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

Spooony said:
^this lol
You can use a million dollar soundcard or a cheap 5 usd cmedia card bc2 will sound exactly the same. Its done it 16bit processing gets done by the cpu then it gets send to the card for conversion.
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ding ding ding, i saw improved sound quality with the higher quality DAC on the Titanium HD. you spend a lot of time on this forum with a pompous, sarcastic undertone and then proceed to spew out bullshit. give it a rest.
 
Anyone experiencing disappearing sound with the Titanium HD and a P67 motherboard? I have an Intel DP67BG and I am using Windows 7 x64 SP1 and every few days I have a problem where I have no sound when I start my PC. I also get a message saying that there is no Creative Labs hardware detected when I try to open up the Creative Console. I have to reinstall the Titanium HD driver to get the sound working again.
 
i haven't had any issues like that with my Titanium HD and P67 mobo. does it happen randomly, or only when you attempt to switch modes? there are several posts in this thread about people seeing the sound drop when trying to switch modes.
 
I never switch modes or use headphones but I bet it's just the same problem as others are experiencing. There must be some driver or software conflict causing this problem. I submitted a help ticket to Creative Labs so I will wait and see what they say. I used this same sound card with an AMD motherboard for weeks and never had any problems. I thought it might be caused by my overclock (I had my 2500K at 4.5GHz) so today I have gone back to default settings, even though I still think it's just a driver problem.
 
wasabipeas said:
I never switch modes or use headphones but I bet it's just the same problem as others are experiencing. There must be some driver or software conflict causing this problem. I submitted a help ticket to Creative Labs so I will wait and see what they say. I used this same sound card with an AMD motherboard for weeks and never had any problems. I thought it might be caused by my overclock (I had my 2500K at 4.5GHz) so today I have gone back to default settings, even though I still think it's just a driver problem.
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Interesting.

There does seem to be a number of P/H67 users having problems , but it does not seem to be affecting all P/H67 users, which is interesting. In the flip side, I do not recall hearing of any non P/H67 users having this problem.

Maybe there is some motherboard manufacturers integrated third party part that is causing an incompatibility for some people?
 
I found another thread at the CL forums with people complaining about the same problem I have, and they all had SSD drives too. I have an OCZ SSD as my boot drive. I wonder if the problem is a combination of SSD, Windows 7 x64 and Intel P67?
 
wasabipeas said:
I found another thread at the CL forums with people complaining about the same problem I have, and they all had SSD drives too. I have an OCZ SSD as my boot drive. I wonder if the problem is a combination of SSD, Windows 7 x64 and Intel P67?
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Interesting. SSD's would certainly not have been my first thought, but its certainly a clue..

I would suggest posting about this in Creative's support forums, maybe if you get enough people discussing it their engineers will look into that potential conflict.
 
I'm able to switch modes with no issues whatsoever.

OCZ SSD as boot drive.
AMD 890FX board
1090T CPU

Win 7 x64
 
DisrupTer911 said:
I'm able to switch modes with no issues whatsoever.

OCZ SSD as boot drive.
AMD 890FX board
1090T CPU

Win 7 x64
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The theory is (and it is only a theory right now) that all three of the following are required in order to experience the problem:
  • Intel P67/H67 chipset
  • Windows 7 (possibly 64bit)
  • SSD

Your report is valuable in narrowing down the field to affected and unaffected hardware.
 
Zarathustra[H];1037204878 said:
The theory is (and it is only a theory right now) that all three of the following are required in order to experience the problem:
  • Intel P67/H67 chipset
  • Windows 7 (possibly 64bit)
  • SSD

Your report is valuable in narrowing down the field to affected and unaffected hardware.
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I do have all of the following and i do have all the issues.

P67, SSD, Win7 64
 
Please post in this thread, we need to bring this to Creatives attention.

http://forums.creative.com/t5/Sound...hing-audio/m-p/575241/highlight/false#M160457

There is someone in the thread who got this response from creative labs.

"One of the new features of both VISTA and WINDOWS 7 is the ability to set your sample rate in the OS. This is a part of the AUDIO system you can access in the sound section of control panel.
You can get to it by clicking on to the sound ICON:
Once you are there click on, (Properties), then go to the, (Advanced), tab. There you will see a dropdown menu were you can set the sample rate of you audio, and test it.
It needs to be set to 48 Khz
It is recommended that if there is a check in, (Exclusive Mode), that you remove it."

I have always had it to 48Khz but i had the exclusive checked, im going to uncheck it when i get home to see if it makes any difference.
 
So far, I've tried mine on a P45 and a 680i board with no SSD, both running W7 x64 and have had absolutely no issues at all.

