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Creative has officially anounced X-Fi product variants on Soundblaster.com
- Thread starter thomase
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Donnie27 said:
i tried everythign with bass management, it just doesn't work right.. u feel it (somewhat), but not that great. i even sent emails to creative and did exactly as i was told, still, sub woofer did not perform fully.
BTW, my sub works fine, when i pop in a DVD in my stand alone dvd player, it sound amazing.
but hey, i have a hda now, no need to worry about playing with creative bass setting to try to get something decent out of it.
Elderblaze said:
OpenAL + EAX is not inferior to the original Doom 3 sound engine. Doom 3's sound engine simply does straight pan and volume on 2 or 5 channels. It might directly manipulate the LFE channel, but I'm not sure if they do, or if it is even possible. Anything you have heard about CPU based environmental effects, material-based attentuation reflections and filtering, etc., is old news. id gave up on all that (maybe because they realized it was too hard).
So we are left with the fact that id decided to not use OpenAL/DirectSound3D + EAX in favor of a clearly inferior sound engine. We all know Caramack spent a lot of effort on the graphics engine to ensure that the graphics would look the same regardless of the video card (assuming the card meets the minimum baseline requirements). The same philosophy applied to their audio engine. Here is a quote from Franco De Bonis, audio sales marketing manager at Creative Labs regarding the whole id/Creative issue:
"DoomIII from the outset will not support our EAX gaming technologies and there are a number of reasons for this, the primary of which is that id decided to implement the best audio implementation they could, that would work equally well across the widest percentage of PC systems possible."
He goes on to argue that multichannel wave driver implementations (used by Doom3) vary in quality (SNR, stability, etc.), so you might as well support Creative. Personally, I think he is missing the point. I think the problem is that id (as well as other developers) don't like the idea that the actual samples going to the DAC will vary from soundcard to soundcard when you use DirectSound3D and EAX. Different DirectSound3D implementations use different HRTF filters, different algorithms, etc. The same goes for EAX - different filters, different overal quality for those filters, etc. This means that fundamentally, the developer doesn't have precise control over exactly what bits get sent to the DAC.
I suppose you can make the same argument about full-screen-anti-aliasing implementations differing on different graphics cards, but in this case, the developer doesn't really have much of a choice because its all internal to the graphics card. Other than that, assuming the graphics drivers don't do sneaky tricks to lower image quality and increase performance, the developer can be pretty sure that they will output the same image on any graphics card - frames per second is another issue....
So the problem is that the 3D sound APIs available to developers are not general enough. They leave too much of the implementation to the sound card vendor. I'm not sure if there is a better way to do this however. Perhaps it should work more like modern shader-based graphics. The sound card has a general purpose DSP which can be supplied by one of many different competing vendors. The programmer can load different algorithms onto the DSP. Companies like Creative can supply the developers with intellectual property in the form of a sound engine, or in the form of a collection of algorithms that they can license.
The issue of how to degrade performance when necessary might be more complicated however. When it comes to graphics, people have gotten used to reductions in framerate when the processing load is heavy. Visually, its not that bad either. At least, its not nearly as bad as what would happen if your DSP starts choking and dropping audio samples. That would result in sound cutting out or bad pops clicks and hisses. I'm not aware of any ways to solve the problem of gracefull performance degradation when the DSP is fully-loaded with work. Its kind of all or nothing. Maybe, based on differences in the DSPs performance, they may have to choose to leave some audio streams unprocessed (maybe this is analogous to turning down the texture quality or dropping frames, etc.). This is getting beyond me now...
OK, there is no need to argue.. but we all know that EAX and creative is not a good thing, they control the market. Audio cards should be more like video cards. Video cards have a spec, OpenGL 2.0/DirectX 9.0c that is created and nvidia/ati/matrox/sis/etc.. must abide to this.
Audio should go the same route, I don't like being forced into purchasing creative cards just because it has EAX4 and crap...
Audio should go the same route, I don't like being forced into purchasing creative cards just because it has EAX4 and crap...
mjz_5 said:
isnt that what Driectsound3D and OpenAL are for
edit oh yea AND EAX as much as you audio elteist hate it IT IS a standered
and yes its a shame that creative is the only player in the gaming sound market
but i dont see what the big deal is i have owned a Live! and a Audigy1 both are great cards and imo my sub works fine in games, videos, mp3s, and DVDs on the audigy1
yes im useing a pretty lowend 5.1 setup and it is analog BUT IT WORKS FINE
now as to the price of the cards yea thats getting out of hand the live was 100 when it came out for the cheapest one and audigy was about the same for the 1 2 and 2zs
no the cheapest one is 130 >.> if you want to be pissy about some thing be pissy about this. this is cleary creative taking advantge of place in the market
mjz_5 said:
My Sub worked from Day One but on Day one I had Megaworks 650's (Sats sucked, woofer rocked). When I moved to a Receiver took some tricks but it worked as well. See this thread?
Post #76
If you're not using Creative's speakers or plain old 4.1s, then finding a set that will do any kind of Bass is almost impossible. I get good bass and even blew one up. The Bass Management should be set between 120 and 136Hz, all the way up takes too much middle out of the Sats.
Oh and that crack about Creative vs. id was just repeating what Moofasa said.
