Creative Xmod - Restore your MP3s to beyond studio quality

Hmmm, +3 dB to high and low frequencies... $80 price tag... this will sell like hotcakes!
 
In my simple opinion, that tech works rather well. I love my X-Fi and it's "Crystalizer" for listening to all my old Napster gotten MP3's. It really does help.

meatfestival said:
Wow, it's an overpriced "rock" EQ preset.
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Have you ever listened to a shitty MP3 with a X-Fi card?
 
The Xmod can make the impossible possible, turn water into wine, turn eggs to pure gold. If you ask of it, it will deliver. Ask of it to wash your chariot, and it shall be done! Ask of it for endowment beyond means, and it shall deliver! Ask of it to transform compressed audio into uncompressed, nay, studio quality audio (whatever that may mean!), and it will perform this deed with great delight! Acceptance into the arms of Creative Labs and completely unverifiable audio bliss can be yours for the smallest donation of $79.95, payable in one easy lump sum!

Give me a f*cking break. Those who would seek to buy such a device are more than fools.
 
Met-AL said:
Have you ever listened to a shitty MP3 with a X-Fi card?
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If it sucks, it sucks. There is nothing you can do about it. You want to eq it? Fine, but dont tell me I need an $80 product to do that. And dont tell me you are taking my mp3 lossy file into BEYOND studio quality.

These Creative guys are morons.

If it wasnt for gaming and their current stranglehold on the audio card market and if there were choices other than Creative, I wouldnt think of XFi as my first choice.... just an example of Creative's exploitation of the public.
 
Pinipig523 said:
If it sucks, it sucks. There is nothing you can do about it. You want to eq it? Fine, but dont tell me I need an $80 product to do that. And dont tell me you are taking my mp3 lossy file into BEYOND studio quality.

These Creative guys are morons.

If it wasnt for gaming and their current stranglehold on the audio card market and if there were choices other than Creative, I wouldnt think of XFi as my first choice.... just an example of Creative's exploitation of the public.
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The creative hate machine is strong with this one. There are other gaming cards other than creative's
 
kaluminati said:
The creative hate machine is strong with this one. There are other gaming cards other than creative's
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Yet I stick with the XFi.... why oh why do I do this to myself.

Ah well... :eek: .
 
Creative's cards are the best for gaming I'd say. While there may be others, X-Fi reigns supreme with its EAX 5.0 HD blah blah. They'd really be king if they supported DDL. Even the latest Auzentech card that isn't even out yet only supports up to EAX 2.0. I have an X-Fi simply for gaming because I feel it is best for that task.

I listen to all of my music out of a squeezebox running to headphones or my receiver which also has the ability to enhance lossy audio. At least it doesn't claim to make it studio quality... On top of that, I don't even like the way the enhanced audio sounds. Way too bright! It seems like it just boosts high frequencies to make it seem more "clear", but makes it a pain to listen to instead. Total gimmick imho.
 
plus they want to make money... this might not be for enthusiest... $80 isnt the price range for us... we wont get something unless its over $100 :)

this is for the person who buys lots of Ipod acc. this will be one... its white dammit... cant you tell who it is marketed to???

they are not idiots.. you are. They are making good products and making millions..... you?

this may not be for you but i am sure it will sell well and has a market...
 
Met-AL said:
In my simple opinion, that tech works rather well. I love my X-Fi and it's "Crystalizer" for listening to all my old Napster gotten MP3's. It really does help.


Have you ever listened to a shitty MP3 with a X-Fi card?
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The thing is if something is recorded at a low bit rate you cant go back and magically get those lost bits back and turn it into a higher bit rate. Essentially its just copying frequency bands to other the next higher and lower frequency and saying they found what you were missing. Its nothing more than a well written DSP could do. And yes, I do own an x-fi.
 
Pinipig523 said:
If it sucks, it sucks. There is nothing you can do about it. You want to eq it? Fine, but dont tell me I need an $80 product to do that. And dont tell me you are taking my mp3 lossy file into BEYOND studio quality.
Click to expand...

Ok, the beyond studio quality is a stretch, but it is far more than just a stupid eq setting. And yaa, the $80 device, not my cup of tea, but the Crystalizer tech that is on the X-Fi cards is actually pretty good.
 
