Talk:Sound Blaster X-Fi

message: I added the above labeled section to the main article but had trouble finding references for the two issues mentioned. I KNOW there are more articles on the Internet regarding the terrible MIDI support when you toss in SoundFonts or try to use EAX but I just couldn't find them. The best I could come up with in the interim were the fairly lacking posts on Creative's own forums. I'm putting this here mainly to drum up any effort to find better/more articles on MIDI on the X-Fi. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Azamax (talk • contribs) 00:39, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  References on MIDI Support 

message: I removed the following line:
:While the card is incredibly versitle, keep in mind that this card's features are made for headphones. The card's market is power gamers and most power gamers use headphones beacuse they are cheap and don't bother others (For example they are essential at a LAN party).
It was unsourced and appears totally untrue. There is strong evidence to suggest Creative has also targeted those who use speakers as well and that many of the features also matter when you use speakers, especially multispeaker configs. Furthermore, it also isn't true that the cards market is power gamers. Sure it is one of the key markets, especially given the price of the more expensive cards. But Creative's adverts (such as the claim it will improve your MP3s so they're better then CD quality) strongly and other factors strongly suggest they are also targetting non power gamers (casual gamers and non gamers). Nil Einne 14:17, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: For this feature, whatever sounds good is good, but in general these are nothing more than novelty. 
Firstly I have no idea what it means whatever sounds good is good. Secondly, the idea it's simply a novelty is POV and many would not agree. Indeed it doesn't even really agree with the intro. The article is still in need of serious copy-editing but I think I've removed all clearly untrue or misleading lines Nil Einne 14:21, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for cleaning it up. If I owned one I'd try to work more on this article, but I don't. We've had some very POV additions of late with no sourcing. Especially the "proper setup" section. --Swaaye 18:16, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

text: However, Creative did not mention any Linux OS support in the minimum system requirements that are printed on X-Fi packaging.
Lets be logical here, does NVIDIA state on their boxes that they have the best Linux driver support in the minimum requirements? Hell no, they don't even mention the word Linux even. The list of examples from various hardware vendors can go on and on, so this line was nothing more than a pointless jab at Linux users wanting drivers for this respective card. 142.163.160.196 15:28, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed line 

message: The article mentions XtremeMusic, Platinum, Fatal1ty FPS and Elite Pro configurations of the X-fi cards. I have noticed that the prices of those models vary widely.
What are the differences, if any, between them? Peripherals? Driver-enabled characteristics? Other? Porfyrios 15:57, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: XtremeMusic is just the card. Platinum has a breakout box with it, that fits in a 5.25" drive bay. Fatal1ty has the breakout box and 64MB of, uh... some sort of dedicated buffer to increase the amount of channels / sound quality. (Games need to be programmed with that in mind; Battlefield 2 and some others support it.) The Elite Pro lacks a breakout box, but has a very large external unit instead with more features. It also has the 64MB of RAM. AthlonBoy 15:23, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

text: X-Fi Xtreme Audio (and perhaps some other models) seem to use a sort of crippled X-Fi chip or even no X-Fi chip at all. "Xtreme Audio" doesn't even use the X-Fi drivers but a variation of the Audigy 2 drivers (some sources say it lacks hardware acceleration, which was instead supposed to be a trademark of the X-Fi chipset). It only has some polishing effects supposedly done in hardware, but no hardware polyphony. EpiVictor 16:48, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Perhaps I'm wrong but it's my understanding the XtremeGamer supports the audio/movie mode and the gaming mode but not the recording mode Nil Einne 10:57, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Configuration differences? (Fatality, Xtrememusic et al)

message: :The first function of the card is to modify the frequencies, e.g. raising a frequency of 25 Hz to 26-27 Hz. The second function alters the quantization (bit-depth) of all the input audio (which is usually set at 16-bits) to 24-bit "audio" (to enable higher calculation precision for the Crystallizer effect). For instance, the Crystallizer helps headphones and speakers that have substantial performance penalties to output audio at a better quality of sound. However, because it shifts lows lower, it will likely reduce some of the bass but this will reduce strain on a lower-end speaker and by shifting higher frequencies to even a higher frequency, the audio will appear to have a greater quality of sound.
The whole tuning sense needs clean up but this one is particularly bad... First it gives an example of raising low frequencies. Then it says it shifts lows lower. Also, won't shifting low's lower increase the strain on low end speakers? High end speakers of course should be able to handle this lower bass! Nil Einne 21:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Doesn't make sense 

