Is this better than lame preset extreme or insane? is this just hype or is the x fi really an awesome ripping method?

LAME is an encoder, not a ripper. If the X-Fi incorporates ripping I don't imagine it would be any better than EAC.

How does a sound card do ripping? And what does LAME got to do with it? Beats me...

Have a look at the comparison table. At the moment X-Fi does not do ripping, and does everything else just on the "excellent" scale -- not "awesome". Maybe the future models will serve your needs.

Xi-Fi is suppose to rip CDAudio using WMA at 24bits or something. The Xfi is suppsoe to have a SRC to upcovert audio signals.

"The Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor puts your music and movie audio through a two-step quality enhancement process. First it converts the audio into 24-bit/96kHz quality, then it remasters and selectively enhances the audio by analyzing and identifying which parts of the audio stream have been restricted/damaged during the compression stages to 16-bit and then to MP3. The result is music that sounds cleaner, smoother and has more sparkle, and movies that sound more realistic than ever before!"

"Sound Blaster X-Fi uses the X-Fi 24-bit Crystalizer & X-Fi CMSS-3D features to "SuperRip" CD's into Xtreme Fidelity quality. You can now enjoy permanently enhanced music instead of low-quality MP3 files!"

I thought what X-Fi does is actually compression : see the image at this post. And it is so far mentioned (to my knowledge) that it is only designed to recover the loss occurred during encoding into MP3 not during the mastering the original CD. Otherwise this makes even less sense than the earlier claims of Creative: Rip a CD into 24 bit and then encode into MP3 ? Wouldn't that increase the file size?

Soon the artists wouldn't even have to make music. Because Creative Z-Fi would collect the music information from their old albums and enhance it into an entirely new album that would sound better than all the conventionally made albums in a studio.

haha ... yeah that sounds like Creative's master plan lol.

Anyway, i've been in the market for the X-Fi and was doing some reviews and stuff about it, how it has like 10x the transitor count compared to an audigy2 etc.

The X-Fi Super Resample Thingy ... "24-bit Crystalize" basically converts ur 16bit audio into 24bit audio and then Creative's "Crystalize" thing boosts high/low signals. Sounds like an over hyped EQ to me ... & u're basically allowing Creative to set its own poitns on that EQ. Most review sites said that this feature was mediocre at best, another marketing blitz from Creativ.e

Heh, funny, I never knew what I was missing with properly mastered cd's. Maybe someone should tell Steve Hoffman about this. It'll make his job so much easier...

Bundled software.

Judging from edekba's first post, I'd say it isn't very awsome at all.

Ok so is it safe to say this wont set standards? mp3 compatibility with better than wav sound? sounded like bull to me but with the upsampling,... who knows?
Has anybody xactually done a rip/encode with this software?

not mp3 ... wma.

Personally i think that SuperRip is like a wma file ... that X=Fi "upsamples" for "better quality sound"


... CD sounds GREAT to me ... no need to upsample after they'be been mastered by the experts and what not but that just me.

Remember: upsampling has nothing to do with improving sound quality.

Um, wouldn't that mean your sound will be mangled with twice? Once upon ripping and compression and once again when playing back? I can see the benefit of postprocessing before encoding, but how would Winamp know?

Ah, I hear you say, you need to use the Creative player! How convenient! But then again, "remastering" something twice should make it sound twice as good. Would be a shame if those millions of transistors would twiddle their thumbs, eating idle power, when I'm doing such a mundane thing such as listening to music.

Creative sucks, period.

Not only does their marketing dept. think everybody is a noob at this stuff, but their more recent products have been of lower quality than before, and their customer service convinces people otherwise, my muvo N200 player is not the best, in fact it's downright mediocre, it skips randomly during mp3, wav and wma playback, but i stuck with it because they said on their board that a firmware update would fix it. It didn't.

I've seen people give up an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 for an X-Fi... that's sad.

I'll take any 2496's that are given up!

Why does creative get so much airtime on ha.org for basically cheating people just one more time? Aren't there enough other soundcard manufacturers out there who may deserve attention for doing something actually useful? If creative labs would be a user and would post this crap on ha.org, then it would already have been banned multiple times, so why do idiots get more airtime than trustworthy manufacturers?

- Lyx

X-Fi does not EQ or even need it's own player.

Their crystalliser are creating a new sound environment to "improve" (fake) a better sound. This may sound fairly good on some (mostly older) music, but after a while, the "improved" music sounds even more distorted than improved.

That is - X-fi does practically nothing you can't do yourself in Audition! It does not even save 24bit files, as everything is converted 16bit->24bit->16bit!

I hope this clears up the confusion

(How come so many people scream about things they practically don't know shit about? Just google around for a few minutes, and a lot of confusion could be avoided in a thread like this!!!)

I did not just read some reviews - I own an x-fi myself, and I must agree that i'm not really THAT impressed!!

Conclusion: X-fi is pure hype, and cannot in any way be compared to encoding presets.

This just came to my mind: If your X-fi is setup to crystallise all output, then crystallised files would be crystallised twice when listening. Now Crystallisation can be set at a specific level, but this is definately lame!