At the end of my first year of university, the Student Union organised a summer event, complete with a gig by Shed Seven. Those of you still in your teens will have no idea who they are (check Wikipedia's wonderful entry on them) - and yet, for one warm summer evening in 1999, I was convinced they were amazing.
And no, I wasn't on anything.
Listening to the Sheds' mighty anthems now, I really can't hear what I heard back then: I'm older, wiser, soberer, but I'm also listening to the music as 128Kb/sec MP3 files through headphones, courtesy of my work PC's on-board AC97 chip. This is a convenient setup, and convenience is the watchword of PC audio these days; however, it's also a stealthy killer, a carbon monoxide leak that sucks the life out of games, movies and music. If Creative wants to convince us to go back to buying separate, expensive sound cards, then the new Sound Blaster X-Fi is going to have to dispel all this lethargy.
Fortunately, that only took about ten seconds. In the 25GB of MP3s I have, I've yet to come across a single song that doesn't benefit from the X-Fi's enhancements. Everything from Puccini to Shed Seven sounds better than ever. Every breath and note of Nina Simone's voice during the a capella start of 'Feeling Good' positively shimmers; the dissonant guitars and rough vocals in Nirvana's 'Heart-Shaped Box' sound less muddy and collapsed, giving the song an even more sinister feel.
The X-Fi uses two technologies to enable such big improvements: 24-bit Crystalizer and CMSS-3D. The 24-bit Crystalizer takes low-quality music files, such as MP3s, which are compressed versions of 16-bit, 44.1KHz CD audio, and makes them sound like 24-bit, 96KHz material. Upsampling audio files, known as Sample Rate Conversion (SRC), has, in the past, left music sounding as ropey as any drunk yodelling the first few lines of 'Wonderwall'. Fortunately, the X-Fi chip is massively more powerful than its predecessors (51 million transistors compared to the Audigy's 4 million), so it's a lot better at SRC.
Once SRC has taken place, the X-Fi then enhances the sound. Previously, computer audio enhancements have been 'time domain processing' effects: spectrum equaliser tweaks that take the whole of the audio waveform and clumsily alter relatively broad swathes of frequencies for a set period of time. The X-Fi uses 'frequency domain processing', which is able to pick out the sounds you really want enhanced, such as drums, vocals and guitars, and bring them to the foreground, without creating lots of background distortion and unwanted weirdness. Frankly, it's awesome - you can turn it on and off at will, so it's easy to hear what your music sounds like without it; once you've heard it, though, you won't want to go without it.
CMSS-3D is an upmixing technology, and comes in very handy if you use a 2.1 speaker system or headphones. CMSS-3D creates nine virtual speakers, above, below and to the sides of the listener, and 'places' the audio in the correct virtual speaker in order to generate a surround-sound field. It gives songs a sense of separation that's much closer to a live performance.
For movies, it's amazing. Watching the highway chase from 'The Matrix Reloaded', the CPC team was amazed by how good the positional audio was, despite the fact that we were using stereo headphones. It's a very natural effect too, and when you switch off CMSS-3D, 'normal' audio sounds horrible, and you can actually hear it collapsing and rushing right down your ears.
Both technologies are handy for games too. The X-Fi has a special gaming mode, which lowers the upsampling rate from 96KHz to 48KHz to allow for faster performance. It supports EAX HD 5.0 and game support looks good: Battlefield 2 has a 128-voice 'ultra-high' sound quality mode especially for the X-Fi. Even in Counter-Strike: Source, which has relatively basic audio, I could hear the difference between X-Fi and AC97. Even through a pair of stereo headphones, you get a greater sense of where gunshots and footsteps - that is, your next frag or your death - are coming from.
PERFORMANCE
Creative is launching four different versions of the X-Fi, and you might be thinking that most of them, like the bassist and the drummer in Catatonia, can be safely ignored. After all, the 'Fatal1ty FPS' edition is the one CPC readers want, surely? It will retail at £180, and sport a 5.25in drive bay breakout box and 64MB of on-board X-RAM. In contrast, the cheapest X-Fi, the Xtreme Music, will cost £100, with no X-RAM or breakout box. The other two X-Fis are the X-Fi Platinum, which is the Xtreme Music card plus a breakout box, and will cost £150, and the high-end Elite Pro, which, for £250, has 64MB of X-RAM and a breakout box the size of Liam Gallagher's ego.
Creative is pitching the X-RAM as being similar in function to graphics card RAM. As games use more voices and higher-quality sounds, they require more memory. Games often compress audio to save memory, and this results in a performance drop when they're decompressed. Adding RAM to the sound card will get rid of this delay, as you can hold the uncompressed sounds there, ready for instant access.
This, like a Menswear album, sounds like a good idea in principle. Well, I've heard that Menswear album, and I can say a good idea is the one thing it lacks.
So far, X-RAM remains a good idea because, to take advantage of it, a game's audio parts need to be written in OpenAL, and OpenAL games are thin on the ground. Indeed, when we tested the high-end X-Fi Elite Pro, complete with X-RAM, against the RAM-less, entry-level X-Fi Xtreme Music, we didn't see any performance difference between the two.
It's difficult to carry out comparative performance testing between AC97 and the X-Fi, because on-board audio isn't capable of running the same EAX and audio quality settings. However, as you can see from the graphs below, the X-Fi's power means you can increase the sound quality settings with impunity. Battlefield 2, the only game with specific X-Fi code, actually ran significantly quicker on the X-Fi with the same sound quality settings as AC97. Games without specific X-Fi support were no quicker with the X-Fi card, but no slower either - something that couldn't be said of the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, which tended to be slower than AC97 when running with EAX on.
CONCLUSION
The X-Fi chip is brilliant, and a massive leap forward from the current Audigy 2. We aren't quite so convinced by all the X-Fi cards, though, as X-RAM is an unproven and expensive technology.
However, whichever X-Fi you buy, you'll be amazed by it. Taking the X-Fi out of my PC so it could be photographed was a horrible experience. Bob Dylan described hearing Elvis for the first time as being 'like getting out of jail'. The X-Fi will likely provoke a similar reaction.