Donnie27
mjz_5 said:
So Creative should kill itself and just give something they spent 100's millions of R&D on for Free? Do you think HDA-M is getting its DDL license free? Of course not. EAX will open up when Creative ships X-Fi chips for 3rd party card use. BFG, Rosewood, Gainward and many of the aftermarket players in the Video card maket will be able to build sound cards with it as well. What Creative doesn't want is Intel and AMD processors processing sounds and doing away with ad-in cards altogether. That's why USB lives and Firewire didn't take over the market. Hell, I don't blame them, do you?
HDA-M is louder, I don't equate that with being better, but like yours, that's just my opinion. I can respect your opinion without calling you retard or etc...
Donnie27
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Wow this thread really took off. There are alot of good points, as well as useless ones. Posting at its finest. I know when Donnie is involved that there are going to be some long defensive posts
DaRkF0g said:Wow this thread really took off. There are alot of good points, as well as useless ones. Posting at its finest. I know when Donnie is involved that there are going to be some long defensive posts
QFT ^
Like I said, once again, not until they come out with a PCI Express card. And not from Creative themselves, if their Add-in-board partners are better.
Which was what? I love how you try to personally attack me in every post (even though I wasn't in the current argument). You can continue to post threads trying to defend creative, but at the end of the day, most people I know prefer a HDA-X over an Audigy 2 because it simply sounds a lot better with their receiver. My receiver's dacs > My Audigy 2 ZS's dacs (even with dd compression). I am glad you got "true 5.1" with 6 analog cables and tweaking your drivers, but I'll take one optical cable any day. A lot of people just don't want to go through all the trouble of using 6 cables (not to mention a lot of people don't like Creative's Bass Management, although I am glad it works for you). So while you like your current audio setup, please try to recognize a lot people don't. Plain and simple, you don't need to make personal attacks and long repetitive posts repeating information you have said three times already to make your point. We understand you like creative, you don't have to defend yourself, audio is mostly personal preference. Just because you like one way of doing it, doesn't mean you have to knock the other way. Although I know this post won't accomplish anything, oh well.
Moofasa~ said:
This doesn't change the merit of Donnie's points, which was that he is achieving more realistic gaming audio with a Creative card b/c of EAX and CMSS.
BTW, did you know that CMSS already supports some vertical or y-axis positioning of sounds? It's insane.... In LOTR on my headphones, the ringwraiths sound like they're coming from below and above me...
How many other computer audio implementations can provide that experience?
It does when your comparing it to a card that is used for digital 5.1 through a reciever. I am glad that cmss works amazingly for your headphones, however I have 5.1 audio and I can not stand cmss (I left it disabled and used other methods of upmixing audio like using foobar's channel mixer). Once again (I apologize if I didn't make my post clear) just because a certian audio set up works for you (in this case cmss with your headphones) could suck for someone else (cmss with my 5.1).MadSkills said:
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I cant wait until this card comes out to sort the posts in this thread from fact and fiction
anotherguy159
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EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWDonnie27 said:
TOTALLY MIDBASS!
Sub-woofer. Notice the 'sub.' Means below. Below the frequencies of the woofer. 60hz and below PLEASE.
Shudder.
anotherguy159
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My point is that woofers are not being designed properly. 'Bass Management' is only a cloak-fix.
anotherguy159 said:
yes not all sound setups are the best and most "PC 5.1" setup have under sized subs but like i said not every one spends 500+ or more on a sound setup this is part of the resion im pissed about the priceing on the X-fi i have some friends that work at bestbuy so ill get the 130 one but i think 200+ just for a sound card is insane this a freaking sound card
anotherguy159 said:
Again, look up Bass Management? Bass Management is for the Sats, NOT the Sub. You don't change the Sub Sonic Tones, just its Volume by drainning bass from the sats. This keeps folks from Blowing out their Tiny Sats from too much bass that they (many of those small easy to hide sats) are NOT disgned to have bass anyway. Many Low and Mid-Ranged Receiver makers figure. Bass Mangement, Bass Redirection and Speakers Sizes Setting all try yo do the same thing.
A. You have a set of Mains that doesn't require a Sub
B. Small Sats that needs a Sub.
C. Some Sub help for middle of the road Mains.
Donnie27
DaRkF0g said:Wow this thread really took off. There are alot of good points, as well as useless ones. Posting at its finest. I know when Donnie is involved that there are going to be some long defensive posts
Actaully this is my last post here. It's like I'm held to a different standard. I'm called some pretty lame things FIRST! So to keep from being perminately banned I'm out of here. I hope at least one person found something useful. I hope the threads are smoother without me. To you thomase and madskills keep up the good work and stay honest.
Donnie27
Kristo said:so anyways, I hear that this creative stuff isn't very good and we should all get a HDA right?
ah, the lovely "personal" subject of audio. But please donnie, dont go, its way too funny, please stay
its what i look forward to in the mornings..AznAnarchy99
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TypicalSloan
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Whats up with everyone nameing thier stuff 'fatal1ty'
M
MantisIT
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They think people like us like that guy because of what he "does"...
personally I think he's a douche bag
personally I think he's a douche bag
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MantisIT
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Jodiuh said:
totally.
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