Creative X-FI HD USB Sound Card Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Creative X-FI HD USB Sound Card Review - Creative's latest sound card is an external model that sports a USB interface and boasts high quality digital, analog, and dedicated headphone connectivity options. We tell you if this may be the audio upgrade that laptop users and those of you with no free expansion slots in your desktop PC have been looking for.
 
I've been looking for something equivalent to the Titanium HD but external, why is this so hard to find.
 
I bought one when they first came out, and have logged 1,000+ hrs on it. Sound quality is excellent. I use it exclusively for lossless music. To date, I've only used it with headphones - Sennheiser HD280Pro and HD380Pro. After first installing the software, I too tried to find an EQ, and eventually discovered it was not offered by Creative. I've consequently been using my media player EQ - Winamp on Windows, and Audacious on Linux. Native Linux driver support is great, with usb plug-n-play functional, but there is no Creative software for Linux platform. On Ubtuntu, I have found that I occasionally need to unplug and plug it back in to be recognized. Also, depending on your audio and media player settings, you may have to occasionally go into system audio settings and reset defaults.
 
Have you guys considered evaluating a USB DAC, and seeing how it competes with this? I own Zero DAC/AMP, which I paid $90 for, and I'd be willing to bet it would blow this sound card away (especially driving headphones). An external dac also opens up a world of possibilities if the opamps are easily replaceable. It would be a very curios comparison, and would really open up the selection for anyone looking for an external audio solution.
 
As I noted in the review, this is definitely a USB DAC. It performs the same functions but Creative gave it the ability to do more.

Those other products in the X-Fi HD USB's price range are limited to music listening, this one has much broader usage for an all around PC sound solution.
 
Just curious, how would this compare to a Xonar DG?

Spec wise, the DG only has a SNR of 105 dB compared to this which is 114 dB, but I'm not sure how good an indicator that is. After all, the Realtek ALC889 is rated at 106 dB and I'm sure the DG is better than THAT.

Additionally, the DG does have a headphone amp for up to 150 ohms and I am primarily a headphone user for both music and games.
 
want:

full EAX support (for legacy titles)

high SNR (in the realm of ~120 like currently available "high end" cards)

5.1 or higher analog output (cuz I don't have an amazing speaker set with even better DAC's than the soundcard would)





Someday I hope such a card exists. Very annoying all current offerings fail at least one of those criteria
 
I would rather own an EMU 0404 than this, oh wait, I do own an EMU 0404.
 
I've owned the card for a few months now and it excellent, all outputs are great and the sound quality is amazing. i currently own logitech z2300s which dont do the card justice. Im hoping to upgrade speakers soon
 
The main things this has going for it are the phono input, possible full support for EAX over USB (though I doubt very many people will actually use that), and its low price ($82 is pretty good for what you get).

I have a slightly modded Zero DAC (I swapped out the opamps), I'd like to try replacing it with something smaller but not lose sound quality. I am, however, extremely skeptical of this since its a Creative product. I'm hoping they can't screw up their USB implementation like they have their PCI/PCI-E ones.
 
Funny stuff, I asked about this exact item on this forum about 1-2 weeks ago (think it was in hotdeals subforum here?)

my question was, what is the difference in sound quality (if any) between this USB version of the X-FI HD, and the other (internal) X-Fi HD version????

For the most part, would you say they sound the same? I am looking at the USB for obvious reasons, plus the ability to use it on whichever system i am currently sitting at (laptop or main PC connected to 5.1 sound system)... that's why I ask. hopefully I can get an answer before the link is back and working
 
EarlKeim - just a quick question.

Does the X-Fi HD USB have the ability to work as a stand-alone DAC like the Extigy does?
 
EarlKeim said:
We made sure to point this out in the product specifications.

44.1 is available with digital output.
Click to expand...

I don't deal with MS and codecs enough to fully understand your writeup...

So you had to specify a specific codec in order to play 44.1 content?

What would happen if you were just to plug the thing into a windows box and hit "play" in iTunes? Would it play, or would you have to mess around with codecs to get it to work?

I am considering picking up one of these to supplement my Titanium HD (because I am getting tired of having to unplug my headphones whenever I want to use speakers).

I figure if I just plug one of these in, I can use the Titanium HD for speakers, and the USB unit for my headphones, changing output in the windows audio settings whenever I want to.

