Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium HD Sound Card Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium HD Sound Card Review - Creative and Sound Blaster have been synonymous with high end sound products for years, but have recently fell on rough times. Today the company is back with its high end product offering for the audio enthusiast. Creative even states right on the box that it is "the audiophile's choice." Let's see that statement backed up.
 
Thanks for the review! I miss my Auzentech Forte as it definitely gives me a better audio experience than onboard. I have to say though that upgrading my sound card will be one of the last things I do as I need to build me a solid rig first.
 
The reason I steered away from the Creative Labs offerings in favor of the ASUS Essence STX, besides the fact that this board wasn't available then, was the absolutely terrible experience I have had time and time again with Creative's driver support. When I first got Windows 7 my sound card was basically unusable, whereas the ASUS worked out of the box.

I'm really curious as to how bloated the driver software felt, and if you experienced any bugs? The review didn't really seem to touch on this as much as I would have liked. A 350MB install seems outrageous.
 
I've owned creative cards since the early 486 days with the original Soundblaster, through SB Pro, SB 16, SB Live! and X-Fi

Part of me says it's nice to see them back pushing the top, and that it's a great card, but then I remember how bad Creative shit on their user base for countless years. With the whole vista fiasco forcing people to buy newer cards that had proved to work 100% fine with the marvelous Daniel_K driver sets, that then got yanked, then after much bitching finally allowed again, to buggy release sets even on the newest cards, to outright drops in support, etc..

They can have the best hardware in the world but the software and support has been utter shit for far too long to repair things at the drop of a hat.

Nice review work.

*Forgot the X-Fi
 
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I had absolutely no issues with the software whatsoever.

Did the software feel bloated? Absolutely not. The install took awhile but that was it.
 
EarlKeim said:
I had absolutely no issues with the software whatsoever.

Did the software feel bloated? Absolutely not. The install took awhile but that was it.
Click to expand...
Fair enough. It doesn't look like it's a worthwhile upgrade over my existing Essence STX, but it's good to see some competition. Hopefully they keep the software support up.
 
Great review as usual Earl.

My cheap-o Creative whatevers (they're six years old, can't remember the model number off hand) wouldn't really benefit from a dedicated sound card. The X-FI chip ASUS uses in my mobo provides good enough sound through them. Plus if I had something that nice I would be way too tempted to turn the volume up to levels where my neighbors might not be happy. However, it sounds like a great sound card, good to see Creative putting something out that I'd consider buying if I had a use for it.
 
Well, color me intrigued.

Couldn't quite make out from the review, but...if you have a fairly bog-standard Intel HD Audio 'front panel connector' panel with the appropriate plug...does this card feature a (what did Intel call it - "Azalia"?) 10-pin header?

I know the X-Fi xTreme Gamer did, which is why I have that one at the moment, but almost all other X-Fi cards (except the 'Audio', which hardly counts...) lacked that.
 
I don't understand why any one would waist money on these cards. If some one is just using a basic PC specific surround setup 96% of all on board sound hardware is more than capable these days. If you are more serious about your audio and have your rig hooked up to a separate receiver with higher quality speakers than your PC based home theater in a box there are far better options than this out dated card. Hell, the audio out on my GTX460 gives me better surround sound for movies and games than anything I have heard from Creative. The lack of HDMI, Dolby Digital True HD and DTS Master Audio makes me wonder what the point of this card is considering the competition.
 
This looks like a great buy for people with HEADPHONES and desktop/bookshelf stereo speakers and optical receivers, but what about all of those with quality 5.1 analog sets? Sure I can hook it up to my Z5500 in optical out mode and use dolby digital live, but what if I want to use my much superior Klipsch set? (The Klipsch sub and sats blow away the z5500)...I know some of these audiophile cards offer a dongle for front/rear/center/sub hookups, but this one doesn't... that pretty much means if I want to game, I have to either use headphones, or stick to stereo :(

Lack of analog 5.1 may not be much of a concern for audiophiles, but it definitely is for gamers and basic movies (for people without $500+ equipment)....it's like someone releasing a videocard without a DB15 to DVI adapter, leaving CRT owners with no way to use the cards....

@Creative:
I know you guys read these reviews!!

PLEASE PLEASE make a version that has a 5.1 analog adapter! I don't care if it has to be a dongle like the gameport adapter for the Audigy cards...at least make one!! You would have one more sale on your hands if this card supported 5.1 analog output....
 
