X-fi Will Change The Face Of Computer Music...

http://www.soundblaster.com/products/x-fi/technology/

This looks like it will be the most amazing chip to ever come out! I’m hoping that EMU bring out new cards based on it (I’m sure they will) that are similarly priced to the 0404 or Proteus X is now, but with 24 times the onboard power!

imho it’s only a dsp for consumer cards …

for me the converters are more important …

if I want professional dsp power I will buy a dsp-only card (like tc’s or similar)

and serious professional products are not promoted in that way before they are released …

and please read everything e.g. 3D (SURROUND) MIDI RECORDING LOL … sorry I have only 2 hands ;)

just my 2cents … i’m sure creative will build great gameing or hifi cards with X-fi … but it’s nothing for the pro music sector

Aye to that, this wont take any load off the CPU for VST or native effects in Renoise, although I have heard of an outboard box which is supposed to be able to do this. Think it was mentioned in this forum somewhere.

This will take a huge load off the CPU for effects - it will be like the Emu 0404/1212 series, except 24 times as powerful! Creative will be selling the chip to other sound card manufacturers as well, so we aren’t stuck with Creative only cards using it (and as they own Emu, and the Emu cards have been incredible value for money, they’re sure to bring out replacements for the 0404/1212 etc. range, that use the X-Fi chip).

The converters are already so cheap (look at the 0404) that I don’t think you need to worry about that. And it certainly IS professional DSP power - look at the number of MIPS! Look at the instruction set!

You’ll see…

will see…

I have nothing against creative labs, but we all know that its easy to get fooled by marketing tricks…

remember how they hyped audigy 1 cards and they didnt turn out to be as good at all…

“…and even adding back in to music the sparkle that is lost during MP3 or WMA compression.” :lol:

that’s what i mean … only words words words and stupid consumer promotion

by the way, how is this expected to reduce CPU load of ReNoise and VST instruments?

If I’ve translated well from martketish language, this is an audio CPU with built in DSP effects, so, if you use external effects, no gain is given. I would never use built-in DSP effects, because I don’t want my songs to be hardware dependant.

I’m still wondering how a “surround MIDI recording feature” should look like… :huh:

place 4 keyboards in your room, connect these ones with the X-Fi chip, and jump from one keyboard to another and record your song immediatly in surround :rolleyes:

lol @ alexander :D, perhaps we could learn to play the bass with our peckers for the sub output?.. naaah!

Thanks for clearing that up It-Alien, indeed the CPU will suffer just as much with our without this chip. The only real difference between my soundblaster 5.1 and my M-Audio Delta 1010 was the sound quality, lower latency due to the better converters, and number of outputs. The soundblaster architecture also seemed to hog a little more of my CPU, but I think that’s because it was so dated, and the drivers catered for many cards

If you want to shove some of the processing over to a piece of hardware, look at some of these dedicated bits of kit. Don’t know if they’d work with renoise though.

I never suggested this would run native effects or VSTs…
What it will do, but 24 times more, is what the 0404 and 1212 do - run its own effects for you. Since most of the population (in the future) will own an X-Fi card (of some make or other), it won’t matter if you use it, as most people will have it.

(Obviously nobody’s forcing you to use the X-Fi’s effects if you have one!)

I came across similar negative views here:

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000340053618/

Such as:
“Even if this thing was God’s gift to Christ as Creative apparently wants us to believe, it’s all worth absolutely nothing unless you have VERY good speakers to notice, the kind that you can’t buy at BB.”
If it runs 24 times as many effects as the 0404 does, it will be useful to many musicians, no matter what speakers they are using.

“So do these new Creative sound cards resample 44.1khz to 48.8khz like the previous Live! series did?”
He obviously didn’t even bother to read all the info. on the Creative site.

“So does this read to anyone else like they added 64Mb of RAM to the card (god knows why) and a bunch of packaged SOFTWARE and called it something new? This looks a lot like the Audigy 2 once you cut all the marketing out.”
Another one who hasn’t even read what the X-Fi can do!

