerful control over their sound design using a mix of the two techniques, but alas; Create is not really "Creative" at all...In fact, they don't even know what true "5.1 Surround" really is. Many of their cards can't even play back a simple L.F.E. track correctly when watching DTS/DD DVD's. Pretty sad for a company that loves spouting about High-Dynamic-Range and other Audio Buzz terms.