Would this be a good solution? I understand from the review I wouldn't be able to use specific drivers and creative software. Are these really necessary for simple listening, or would the unit do well without them?

How about the 44.1 vs. 48khz issue? Since most of what I use it for is listening to 44.1khz audio files and some games, would I notice a significant audio degradation due to having to convert everything to 48khz?

Much obliged,
Matt
 
If you use your sound card to play music by simply going to windows media player and hitting "play" then you wont notice anything, EVER.

Windows handles the Sample Rate Conversion entirely on its own.

The reason people want native 44.1 support is so that there is no software downsampling or resampling performed by Windows itself when it simply uses DirectSound.

If you use Foobar (like we did) and you play a lot of songs of different bit depths and sample rates you can use the SSRC plug in and it will do the playback sampling for you to bring everything to the sample target sample rate for playback using WASAPI or ASIO. This card has no hardware ASIO drivers but ASIO4ALL software based drivers worked very well with absolutely NO problems.

Some players make clicks and pops when it changes these rates. Foobar no problems whatsoever.

Most people do not even notice the resampling honestly. There is a purist crowd that does.
 
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Good review but note that most pros actually record at 24bit but 44 or even 88 not 96 because if your final format is CD 88 is of course easily converted to 44 unlike 96.
Not a bad card as it is multi purpose.
 
shaolin95 said:
Good review but note that most pros actually record at 24bit but 44 or even 88 not 96 because if your final format is CD 88 is of course easily converted to 44 unlike 96.
Not a bad card as it is multi purpose.
Click to expand...

Yes I understood that. Most pros use a considerably more expensive card as well. But some files are being sold at places like HDTracks like you say at 24 bit, 44 and 24 bit 96.

Some of the most expensive internal sound cards from ASUS and HTOmega are not capable of the sampling rates you speak of either and those cards cost two to three times as much as the X-Fi HD USB.
 
I bought this because I like the sound of certain records over their CD counterparts. I agree that the sounds produced by this is better then the average MP3 of modern albums. The software is lacking, however there is other software that will make use of this card. They are not free, so that is a detraction.

For everday use I use the external HD 5.1 XFI with a old but pricey logitech 5.1 system. The sound is very good, but it is not detected as having EAX support in a number of games that have EAX. Battlefield 2 and others say you don't have EAX installed. The addon software for feature support since windows vista did not solve this issue. However it does work very well as a raw 5.1 sound card. Just you would expect creatives bells and whistles to atleast be detected.
 
CoretTrobane said:
EarlKeim - just a quick question.

Does the X-Fi HD USB have the ability to work as a stand-alone DAC like the Extigy does?
Click to expand...

I see it has optical input so it should, that is how I use my EMU 0404 but that costs twice as much as this.
 
EarlKeim said:
If you use your sound card to play music by simply going to windows media player and hitting "play" then you wont notice anything, EVER.

Windows handles the Sample Rate Conversion entirely on its own.

The reason people want native 44.1 support is so that there is no software downsampling or resampling performed by Windows itself when it simply uses DirectSound.

If you use Foobar (like we did) and you play a lot of songs of different bit depths and sample rates you can use the SSRC plug in and it will do the playback sampling for you to bring everything to the sample target sample rate for playback using WASAPI or ASIO. This card has no hardware ASIO drivers but ASIO4ALL software based drivers worked very well with absolutely NO problems.

Some players make clicks and pops when it changes these rates. Foobar no problems whatsoever.

Most people do not even notice the resampling honestly. There is a purist crowd that does.
Click to expand...

Thank you for that!

I may resample a few songs in Audacity and replay them at 48k on my Titanium HD to see if it bothers me. Would you say this would be a pretty accurate representation of what resampled songs on the USB unit would sound like?

I'm by no means a audio professional, and barely even qualify as a audiophile... (more like a low end audio snob, I would say). Not sure if this would bother me or not, but I want to find pout before buying.

I keep being convinced that half of the stuff the entrenched audiophile community complain about is placebo effect...
 
Besides the songs that I posted, I listened to my entire music collection over the month that I spent with the product.

I never noticed any sort of anamoly. I did notice consistency in the sound signature. The huge soundstage compared to onboard is the most notable. The resampling? I cant point to a single issue where I noticed it.
 