“If it’s for audio creation, $400, is cheap. So cheap that I would be skeptical of the quality.”
Unbelievable! Bear in mind that this was written by somebody in August 2005, not 2002…
Hasn’t he heard of the Emu range? Most of them are well under $400, and about as good quality as you could ever want!

“High Quality? Yes top-end hi-fi lovers really go for 3.5 mm jack plugs to link their equipemnt.”
An idiot suggesting that a 3.5mm jack is incapable of delivering high quality audio, for some reason. How thick does he think the traces on the circuit board are, through which the audio signals all travel?

"Sound Quality? The lack of EMI shielding to the analogue paths on both sides fo the board, means you should be able to hear that nice line noise from the inductor on the neighbouring PCI modem in your PC and all those lovely digital signals and fan coils inside your case in the highest of fedility.

I think I’ll pass…"

Yeah right! I can really hear all the ‘line noise’ on my Emu 0404, Turtle Beach Laguna, and cheap onboard motherboard soundcards - NOT.

“Nothing like sticking $400 worth of sensitive high fidelity audio parts INSIDE A FREAKING PC CASE.”
Why not? Millions of people have managed perfectly well doing exactly this…

Basically that page is full of rant after rant, all incorrect, slagging off X-Fi. They act as if Creative couldn’t possibly have produced a better chip since the EMU10K1! As if nothing has improved in VLSI technology in the last four years.

The Creative cards may or may not be brilliant - they may or may not take advantage of the X-Fi’s power, in ways that are useful to musicians, but since Creative are going to sell the chip itself to other card makers (and are Emu is bound to be one of them), I don’t think this is anything to be negative about.

This one was the best of all: “Pro audio bottom line: If you want top quality, you cannot do analog conversion inside the PC case.”

What planet is this guy on? Has anybody else had this problem? I think not.

I dont beleive in SB cards. I didnt believe in them in the past ( I bought gravis instead). But lets see what the future will bring.
But you can buy of course the original: emu . That will enable you to get rid of the things not possible using a branding card.

Nevertheless SB cards are what you are in need of for gambling.

i’ve read somewhere that someone/some company is programming plugins that take the raw data fed in them (of course the two 32bit [stereo] audio inputs) feed them to the ram of the video card and somehow use the video algorithms to calculate the desired effect. the calculated data is read again by the plugin and goes back to the host application.
rumors, i know. i don’t even know if this is really possible, but sounds kinda promising towards saving cpu power.

Many of the higher end cards have breakout boxes which do all the D>A conversion externally (e.g. my Delta 1010 is in a shielded server cabinet), therefore the interference from the PC’s case becomes negligible, if it ever was a problem in the first place.

Bionic-fx was supposed to show a demo of this early this year. But it never happend.
If/when this is done you can get hell of a lot vst power using a new geforce gpu and pci express. It only adds about 2ms delay.
AFAIK only specific vst’s can be used with this. I dont know if its possible to make a vst wrapper so you can load other plugins as well.

wow. cool. thx. bookmarked. can’t wait to see it.
i don’t have a pciexpress yet though. i’ll see the
time it comes out.

and what’s about more gfx-speed powered by our soundcards? :blink:

… this is also very interessting: FX Teleport … has anybody experience with FX Teleport?

( i have an old 1.5Ghz P4 in my office - with a busted mainboard … maybe i will try it if i’ve bought a new board … )

i’ld give for a soundcard that can hold 16GB of ram in the past…
But i think i can reach as much when purchasing a board that can hold up 4GB and run two or four cpu’s symmetricly load-balanced.

It will recreate lost information in a accurate way in realtime. When you do that it will sound much better.

It will also take lot of cpu load of when playing games because of EAX.

It will also have a VERY low ASIO latency, because of the architecure.

The dsp effects though you will most likely not be able to use in music creation.
There are realtime dsp effects on the audigy series too, but you can’t use them from inside any music program.
But I might be wrong here…