Met-AL said:
Ok, the beyond studio quality is a stretch, but it is far more than just a stupid eq setting. And yaa, the $80 device, not my cup of tea, but the Crystalizer tech that is on the X-Fi cards is actually pretty good.
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<disclaimer>I am extremely sceptical when it comes to these devices and claims.</disclaimer>

I have a hard time believing their claim, since I think that information theory is in direct contradiction to any/ all of the "improve sound quality" claims. An encoded mp3 has X amount of information. There is no way to get (X + 1) amount of information from it. Now, Creative could claim that "the regular mp3 decoder" only uses (X - n) information. But if it were, we could compress mp3's more without a loss of quality.

I admit that I have no scientific study to back up my claim that there is a difference in quality between a 192kbps and a 160kbps mp3, but Creative does not have a double-blind study comparing an EQ setting to the "mystical" Crystalizer tech either. And I have less of an incentive to make stuff up, since I do not gain or lose anything from Creative's soundcard sales.
 
Met-AL said:
Ok, the beyond studio quality is a stretch, but it is far more than just a stupid eq setting. And yaa, the $80 device, not my cup of tea, but the Crystalizer tech that is on the X-Fi cards is actually pretty good.
Click to expand...

I have read somewhere that all the Crystallizer is.... is an EQ for the lows and the highs. That's all. They plotted FR graphs and it was consistent across a spectrum of audio files.

Personally, you can do that in almost any music playback program on your PC, so why tout it as the best thing to come out since sliced bread?

Creative is such a marketing farce.
 
The crystalizer does not restore frequencies lost in compression. It colours the sound and attempts, badly, to restore the peaks that are squashed in loudly mastered tracks.
 
Pinipig523 said:
I have read somewhere that all the Crystallizer is.... is an EQ for the lows and the highs. That's all. They plotted FR graphs and it was consistent across a spectrum of audio files.

Personally, you can do that in almost any music playback program on your PC, so why tout it as the best thing to come out since sliced bread?

Creative is such a marketing farce.
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It's not an eq setting that you can just do with any software like you read somewhere

24-bit Crystalizer
With claims that it "enhances MP3s and movies to sound better than they do on their original CD or DVD," the 24-bit Crystalizer is easily the X-Fi's most-hyped feature. Creative certainly has a history of hyperbole, but the audio world in general seems rife with wild claims. 128kbps MP3s that offer CD-quality audio are one of my personal favorites.

If you don't buy into the hype, the 24-bit Crystalizer is easy to enable and disable within the X-Fi driver control panel. When enabled, audio streams are run through the X-Fi's sample rate converter and upsampled to 24-bit and 96kHz. From there, the Crystalizer attempts to simulate how a sound engineer would go about remastering the audio stream. It's common for studio engineers to compress the dynamic range of instruments to fit into a 16-bit/44.1kHz recording, and the Crystalizer tries to restore some of that lost dynamic range.

Creative says that the Crystalizer is able to extract crisper high frequencies, punchier mid-range percussion, and stronger kick bass hits from lower bitrate recordings, a claim we'll examine in our listening tests. First, though, we thought it would be interesting to examine the Crystalizer's impact on RightMark Audio Analyzer. We fired up RMAA and ran the X-Fi at 16-bit/44.1kHz with the Crystalizer disabled, at its 50% default, and at 75% and 100%. Only a couple of RMAA's tests were affected by the Crystalizer, with the most dramatic difference observed in the frequency response test.



Notice how the Crystalizer pumps up high and low frequency sounds, but has poorer frequency response in the middle of the spectrum. In general, the Crystalizer's impact is consistent across all three percentages, but the same can't be said for its influence on intermodulation distortion.


Intermodulation distortion occurs when a sound card can't accurately reproduce two sounds at the same time. With Crystalizer percentages above 50%, the X-Fi definitely struggles. Perhaps that's why 50% is the default.
Although it's hard to imagine that the 24-bit Crystalizer can divine enough information from an MP3 to make it sound better than the original CD, the technology may have merit, particularly with low bitrate recordings. Our listening tests will shed some light on just how useful the Crystalizer is in the real world.
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http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/soundblaster-x-fi/index.x?pg=3
 
Yes, it may be a bit overhyped and way overpriced, but the Crystallizer is:

1. Not software, it's hardware.
2. Actually does a good job at what it advertises.

Is it enough to justify the price? Heck no. But to bash it and say it doesn't work is ignorance.