EarlKeim said:
Besides the songs that I posted, I listened to my entire music collection over the month that I spent with the product.

I never noticed any sort of anamoly. I did notice consistency in the sound signature. The huge soundstage compared to onboard is the most notable. The resampling? I cant point to a single issue where I noticed it.
Click to expand...

Nice.

Thank you very much. Does the resampling hit the CPU much?
 
No there was never any overhead or spikes in CPU usage whatsoever when using the card to play music, movies, or games. Just like we said in the review, only the console launcher show usage. that was 1%, but it was actually just 10 megs for the program running resident.
 
I read the mobile version of the article and most of the images were from a different review.

Also tapping "full version" link just looped me back to the mobile main page
 
I recently worked on a system for a client where he had a recently purchased X-FI soundcard. Turns out his crashing was because the fucking stupid drivers aren't stable if you have more than 3GB of RAM installed. Way to fucking go Creative, this isn't the first time you've had driver support issue (1 year waiting for Linux drivers for some cars? FUCK YOU). I will never recommend Creative to anyone in the foreseeable future unless they make MASSIVE changes to how they do business.

Besides there are much better alternatives out there.
 
Dylan80 said:
Funny stuff, I asked about this exact item on this forum about 1-2 weeks ago (think it was in hotdeals subforum here?)

my question was, what is the difference in sound quality (if any) between this USB version of the X-FI HD, and the other (internal) X-Fi HD version????

For the most part, would you say they sound the same? I am looking at the USB for obvious reasons, plus the ability to use it on whichever system i am currently sitting at (laptop or main PC connected to 5.1 sound system)... that's why I ask. hopefully I can get an answer before the link is back and working
Click to expand...

From the article, to start with:

At the heart of the X-Fi HD USB's function is Creative's in-house CA0189 USB chipset
Click to expand...

If we go to the link about the USB chipset, here is the first thing we get from Creative:

CA0189 is a highly-integrated, high-performance system-on-chip designed specifically for a range of lower end, cost-sensitive audio products. CA0189 provides more features and performance than any other available solution, at the lowest possible system cost. In addition, due to the use of an industry-standard processor, a wide range of off-the-shelf software is immediately available.
Click to expand...

Note the "lower end, cost-sensitive audio products". This is one of Creative's cut-down chips without a hardware DSP. In comparison, look at the links at the bottom of the page for the Creative CA20K1 (the chip found in PCI X-Fi cards), and CA20K2 (the chip found in the current X-Fi Titanium line of PCIe sound cards).

CA20K1 - Top of the line X-Fi driven PCI audio chip with built-in DSP
Click to expand...

CA20K2 - Next generation top of the line X-Fi driven PCI Express audio chip with built-in DSP
Click to expand...

Both descriptions take pains to note that they have a built-in DSP.

The reviewed product here, and some of Creative's other "creatively" (no pun intended) labeled X-Fi products (mainly the XtremeAudio line) don't use a true X-Fi chip, but instead use the less-expensive CA0110, CA0111, or (in this case, being USB) CA0189 chips, where a lot of DSP functions are done in software. They are fine for audio playback, but they can have higher CPU usage in some scenarios, and Creative also makes it clear in some of their product marketing that products based on the CA01xx chips aren't designed for the gaming market, and instead they recommend products based on true X-Fi processors, the 20K1 and the 20K2.
 
BloodyIron said:
I recently worked on a system for a client where he had a recently purchased X-FI soundcard. Turns out his crashing was because the fucking stupid drivers aren't stable if you have more than 3GB of RAM installed. Way to fucking go Creative, this isn't the first time you've had driver support issue (1 year waiting for Linux drivers for some cars? FUCK YOU). I will never recommend Creative to anyone in the foreseeable future unless they make MASSIVE changes to how they do business.

Besides there are much better alternatives out there.
Click to expand...

I have 16GB of ram. Drivers are rock solid for me...
 
Yeah, that RAM issue sounds crazy to me. I have a 12gb and a 4gb systems both running x-fi cards just fine. Typical internet sensationalism.
 
The older Creative cards has issues when you went beyond 4 gigs of ram. The cards that I used that exhibited that problem were the Audigy 2ZS and Audigy LS. The X-Fi Titanium Fatality Pro and the Titanium HD have never had such issues.
 
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