Hopefully the P67 users can get a UEFI update or a driver patch to remedy these issues.
 
Zarathustra[H];1037204878 said:
The theory is (and it is only a theory right now) that all three of the following are required in order to experience the problem:
  • Intel P67/H67 chipset
  • Windows 7 (possibly 64bit)
  • SSD

Your report is valuable in narrowing down the field to affected and unaffected hardware.
Click to expand...

I have all of the above without issues....
 
Does anybody know if Creative will come out with some sort of expansion card for analog surround like ASUS did for the Essence ST (daughterboard being the H6)?
 
And that site did not take the card apart like we did............:D


Did you guys notice, that the article mentioned hooking the card up to a receiver with an optical cable........?

They bypassed the OpAmps and the Digital to Analog converter on the card. How is that for journalism?
 
EarlKeim said:
And that site did not take the card apart like we did............:D


Did you guys notice, that the article mentioned hooking the card up to a receiver with an optical cable........?

They bypassed the OpAmps and the Digital to Analog converter on the card. How is that for journalism?
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yeah I don't think they realize if you're doing digital you might as well get the old Ti Fatalyty or however you spell it. This shines with good cans :)
 
anyone got this error with the card Device not found and the console don't want to open. But the device is installed with the latest drivers. The the cs2aud or something like that shows not signed in dx. That's a xp file ain't it?
 
Spooony said:
anyone got this error with the card Device not found and the console don't want to open. But the device is installed with the latest drivers. The the cs2aud or something like that shows not signed in dx. That's a xp file ain't it?
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can't find the link, but it's a known issue with xi-fi cards disappearing with SSD's would you believe. Have a look with on the creative forums
 
cliche said:
can't find the link, but it's a known issue with xi-fi cards disappearing with SSD's would you believe. Have a look with on the creative forums
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you got to be kidding me lol. That's the last thing I would bloody suspect. Thanks man I owe you one
 
Spooony said:
you got to be kidding me lol. That's the last thing I would bloody suspect. Thanks man I owe you one
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yeah I would never have expected it to be an SSD issue, also win 7 64 bit has made it more prevalent
I take it you have an SSD ?
 
I've never had an issue with my AMD+ SSD+ Win7 PC and creative software with my xfi titanium hd
 
Tried a third motherboard, P8P67 Evo, problem still persists. Creative is just being ignorant and lazy, they wont acknowledge the issue, if anyone here has a close tie to someone from creative, bring this to their attention please. Thanks.
 
Update: A new beta driver was released, and it does not fix the issue many of us have been having.
 
Yesterday i replaced my SB X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Serier 7.1 Sound Card which was working perfectly fine with the new Titanium HD, i did a fresh install of Windows 7 and deleted my partitions so started completely from scratch. Installed the drivers that it came with, had no sound at all. Updated the sound driver to the latest one 3.00.1004 and still no sound. I'm using the optical cable for 5.1 as i have no choice so i thought as i wasn't using opitical before maybe it doesn't work but then when i uninstalled the creative drivers windows installed it's own driver and i all of a sudden had sound, but it must have been using the onboard sound on my motherboard. Then i tried installing the latest Creative driver first instead of the one from the CD provided and still no sound. I spent 6 hours trying everything i could think of, on Creative's website it mentioned trying to change the frequenzy sampling rate to match your speakers, well i went through all of them in the settings and still no sound. I've even taken the sound card out and reinstalled it again, still no sound. I'm really lost and could appreciate some help. Do you think the sound card could be faulty?

In device Manager the sound card shows up so it is being reconised, also on the opitical at the back of the card it glows a red colour.

The specs of my machine are:

Logictech Z5500 5.1 Speakers

Windows 7 Home Premium (orignal not a copy!)

Gigabyte P67A-UD7

Intel i7 2600k 3.40Ghz

Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR PC3-15000C9 1866Mhz

ATI Radeon 6970

Also i've updated Windows 7, but to be honest i had no sound before the updates and no sound after installing all the updates and uninstalling the drivers and then reinstalling them. I feel like i'm a beaten man and it's so annoying, any advice PLEASE?

When i go home tonight i will double make sure that in my bios the onboard sound is disabled and if not i'll disable it to see if that makes a difference, what about using another PCI slot but with that said i'm using the same slot as when i had the x-fi Fatalty and that worked fine.
 
Does the analogue out work? Is the optical out the default device in Windows sound playback properties? Does the same menu show activity on the optical out (it's got a meter on the right I think)?

I've only used the analogue outs myself so hopefully someone with more experience will chime in.
 
