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| 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. |
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| The Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music is a product of which we're big fans. Not only is it a great sound card, but it overturned conventional wisdom. Prior to its arrival, few people thought there would be any point in paying £90 for a sound card, given the relatively high standard of motherboard audio. Yet the X-Fi was an absolute revelation. Not only did it supplant integrated sound, it even convinced me to listen to my old 128Kb/sec Shed Seven MP3s again. |
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| Creative has always had a definite plan as to how sound on the PC should work, and this vision is quite different to how audio is handled by consumer electronics. Creative's SoundBlaster X-Fi and Audigy cards include on-board Dolby Digital decoding, so even if you hook up your surround speakers using analogue connections, you can listen to surround-sound audio. |
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| Modern motherboard audio is so good that many people don't bother with a dedicated sound card. In an effort to keep the sound card market healthy, Creative is sprucing up its X-Fi range with two new cards, the £30 X-Fi Xtreme Audio and the £56 X-Fi Xtreme Gamer. |
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| Given that many motherboards now sport 8-channel surround sound and S/PDIF outputs, sound cards are something of a frivolous purchase when it comes to assembling and building a PC. They're hardware for perfectionists who want their PCs to be all-singing as well as all-dancing. |
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| Asus has introduced a new PCI-E Xonar sound-card, complete with EAX 5.0 support - even though Creative isn't too happy about the latter. Now, normally, the number three usually follows two, a point underlined by the Book of Armaments, Chapter 2, verses 9-21 (after you've skipped a bit). However, Asus seems to think that the third number used for counting is 'X', as its new Xonar DX is a cut-down version of the Xonar D2X, which was the PCI-E follow-up to the Xonar D2, Asus' first ever sound card. The original Xonar impressed us with its high sound fidelity, but it was pricey and used Dolby Digital and DTS Connect to produce surround sound in games, rather than Creative's EAX. |
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| Last sighted a couple of months ago at Computex, the Xonar D2 is Asus' brazen attempt to take Creative head-on. Asus isn’t pussy-footing around with the Xonar either, this is intended to be a serious contender and as such it’s a card brimming with features and promising a high quality audio experience. Can it deliver? |
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| AuzenTech has delivered some impressive sound cards using audio chips from the likes of C-Media, but now it's taken a huge leap forward with a Creative X-Fi chip. |
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