Interesting...
I think i steered well clear of creative a while ago now, but this looks to be promising, i may of spoken too soon though. I'll wait for all the problems to arise and see for my self.
I'll stick to my beautiful baby that is the Asus Xonar Essence STX.
 
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grifter_66 said:
I don't understand why any one would waist money on these cards. If some one is just using a basic PC specific surround setup 96% of all on board sound hardware is more than capable these days. If you are more serious about your audio and have your rig hooked up to a separate receiver with higher quality speakers than your PC based home theater in a box there are far better options than this out dated card. Hell, the audio out on my GTX460 gives me better surround sound for movies and games than anything I have heard from Creative. The lack of HDMI, Dolby Digital True HD and DTS Master Audio makes me wonder what the point of this card is considering the competition.
Click to expand...
The point of this card's design is that it has a high quality headphone amplifier. That amp is the same as the one GRADO uses in one of its own amplifier.

Does your GeForce have swappable OP-AMPs or a headphone adapter? No it does not. You have missed some of the most important features of the card we pointed out in a seven page review. I dont think I have read any articles that long about anything sound based on the Geforce or ATI cards.
 
I like the comment about the Zalman clip on mic working well. At least w/ the Forte, it sounds like a mini chainsaw in the background in L4D2 and it's even worse in BC2. Wonder if it's the mic or the card...there's also a slight buzzing off the headphone amp.
 
We never experienced any buzzing when plugged directly into the headphone amplifier on the back of the card and we spent over a month with the product.
 
Yeah, it's a known problem w/ the Forte's. One of the first headphone amp cards so it's no surprise. I've wrapped the entire pcie bracket in electrical tape and left off the screw, but it persists. Not really a big deal as I can't hear it when listening to music or gaming. The chainsaw mic's the biggest problem.

I do really like the look of this card though. How warm does it get? The chip under the shielding?
 
I wish they had made a comparison of sound quality to your average integrated motherboard sound.

Back when I dabbled in audio recording, I used a M Audio DUO, with phantom power for my Studio Projects microphone, but these days that I am not doing this anymore, and all I do on the computer is listen to music and play games using my Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro's, am I really going to notice a real improvement over the built in sound card.

Is it going to be a $180 improvement?


As the Flames Rose to Her Roman Nose... by mattlach, on Flickr
 
for games, isn't using analog 5.1 connection better than using an optical SPDIF connection?

ALso for movies, if you are using optical out, the receiver is doing all the work, so it doesn't matter what type of soundcard you have
 
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Zarathustra[H];1036341754 said:
I wish they had made a comparison of sound quality to your average integrated motherboard sound.

Back when I dabbled in audio recording, I used a M Audio DUO, with phantom power for my Studio Projects microphone, but these days that I am not doing this anymore, and all I do on the computer is listen to music and play games using my Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro's, am I really going to notice a real improvement over the built in sound card.

Is it going to be a $180 improvement?
Click to expand...

I feel onboard sound is ABSOLUTELY terrible. Every time I hear someone is using onboard sound, I cringe. I used it myself for two days. Never going back.

Once you use a good dedicated card whether it be a $70 Xonar or the new Creative card you will notice. Even the headphone jack on a PC with onboard sound just totally sucks. Read this and you will know. Onboard sound is not shielded in anyway from EMI and this colors your sound with a flutter and flatness.

Read this article and see if that helps to explain:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/How-On-Board-Audio-Works/28/1
 
EarlKeim said:
I feel onboard sound is ABSOLUTELY terrible. Every time I hear someone is using onboard sound, I cringe. I used it myself for two days. Never going back.

Once you use a good dedicated card whether it be a $70 Xonar or the new Creative card you will notice. Even the headphone jack on a PC with onboard sound just totally sucks. Read this and you will know. Onboard sound is not shielded in anyway from EMI and this colors your sound with a flutter and flatness.

Read this article and see if that helps to explain:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/How-On-Board-Audio-Works/28/1
Click to expand...

See I used to always feel this way, and had several expensive Creative boards in the past, but I guess at some point I feel like onboard audio became good enough that there wasn't a huge difference...

Maybe I just haven't heard them side by side in a while..

That being said, if you have to hear them side by side to tell the difference, does it really matter?
 
Hmm, I can't say it was one of my favorite articles. Subjective statements like "sounds much better" are not that useful in a comparison, but I guess it is not that easy to compare sound cards. The biggest difference between sound cards for me has always been the DAC, i.e. the quality of the analog outputs, but as soon as cards started giving me an s/pdif out to hook on my Yamaha AV receiver, it didn't matter if it was an expensive card or the motherboard, so for at least 5 years I have not bought a sound card.
I am curious though, since the little gaming I do is not on the HTPC, are there games that can encode to say DD so that you can get it via S/PDIF and bypass the sound card? Or gamers still have to get a good sound card?
 
