It's because Vista got rid of DirectSound (which the X-Fi's use), and now only uses OpenALI run a Audigy 2ZS and have not even thought about getting rid of it. The X-Fi are great cards. If you run XP. The drivers for that card on Vista have been known to be a bit buggy.
I think I just found the Mother of all sound cards.
well if you got 200 to spend on a sound card its good
It's because Vista got rid of DirectSound (which the X-Fi's use), and now only uses OpenAL
Creative had to make some software (called Alchemy) to convert the DirectSound calls to OpenAL.
Anyway, one of the biggest advantages to the X-Fi is it's surround sound capabilities in gaming.
Basically, the X-Fi processor, has more processing power than any other commercially available SPU in existence so far. It uses that processing power to process up to 128 individual sounds, with up to 4 effects per sound. So you can hear where a particular sound is coming from.
There are a few things that creative didn't pay a lot of attention to: two of them are the quality of capacitors, and Operational Amplifiers.
The ones they put on the X-Fi's are okay, but they could be better.
There are people (myself included) who have modified their X-Fi cards with better OpAmps (such as LM4562's and LME49720's) and better capacitors
better power smoothing, lower distortion soundAnd what improvement did that produce ?
so, you were using it under Linux?I rma'ed my X-Fi XtremeMusic 4 times... yes, that's right. FOUR TIMES.
They randomly crapped out on me. After the 5th time, I sold it on Ebay.
I would just randomly get a blue screen. I even went as far as trying it on a different PC under Linux. It even crashed UBUNTU (PSOD [pengiun screen of death [].)...
I tried everything, PC wouldn't boot. Same result on all the cards I owned. Old, new, beta drivers. Did everything creative asked. Went into safe mode, disabled X-Fi. Wham. XP booted up no issue.
Not sure if my PC doesn't like X-Fi, but I'm fed up with Creative. Their products aren't that good of quality anymore, it seems.. I'm going to get myself a Turtle Beach card that has optical out for my speakers.
That's my experience with X-Fi.