Personally, I don't even use it, because all my MP3s are too high quality. It'd just degrade and colorize the audio past my preferences.
 
next, a $120 box from creative to make your VHS tapes beyond blue-ray quality! WOW!!! where will the madness stop?!?! :cool:
 
ajm786 said:
But to bash it and say it doesn't work is ignorance.
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I am not bashing it.
I like to understand things. While I don't know how every little piece of a car engine works and how modern engines may be more efficient than older ones, my little understanding of thermodynamics, physics and chemistry allow me to understand that "in principle" the car engine takes a high-density energy carrier (gasoline) and transforms this energy into heat [...] makes the car go forwards.

As I mentioned in the previous post, there is a certain, limited amount of information encoded in an mp3. Unless the crystalizer uses some quantum effect that I do not know or understand to retrieve additional information from the original source, it cannot extract more information from the mp3 beyond what is contained therein.

Let's say the source signal has a certain amount of information kX, where k is a rational number, greater or equal to one. The mp3 compressed version contains X amount of information, i.e. strictly less or euqal the amount of information in the source signal, which we want to reproduce in the end.

Now I am not exaclty familiar with how mp3's are encoded, but my limted understanding is that the encoder looks at a chunk of the signal does some lossy transformation on it so that the inverse produces something that sounds equivalent to the original. In the end, streaming mp3 would not be possible if a transformation was applied to the complete signal, i.e. the whole track.

At the decoding end, the "run on the mill" decoder takes chunk for chunk, applies the reverse transform to generate an equivalently sounding signal. One could reasonably argue that there may be inter-temporal dependencies that are "kept alive" through the encoding transform, but are lost if decoding chunk by chunk: So if one took the whole mp3 file and decoded it, one could infer additional data bout how the orignal signal sounded.
In short, Sum(t = 0,T, delta t, decode(X(t))) < X
Where T is the lenght of the track, delta t is the size of a chunk and decode ( X(t) ) is the amount of recovered information when decoding the chunk t.
Although this is a reasonable arguement, it would require that the crystalizer has access to the whole file in order to show an improvement over a run-of-the-mill decoder.

Does the crystalizer work with streaming mp3? Or is it just an extremely high-quality decoder?

back to topic:
The device linked in the original post works on the analog output of any soundcard. This means that our run-of-the-mill mp3 decoder has already done its damage. Also, since people are unlikely to be willing to wait until the current track is over before listening to it, any form of fancy inter-temporal decoding is not going to work. How exactly is that external device, with no access to the source that I can think of, going to get more information from the stream than what was originally contained in the mp3?

Now all this is -obviously- based on the precondition that "better" sounding means closer to the orignial. If "better" means "with more effects applied to it" then there is nothing preventing anyone from producing a "better" output.
 
This got the same welcome at Anandtech. IMO, for that money you might as well just buy an X-Fi.
 
MP3 compression is a tricky, fairly complicated process, gaining most of its leverage from taking advantage of basic psychoacoustics, but I imagine there are other lossy type of compression, such as bit dropping, interpolation at the decoding stage and sample rounding (which would explain transient flattening and dynamic range reduction). If you're really interested, check out the source code for the freely available, open source LAME encoder. That should tell you all you need to know about MP3 compression (or at least their interpretation of what MP3 encoding should be). I can't read code for bullocks, so I'm no good there.

Now, what does this device really do? It's a very basic effects box. Judging from what Creative mentioned about "dynamic range loss" (which I can't personally verify, since none of my software will analyze a program waveform and determine the dynamic range), but assuming they're correct about some sort of 3:1 multi-band compression ratio (which it can't be), it has a 1:3 multi-band expander. Akin the the Crystalizer, it also has a basic equalizer, probably two shelving EQs with a fixed gain and fixed frequency on both steps. Now, a good equalizer can sound good, and a good compressor can sound Real Good, but I've never heard good sounding expansion. Unless Creative Labs accurately modeled the SSL 4000 quad buss compressor and forced it to perform expansion, it's going to sound like shit. It's in the digital DSP realm as it is, so it's not going to sound great or musical, unless they're modeling circuitry, which is not something I wouldn't expect CL would ever do.

You're absolutely correct about "reviving" compressed audio into its uncompressed signal. It's not possible. At all. Whatsoever. It's also not possible to attempt to recreate "studio quality" sound, because that term effectively means nothing. Now, it can do some very basic things, attempt to "undo" MP3 compression, but it's half-baked at best, and laughable at worst. Once you squash a 1.5mbps stereo bit-stream into 128kbps, you are fucked for the count.