Zarathustra[H];1037203285 said:
Interesting. SSD's would certainly not have been my first thought, but its certainly a clue...
Click to expand...

I have the same problem athough I do not have an SSD installed and I'm using a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCI-E, not the HD version.

I have used the Sound Blaster X-Fi on my old Opteron/XP system for four years with no problems changing modes. On my new P67 system I've just build, with new Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium card, if I change the mode or the encoder setting, I lose all sound and have to re-boot to get back sound. Have used up-to-date drivers and Beta drivers. My specs in my sig, unsing Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit.

Gonna try turning off application exlusivity for the card and see if it helps.
 
Please ignore my post, sooooo embarrassing, user error (hands up). Nothing wrong with the hardware or drivers.

As i didn't have to do this before when i was using my Fatal1ty card without using optical i honestly didn't give it a second thought but i had to go to the encoder settings from the creative audio software and change to Dolby or DTS, it was switched off so i chose Dolby at first and then my Logictech Z5500 5.1 LCD Panel changed to the Dolby sign and then there was light (sound). I felt very stupid indeed.

Now the sound is GREAT but i do have one other probably silly question, i use my rig mainly for games and movies, for movies probably better if the encoding is DTS but what setting should i choose for gaming? Should i use Dolby Digital or DTS?
 
EarlKeim said:
And that site did not take the card apart like we did............:D

Did you guys notice, that the article mentioned hooking the card up to a receiver with an optical cable........?

They bypassed the OpAmps and the Digital to Analog converter on the card. How is that for journalism?
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Um, on Page 4 of the review, you talk about watching movies with the speakers hooked up via S/PDIF. Doesn't that mean you were as "bad" as PCG in your testing?

The price of this has finally come down to an almost acceptable $137 at Amazon, but I'm still leary of pulling the trigger on this because of the oddball connectivity:

* My old, but still good, Logitech Z-580 5.1 speakers can accept analog, S/PDIF and optical inputs. I used to run my old nForce2 mobo via S/PDIF to the speaker pod and it would decode the Dolby or DTS and show in the display what it's doing. I'm currently running the mobo's RealTek HD sound via analog.

* I have some decent headphones - AKG K240 Studio, Sennheiser HD280 Pro, AT ATH-910 Pro - so if I had to fairly permanently attach a pair to the back of the computer, I could, though I'd prefer not.

* I don't do critical music listening (I mostly stream Pandora as background noise), but do record music which does require quality sound. However, I currently plug my cans into a Lexicon Lambda audio interface, so the PCs audio is irrelevant at this time.

* I play games, but not competitively, so I don't need to hear people sneaking up on me like I used to with BF2142 and my old X-Fi Fatal1ty model, which got pulled when I went SLI and the cards blocked the PCI slot.

Considering my setup and usage, do I even NEED this card? It really sounds like a PITA and if you don't listen via headphones, you don't get the benefits of the deluxe components. Quick, helpful replies would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
pattybart1023 said:
looking for a cheap audio card with a digital output. optical or coax. please help thanks
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If you are going optical just use your onboard. Will sound exactly the same as an X-Fi... X-Fi may buy you some CPU cycles back but they ain't cheap.
 
I just bought the X-FI Titanium HD a few days ago. Previously I was using a Titanium Fatal1ty. Frankly, I'm blown away by the difference when using my PC350s. I've had these headphones for over a year and I was always a little disappointed with the sound I could get through my computer, but all that has changed dramatically. My Shure SRH840s also sound incredible. This card was worth every penny.

Incidentally I haven't had any issues setting it up properly. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit. I removed all creative software and drivers before installing and it worked seamlessly. I also installed most of the software that came with the new card, except for the sound samples.

The one thing I'm not sure about is why the headphone mode even exists. As far as I can tell all it does is mute and deaden the sound terribly, I have it turned off at all times.
 
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I was looking at the review for this product and it mentioned that it has 5 year warranty. (page one) Which is false.

I looked it up on creative.com, sure enough, the warranty is creative's standard ONE year warranty.
http://support.creative.com/warranty/welcome.aspx?pid=19749&cid=1&h=15

The limited warranty for the Product is for twelve (12) months from the date of Your purchase ("Warranty Period"). The Warranty Period will be extended by each whole day that the Product is out of Your possession for repair under this warranty.
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I know Newegg.com states it has 5 year warranty, which is also false. Newegg.com does not always list the correct specs. (sorry Newegg)
 
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That is what it looks like on a lot of people's systems. It is one of the easier ways to tweak the card. That is gaming mode in the picture. There is also Audio Creation Mode and Entertainment Mode.
 
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