x-plosion review

[Stoly]

http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=28

[Mazgazine1]

alright thanks for the post, its been hard to find any impressions.

hmm. I wish the synthetic benchmarks had the X-fi in there for comparison.

I've had an Audigy 2 for awhile now, andI really don't find EAX to be that big of a deal.. I notice that when switch between EAX 1/2/3/HD all it does it get kinda louder.. (maybe I'm not hearing it right). But the gaming performance hit is big :( - ah well, its worth it for the 'one cable to rule them all' - and it sounded like he liked it anyways despite no EAX support.

[Stoly]

AFAIK it does support EAX but only 1.0 and 2.0, Creative Labs currently has no plans to license EAX 3.0 or higher.

Since I had soundstorm before and was quite happy with the quality, I think DTS is a bit of an overkill for me so I might go towards the x-mystique.

[H-street]

looks like the axed the front panel option that was originally listed as being part of the XPlosion..

or i wonder if they decided to axe the XRaider, which has the DTS Connect only cheaper..

[Uncle Jim]

I have my doubts about this whole DTS encoding:
if you are gamer and have very good external receiver to bypass DAC on the sound card then it is, maybe, an option.
But in this review they took speaker set that has SNR of 75 dB, while current soundcards like X-Fi have SNR well above 100dB.

So what's the point?
Well if 1) you DO have really good i.e. expensive outboard DAC and 2) you are gamer 3) but you do not care about EAX and 4) feel there is actual need to use digital connection
then - it is an option, one of many btw. Mystique, Montego, Terratec they all do the same thing really more or less.

The real downside are the FPS results in this review: 9 FPS below Audigy - both with and w/t EAX. And they compared it only to the first Audigy from 2001... I guess if I sent them my X-Fi for tests it would blow X-plosion away :D

[Stoly]

Something to keep in mind

The performance difference between the x-plosion and the audigy becomes a non-issue once you go to actual gaming resolutions.

EAX 3.0+ is propietary to creative labs and they won't license.

The x-fi can have a SNR of 100dB but it will still be limited by the same 75 SNR on the inspire 5700 so its a limitation on the speakers not the soundcard.