Zarathustra[H];1036341846 said:
See I used to always feel this way, and had several expensive Creative boards in the past, but I guess at some point I feel like onboard audio became good enough that there wasn't a huge difference...

Maybe I just haven't heard them side by side in a while..

That being said, if you have to hear them side by side to tell the difference, does it really matter?
Click to expand...
It may because then you would know once and for all that it is terrible. What I found happening with most users is that they have not used a dedicated card in awhile. Their ears are accustomed to the onboard. When people hear my system, they always say things like, "My HP doesnt sound like that." etc.
 
Just due to Creative's user support I would have given them a silver until they proved otherwise. I always purchased Creative cards till the Audigy 2 came out and the drivers hosed my machines. Spent hours on the phone with tech support to no avail, switched to cheap or onboard cards and have not needed tech support. :)
 
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I also used Creative cards religiously. I have had cards from the old Soundblaster, Soundblaster Value(man did that card stay with me through many builds), Audigy, and a couple others that I can not remember the names of. I was happy until I built my first Vista system and could not get proper surround sound because they gimped their drivers. They said that their current generation of cards could not work with Vista and that if we wanted proper sound that we would have to upgrade even though Daniel_K modified a set of drivers that made the cards work. Daniel_K was then forced by legal actions to remove the drivers for download. I switched to an Asus Zonar and have been very happy with it. It worked right out of the box and I had all my surround sound back, even in older games.
 
EarlKeim said:
It may because then you would know once and for all that it is terrible. What I found happening with most users is that they have not used a dedicated card in awhile. Their ears are accustomed to the onboard. When people hear my system, they always say things like, "My HP doesnt sound like that." etc.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, I will have to try it again.

I haven't used a dedicated sound board since my Audigy 2 back in 2005 or so...
 
cocheese256 said:
............. They said that their current generation of cards could not work with Vista and that if we wanted proper sound that we would have to upgrade even though Daniel_K modified a set of drivers that made the cards work. Daniel_K was then forced by legal actions to remove the drivers for download. I switched to an Asus Zonar and have been very happy with it. It worked right out of the box and I had all my surround sound back, even in older games...........
Click to expand...

I will tell you that in the month we spent with the card we did have not a single error, crash or high CPU utilization as Creative cards were once known to be plagued since Vista was released.

The only error we experienced was the one caused by the dirty cable, and thus not the software's fault.
 
Zarathustra[H];1036341846 said:
See I used to always feel this way, and had several expensive Creative boards in the past, but I guess at some point I feel like onboard audio became good enough that there wasn't a huge difference...

Maybe I just haven't heard them side by side in a while..

That being said, if you have to hear them side by side to tell the difference, does it really matter?
Click to expand...

The majority of onboard sound solutions are terrible..
But if you have say a P6T Deluxe motherboard that uses the AD2000B, it's not actually all that bad, still a bit noisy and lacks in power but as onboard solutions go, it's not all that bad.

IMO this is the first creative card (excluding the classic soundblaster years) that has had real effort in design and build quality. So long as they keep it up with the driver support, all will be well. The previous lot in their x-fi range all had their gimmicks and tweaks. It looks as though they have sat down and looked at what auzentech where doing and what the Xonar series had and realised they need to do it properly.

I moved from onboard (P6T Deluxe) to the xfi xtreme gamer and could hear the improvement, nothing fantastic and i liked the EAX and generally how it performed apart from lag i got in Ableton because of crappy drivers.
I then moved to the Xonar Essence STX, brilliant on ASIO, amazing sound and build quality and a powerful amp for stubborn cans. This sounded so much better than the Xtreme gamer, my music (Mix of CD & Vinyl ripped into FLAC) came alive, was a lot clearer, punchier, sounded real. This for me was the biggest leap in sound i'd heard, will never regret buying that card.
It may of been because i moved from a "gaming" sound card to an "audiophile" sound card, but never the less, the move amazed me.
I use Sennheiser HD595 and HD25-II headphones and for speakers i use analogue RCA --> Onkyo TX SR307 --> Cerwin Vega! VE8f's or VE5m's
 
Zarathustra[H];1036341969 said:
Fair enough, I will have to try it again.

I haven't used a dedicated sound board since my Audigy 2 back in 2005 or so...
Click to expand...