Now, if someone really digs lame attempts to revive what is already horrid quality garbage (of which 128kbps MP3 is a member), that's great, and they can buy ambiguous $80 devices, but fools they would be for falling for Creative Labs' nonsense marketing gibberish.

EDIT: Fixed some consistency issues.
 
Perhaps this is a bad analogy and I'm probably just restating what other people have already said but...

Go take a 1600x1200 wallpaper to photoshop, resize it to 800x600 and it still looks pretty good. However, you're actually missing 75% of the original information on the file (similar to compressed MP3). Now expand the picture back to 1600x1200, and you'll notice it looks much fuzzier than the original 1600x1200 image looks.

The same principle is there. You take a bunch of digital information, lose a lot of it, and then attempt to get it back as best you can. Perhaps creative's new device allows you to do that better than whatever we've had for decoding MP3's for the last... however many years, but I doubt it...

Whatever the claim is, it's not possible to make it sound like the original CD.

Creative product page:

"X-Fi technology intelligently enhances the highs and lows so you'll hear it all-crisp cymbal crashes, wailing guitar solos, screeching tires and booming explosions."

Intelligently enhances? You mean boosts by a few dB? Sure sounds like an equalizer to me. Studio-quality? What studio? Oh that one in your bathroom? Yea I guess it does sound better than whatever you mixed in there...

They're just trying to make money, which shouldn't come as a surprise.
 
You know it alls can call it an eq or whatever you want. It's not a eq, its been stated what it is.

What I do know, is my X-Fi with the Crystalizer turned on, MP3's sound much better. I am picky, I can't stand MP3 music, especially the low bitrate ones like the 128kbps ones. The Crystalizer takes the slury sound on the highs and fixes it, try doing that with an eq. They sound good enough to listen to with it. It also works wonders on streaming audio from online music stations. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it is a very good improvement on the sound.

But, yaa, you guys all know it's actually nothing and they don't sound better. I wonder how many of you actually have a X-Fi card...

dBTelos said:
IMO, for that money you might as well just buy an X-Fi.
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Exactly.

drizzt81 said:
<disclaimer>I am extremely sceptical when it comes to these devices and claims.</disclaimer>

I have a hard time believing their claim, since I think that information theory is in direct contradiction to any/ all of the "improve sound quality" claims. An encoded mp3 has X amount of information. There is no way to get (X + 1) amount of information from it. Now, Creative could claim that "the regular mp3 decoder" only uses (X - n) information. But if it were, we could compress mp3's more without a loss of quality.

I admit that I have no scientific study to back up my claim that there is a difference in quality between a 192kbps and a 160kbps mp3, but Creative does not have a double-blind study comparing an EQ setting to the "mystical" Crystalizer tech either. And I have less of an incentive to make stuff up, since I do not gain or lose anything from Creative's soundcard sales.
Click to expand...

I can see your point. All I can tell you is it does work, but CL would have been better off not hyping it past the believable point by saying it was studio quality. I have no scientific proof or screenshots or whatever. I wouldn't buy the gizmo either, but the tech is on the X-Fi cards but that alone doesn't make an X-Fi card worth it either, and it won't make this gizmo worth 80 bucks.
 
Haha this product reminds me of those X-Ray glasses they used to sell in old magazines. What a joke and no I don't hate Creative I own a lot of their products (x-fi, zvm, zen v) but they do release a lot of junk
 
Met-AL said:
You know it alls can call it an eq or whatever you want. It's not a eq, its been stated what it is.

What I do know, is my X-Fi with the Crystalizer turned on, MP3's sound much better. I am picky, I can't stand MP3 music, especially the low bitrate ones like the 128kbps ones. The Crystalizer takes the slury sound on the highs and fixes it, try doing that with an eq. They sound good enough to listen to with it. It also works wonders on streaming audio from online music stations. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it is a very good improvement on the sound.

But, yaa, you guys all know it's actually nothing and they don't sound better. I wonder how many of you actually have a X-Fi card...


Exactly.



