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guru3d has review of Auzentech X-Plosion sound card
- Thread starter Uncle Jim
- Start date
AFAIK, it's nothing big because it won't make me swap out my x-fi. Also, it's probably not half as good for gaming because it lacks the creative cards' sirround sound enhancement features. The only prospective customers that this product will drawn in probably are people who don't use their computers as toys and do real audio work or the equally niche market of creative haters.
FingerSlut
Gawd
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I just picked this up today. It completely murders the on-board crap. I have not had my stereo receiver say Dolby Digital Surround on my computer spdif in 3 years since I had nforce2.
I'm very pleased with the sound, clarity and seperation out of my home theater. Fantasitc product. Also, no bulky drivers or bullshit. Theres an option to only install drivers in the install, its the first thing you see.
I'm very pleased with the sound, clarity and seperation out of my home theater. Fantasitc product. Also, no bulky drivers or bullshit. Theres an option to only install drivers in the install, its the first thing you see.
SJetski71
Fully [H]
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These three markets you highlight are certainly large enough to support this product, and then some.CompuGeek said:
Interesting sound card imho, hope it spurs development of even better products.
What Creative surround sound features? Upmixing? The X-Plosion does it.
Would it be nice if it were entirely hardware processed? Sure. But here's the fact-of-the-week: to do DTS Live with an X-Fi is a $220+ affair. The X-Plosion? $120. The sound quality suffers, but the features are there and at a good price point.
DDL and DTS encoding seem to be no trouble for most CPUs to handle, so I'm not sure I understand why you're demanding that it be processed entirely on the card's hardware. According to what Guru3D has discovered, doing DTS encoding on the X-Plosion seems to lag behind the X-Fi by about 10% in FEAR and ~14% in Episode One. Not shabby considering the workload - and certainly not "worthless". The lack of OpenAL support is a drag, though.Moofasa~ said:
Would it be nice if it were entirely hardware processed? Sure. But here's the fact-of-the-week: to do DTS Live with an X-Fi is a $220+ affair. The X-Plosion? $120. The sound quality suffers, but the features are there and at a good price point.
phide said:
Well from the review linked by the original poster, the X-Plosion is about ten fps behind the X-Fi when using DTS encoding in each game (that's not something most gamers will shrug off, ten fps can easily be the difference between enabling AA in a game or not).
Also, the review picked out two ideal games to showcase the X-Plosion. Any Source based games should bring out the best for the X-Plosion since Valve developed their own DirectSound3D audio engine that is very compatible with various ranges of sound cards. Not that this is bad; I still feel that Source has one the best sounding/positioning engines currently. Fear actually uses a less compatible DirectSound3D audio engine. The reason the performance hit isn't great is because the X-Plosion doesn't have to process the extra EAX 4 effects done in Fear (multiple reverbs, occlusion, and obstruction). It only processes the basic audio effects and positioning.
Now for the not so ideal games. OpenAL is the future for games (I can't remember the last recent game that doesn't use OpenAL). This is what kills HDA's products (and many onboard audio solutions too). Since X-Plosion doesn't natively support OpenAL, it needs to use an OpenAL->DirectSound3D wrapper (which is not at all light on the CPU) to be able to process the audio engine. While the performance hit on DirectSound3D games are bearable (and I'll admit, the fps hit in Source and Guild Wars were still playable after scaling back a few video settings), on OpenAL games it's disgusting. While I have only personally have/tested three OpenAL games (CoD, BF2, Quake 4), all of them have had significant fps hits while using the X-Mystique (and I game at 1600x1200). I actually had to drop CoD and Quake 4 down to 1280x960 to make it playable (and it was still slower than an Audigy 2 ZS or X-Fi at 1600x1200).
So I think my original comment still stands, people aren't going to spend $120 on a card that forces them to greatly scale back on other options (resolution, aa, af, shadows, etc) on new OpenAL based games (which should be most of them) just to get compressed surround sound. This card is simply worthless to the average gamer.
Add in that this card can't do bit-perfect playback drives me crazy (couldn't pass through any of my DTS 44.1khz files, even when I turned DDL off and set the output to "44.1khz"). I guess it resamples everything to 44.1khz, even material that's already in 44.1khz.
The only people who should even consider this card is people who have a receiver without analog inputs (which become rarer and rarer by each passing day). I have no idea why anyone would compress their audio data when they could just use their analog inputs on their receiver to get uncompressed audio.
I know I am coming off as a Creative zealot, but trust me, do you think I like spending $250 on an elite pro?
I think the HDA cards could be fantastic cards if they only supported native hardware acceleration for OpenAL, DirectSound3D, and DDL/DTS:C. They have their markets, but gaming isn't one of them.Points taken. Of course, the situation improves when doing an "apples to apples" comparison via analog outputs, but sound quality is still something of an issue in this domain. While the X-Plosion fares okay, the crosstalk result is pretty appalling. Hopefully HDA will get on OpenAL support for their next card - which seems to have already been in the pipeline for a long time.Moofasa~ said:
I've personally vowed never to buy another Creative Labs product so long as I have breath, so I'm really looking like hell to find some other options. I may have to bite the bullet and pick up a professional-level card.
Concerning resampling, it seems like every card does it, with no real way to disable it from doing such. Aggrivating as hell - and I thought the X-Plosion was the exception.
Moofasa~ said:Add in that this card can't do bit-perfect playback drives me crazy (couldn't pass through any of my DTS 44.1khz files, even when I turned DDL off and set the output to "44.1khz"). I guess it resamples everything to 44.1khz, even material that's already in 44.1khz.
The card does do bit-perfect output. Note that any DTS / DD streams will be 48khz, thus wouldn't work correctly anyways when you set output to be 44.1.
If you have any 44.1 khz DTS files, I'd be happy to hear of them, but I know that at least all DTS-CD's and DVD's are sampled at 48.
BO(V)BZ said:
Download some for yourself
Just rename the DD/DTS .wav file to .dts (or use k-lite codec pack with media player classic and it will automatically find the DD/DTS file in the .wav).
If a card has true bit-perfect playback capabilities, it will be able to send the DTS/DD file over the SPDIF to your receiver, which will be able to decode it perfectly (the X-Fi can do this). If not, resampling destroys the DTS/DD file and your receiver will not be able to decode the file, thus you will hear garbage sounds (usually high pitched).
jester1176
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without OpenAL support, it might as well be an onboard audio solution as far as Vista is concerned.