I should add that prior to that my computers were Creative only.

Sound Blaster -> Sound Blaster Pro -> Sound Blaster AWE32 (this one lasted many builds) -> Audigy -> Audigy 2
 
EarlKeim said:
I will tell you that in the month we spent with the card we did have not a single error, crash or high CPU utilization as Creative cards were once known to be plagued since Vista was released.

The only error we experienced was the one caused by the dirty cable, and thus not the software's fault.
Click to expand...

Are you referring to the sound cards that were out when Vista was released or the current card that the article is discussing?
 
Rossi~ said:
The majority of onboard sound solutions are terrible..
But if you have say a P6T Deluxe motherboard that uses the AD2000B, it's not actually all that bad, still a bit noisy and lacks in power but as onboard solutions go, it's not all that bad.
Click to expand...

Ah, my current build has a Realtek ALC888 chip and I've been OK with it, though again I haven't compared it to a standalone sound card in a while...
 
I was referring to Creative's drivers and applications in general for the first two years of Vista's release. Even ASUS still has BETA drivers for some its Xonar lines.

ASIO worked flawlessly in all of our listening tests. WASAPI did as well.
 
Zarathustra[H];1036341999 said:
I should add that prior to that my computers were Creative only.

Sound Blaster -> Sound Blaster Pro -> Sound Blaster AWE32 (this one lasted many builds) -> Audigy -> Audigy 2
Click to expand...

Actually, both my Audigy and Audigy 2 bit the dust because the rear 3.5mm jacks became loose and eventually non-functional.

I hope these new boards have reinforced jacks, cause this always seems to happen to me.
 
With regards to the bloat of the driver package is this yet again just a progression from the original X-Fi release?

I say that as when I investigated why the original X-Fi install was so huge I found nearly 50% of it was a collection of pretty useless .WAV sound files that were there for testing. Never used them.
 
You can choose whatever you wish to install from the driver CD you do not have to install everything that is there. Pretty simple.
 
I don't doubt your listening test went fine, but the fact still remains that many people, including my self had problems with games playing correct 5.1 sound under Vista, and at the time Creative offered me two solutions. 1) download their Alchemy software to emulate the proper sound, or (2) purchase a new sound card. I had to purchase the Alchemy software because I was using an Audigy card at the time (I also tried an XFi card that had Alchemy bundled with it but I returned it because it did not prove any better). The software still did not produce the proper 5.1 channels. That is why Daniel_K modified those drivers to show that it could be done, but it seamed that Creative did not want anyone to show this so he was forced to remove them. I have no problem with a company wanting to push new products. That is how a company stays in business. I was however a little "put out" by how they were handling the situation, so I decided that if I had to purchase another card I would try another company. Plus if Asus drivers were BETA, they still performed better in the multiple systems that I had experience with than the official Creative drivers. I do not have a boycott stance on Creative products, and there is a good possibility that I may purchase a Creative card for a future build down the road. However for right now, my Asus card works great and will probably just be moved to my next system build. Sorry for the long rant.
 
Everyone has their own right to rant:D

Dont let something that plagued Vista cloud your judgment. Daniel K? We dont need his stuff anymore with this card.

Under Windows 7 64 the card ran and still runs flawless.

Alchemy is only for legacy games and EAX. Games like Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 and Bad Company worked very well in 2 and 5.1 setups.
 
grifter_66 said:
I don't understand why any one would waist money on these cards. If some one is just using a basic PC specific surround setup 96% of all on board sound hardware is more than capable these days. If you are more serious about your audio and have your rig hooked up to a separate receiver with higher quality speakers than your PC based home theater in a box there are far better options than this out dated card. Hell, the audio out on my GTX460 gives me better surround sound for movies and games than anything I have heard from Creative. The lack of HDMI, Dolby Digital True HD and DTS Master Audio makes me wonder what the point of this card is considering the competition.
Click to expand...

a few points
- Digital audio out(pass through), I thought the sound card / output had no influence on quality =) as bits are simply being passed through as they were from the source, so your GTX460, can't get any better than the Creative card with digital out, unless you're using the HD audio formats, in which case, you have a $400 receiver?

- The quality of the sound coming out of this card, is 100x better when compared to 99.9% of onboard solutions, if you can't hear the difference, it doesn't mean everyone else can.

- Having the sound card able to drive 300Ohm headphones is a big bonus, and saves $ on buying a separate headphone amplifier.


I've been using an X-FI Prelude for almost 2 years now, i love it =), not a single audio related crash.
 
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