I can see your point. All I can tell you is it does work, but CL would have been better off not hyping it past the believable point by saying it was studio quality. I have no scientific proof or screenshots or whatever. I wouldn't buy the gizmo either, but the tech is on the X-Fi cards but that alone doesn't make an X-Fi card worth it either, and it won't make this gizmo worth 80 bucks.
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Everyone can tote their X-Fi and Crystalizer all they want. I have owned an X-Fi (lowest cost one). I gave it a chance for roughly 2 months before I sold it and got rid of it.
I went back to my Live! card in favor of it.
All of my MP3s are VBR at the highest quality.
I use WinAmp as my player. 100% flat EQ.
However, I use "Tomassini Sound Solution" along with WinAmp. The absolute best software DSP produced for winamp, ever -- if you know what you're doing.
How can I prove it to you? I can't. I only proved it to myself.
I've been a DJ for 4 years. I've been a professional musician for 11. I've done complete studio recordings, mix-downs, and engineerings in studios from Florida, PA, and New Jersey. They went from ProTools ones, to top-of-the-line rack recording equpiment that would put most data centers down in shame.
To my ears, with my knowledge and background, the Live! + SS is an exteremly powerful and unbeatable combination.
It sounds an incrediable amount better than X-Fi + Crystalizer.
Of course, it can be argued that I could run SS on top of my X-Fi. True, but I'm a ton more happy with this card. With the rest of my stereo equipment, sans my recording headphones, it wouldn't make that much difference. In fact, I doubt it wouldn't be much beyond noticable.
That's my $0.02. I'm still using a creative product in the end. I don't care, honestly. I just cannot justify buying an X-Fi, and into their "make junk sound good" policy.
"Beyond studio quality." is in fact impossible. How does it get better than perfect? What comes off the digi or reel-to-reel in the studio is raw, and untouched. It cannot get "better" than that. Plain simple fact.
And even getting a lossy compressed format to come close to that, is, pratically impossible.

Question for all who've been discussing this: what do you call "studio quality", and what references do you have musically that show you're not simply speaking out of your asses? :eek:

Reason I quoted you, Met-AL, was to ask if you ever even used a serious EQ before? Not a crappy 10 or 12 band one. I mean a true, stereo, 42 band one? If you have, you'd realize getting highs to reproduce how they do when that crappy Crystalizer is on is in fact, very simple.

-Ray
 
Eulogy said:
Reason I quoted you, Met-AL, was to ask if you ever even used a serious EQ before? Not a crappy 10 or 12 band one. I mean a true, stereo, 42 band one? If you have, you'd realize getting highs to reproduce how they do when that crappy Crystalizer is on is in fact, very simple.

-Ray
Click to expand...

Nope, I have not ever used a professional EQ. Only pro equipment I have, if it is or was ever considered pro, is my Carver M1.5 amp. I'll take your word for it, you seem to be good for it. You know what I mean though on the highs with MP3's where it sounds slurry and that aggravates the hell out of me. I can pick out a CD that one of my friends made from a MP3 everytime. MP3's suck, but with the X-Fi, they suck less.

coolxboxgamer said:
roflcopter:


(from creatives site)
Click to expand...

You have to be shitting me? They have that on thier site? They would have been so much better off just saying the Crystalizer helps, but to say that..yaa, LOL.
 
Met-AL said:
Nope, I have not ever used a professional EQ. Only pro equipment I have, if it is or was ever considered pro, is my Carver M1.5 amp. I'll take your word for it, you seem to be good for it. You know what I mean though on the highs with MP3's where it sounds slurry and that aggravates the hell out of me. I can pick out a CD that one of my friends made from a MP3 everytime. MP3's suck, but with the X-Fi, they suck less.



You have to be shitting me? They have that on thier site? They would have been so much better off just saying the Crystalizer helps, but to say that..yaa, LOL.
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First, thanks for not taking me the wrong way. I just re-read my post, and see the open possibility that it can be taken as an attack. It wasn't meant as such. Thank you for not reading into things too much (seems all to common online...).

That graph aggrivates me. I'm half tempted to e-mail them. If only they read e-mail...

I understand what you're saying about the "sucking less". I do suggest that you try the S.S. I spoke of. I'll upload it to my host.

In fact, I encourage everyone to download it, and at least give it a shot. It's a small download, roughly 403KB. I believe it only works with WinAmp. Though, I haven't tried it with anything else.

Link to the installer:
http://thousandwatts.com/SS131.exe

Link to one of my personal configs for it:
http://thousandwatts.com/ss89.dat

If you choose to give it a whack, download the installer, follow the instructions. Then if you wanna use my config, copy the .dat to the default winamp directory. You'll see the other 80 or so dats in there already.

Then, go ahead and go here: http://www.soundsolution.it/ to read how to use it, find other users' configs, and learn how to make your own sound how you want it!

Seriously. Open your ears ;).

-Ray
 
Heres a link to the product page on their site http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=209&subcategory=668&product=15913... just random bs that this thing can get sound quality from mp3 to studio quality... heres a few quotes...

Imagine being in the studio as your favorite artist records a new album. The sound is real and live the way it was meant to be heard.
When that album gets mass-produced on CD, it is compressed to fit the format. And the sound quality of that original performance suffers.
When you further compress the songs into MP3, you'll notice an even greater loss of sound quality. Your favorite album now sounds flat and lifeless.
X-Fi technology breathes life back into the songs. It restores the details, expands the music to surround sound and creates an experience that goes beyond :p studio quality.


my question is how in gods name do u get something from compressed mp3 quality to studio quality, which is better than what the artist even recorded it at....
 
certainly sounds different. Not sure if I like it though. The liveset that I am listening too appears to have more "noise" that I usually did not notice :/
 
coolxboxgamer said:
roflcopter:


(from creatives site)
Click to expand...

feanexperiencedb5.jpg


A friend made that, I thought it was pretty good.
 
Creative Labs said:
When that album gets mass-produced on CD, it is compressed to fit the format. And the sound quality of that original performance suffers.
Click to expand...
That's a lie. You don't have to compress audio to get it on a CD, because the dynamic range of a CD exceeds that of the typical recording medium, 2" magnetic tape. All that's required for me to go from a 2" Studer or Otari machine into a CD-R is an input level knob. I turn the input level knob so that no samples clip and, voila! I've managed to successfully translate the "studio quality" audio to a CD. No compression occurs. At the very worst, if I'm translating from a higher sampling rate, for instance, I only lose very low level audio, at worst, ~-96dB below unity, which is entirely inaudible at any sane monitoring levels, and that's ONLY if the dynamic range of the program is greater than 96dB.

Even if I did have to compress it (which I don't!), a good compressor can really make a recording shine. That's something Creative is missing here.

Creative Labs lies to consumers, yet some of you continue to buy their products. Unbelieveable.

coolboxgamer said:
my question is how in gods name do u get something from compressed mp3 quality to studio quality, which is better than what the artist even recorded it at....
Click to expand...
You can't. End of story.

Oh, and the graph is not hilarious, not amusing, but sickening.
 
Creative's marketing department is the most absurd retarded bunch of people that ever exist. I don't see/know how you can outright LIE to everyone in sight just to make a buck on your product. And the sad thing is that there are people that WILL listen to that marketing!!!

It's just sad, really. We need a really good company to make a sound card solution and counter all the crap that Creative is spewing. The simple fact is that there is no competition, so there is mass stagnation when it comes to this market.
 
vexeus said:
Perhaps this is a bad analogy and I'm probably just restating what other people have already said but...

Go take a 1600x1200 wallpaper to photoshop, resize it to 800x600 and it still looks pretty good. However, you're actually missing 75% of the original information on the file (similar to compressed MP3). Now expand the picture back to 1600x1200, and you'll notice it looks much fuzzier than the original 1600x1200 image looks.

The same principle is there. You take a bunch of digital information, lose a lot of it, and then attempt to get it back as best you can. Perhaps creative's new device allows you to do that better than whatever we've had for decoding MP3's for the last... however many years, but I doubt it...

Whatever the claim is, it's not possible to make it sound like the original CD.

Creative product page:

"X-Fi technology intelligently enhances the highs and lows so you'll hear it all-crisp cymbal crashes, wailing guitar solos, screeching tires and booming explosions."

Intelligently enhances? You mean boosts by a few dB? Sure sounds like an equalizer to me. Studio-quality? What studio? Oh that one in your bathroom? Yea I guess it does sound better than whatever you mixed in there...

They're just trying to make money, which shouldn't come as a surprise.
Click to expand...

but if you resize it in photoshop it comes out a lot better than if you resized it in paint or something :)
 
ajm786 said:
Creative's marketing department is the most absurd retarded bunch of people that ever exist. I don't see/know how you can outright LIE to everyone in sight just to make a buck on your product. And the sad thing is that there are people that WILL listen to that marketing!!!
Click to expand...
Without wanting to step on anyone's toes, but it appears that for "audio enthusiasts" marketing is gospel. I mean, people pay more than USD1000 for audio cables the length of my forearm, thinking that it sounds superior to the USD 500 cable...
 
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