message: I find this difficult to believe. Given 10,000 million instructions per second for a chip running at 400 megahertz, this would come down to 25 instructions per cycle. 10*10^9 operations per second would sound more reasonable if it were an OMG-wide superscalar SIMD-style DSP, possibly with multiple instruction streams (which wouldn't be that far-fetched given that it's the approach used by contemporary graphics processors). Still, 25 operations per cycle sounds more like the theoretical upper bound of some part of the execution pipeline rather than real-world performance. In other words, marketing material which, in the article, is neither tagged as such nor elaborated. 88.112.3.21 14:48, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You are undoubtedly right that the rating is way off. Creative rated the old EMU10K1 on Live! as a 1000 MIPS DSP. A rather miraculous number there too. --Swaaye 22:27, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  10,000 MIPS? 

message: Most of them are unneccesary.... Article wont be readable soon if every sentance needs backing up with a citation
:The thing is that there are a lot of unreferenced claims (specifically criticisms) here. Most of these are likely true, hence they have not been removed but they still need to be referenced and failing that, should be removed. You might want to read wikipedian policies and take a look at a featured article to get an understanding of what's expected of a good article. The trouble is, a lot of people don't seem to understand that this is an encylopaedia and not in fact a place to try and correct Creative's misleading marketing Nil Einne 08:52, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The bit about "Xtreme Audio" not being part of the X-Fi line was written since a very similar statement is used in the Sound Blaster Audigy and Sound Blaster Live! article about the low-end Live! 24-bit and Audigy/Audigy2 SE: they too, do NOT truly belong to their product lines, feature and hardware wise. So perhaps you want to "correct" those ones too? EpiVictor 12:19, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why are there so many citations? 

message: I moved that particular criticism here, because it's written in a horribly POV way, openly endorsing Creative's competitors, and citing only one post on CL forums as a reference. It is true there are some hardware problems with the X-Fi lines (some, like the infamous SCP, were actually carried on from the Live! and Audigy series), others are more critical and unique to X-Fi (e.g. outright defective firmware  on some batches, resulting in totally unusable cards) but independent backing up for each of these facts is needed. And surely openly endorsing another manufacturer isn't in Wikipedia's style. Here's the removed excerpt:
:====The 'Squeal of Death' problem====
:A great many Creative customers have suffered from an intermittent fault known colloquially as the  Squeal of Death'. This manifests as a high pitched whine or squeal which plays constantly until the computer is rebooted. It manifests on many high performance PCs. The X-FI card appears to be incompatible with NVidia SLI based systems and with ASUS motherboards.
:Creative have failed to fix the problem, directing blame at the motherboard manufacturers. Users report that replacing the Creative card with a rival such as the Razer Barracuda card cures the problem. The 'Squeal of Death' only affects Creative Labs products.
If it's fixed, backed up properly and expanded...then it may go in the article again. EpiVictor 20:52, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Squeal of death' 

message: Wouldn't it be worth mentioning the initial problems with vista and that directSound still does not support EAX-features of X-fi?--213.183.10.41 07:27, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Works even under Windows 7 while I do not know how to check if all fancy features are active. Audriusa (talk) 20:33, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vista issues 

message: The article says that we have to keep all the sound sources at 50% to avoid distortion but some time ago it used to say that the correct setting is 100%. While I happen to prefer it at 50% I'd like to know if it's proved that it's the 0db amplification setting or not. I'd also like to know if "50% for all sources" includes the master volume or if it doesn't have anything to do with the sound sources mentioned above.  89.131.127.92 (talk) 20:27, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Mixer 

message: Xtreme Audio series also has CMSS 3D and Crystalizer Mindlesslysiao (talk) 04:52, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added a line too 

message: Creative has other cards in the X-Fi Titanium line besides the Fatility pair, but their information is missing from this page. 129.82.99.202 (talk) 11:04, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other Titanium cards besides Fatility 

message: Uhmmm, x-fi series cards are marketed as 24 bit devices. As far as I know a 24 bit depth allows for a dynamic range of 144 dB. Yet the x-fi xtremegamer seems to be able to handle only 109 dB, which is slightly richer than the best 16 bit stream. Am I getting something wrong? 81.101.19.67 (talk) 19:33, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  24 bit? 

message: re:
:Yes there is a patch for ALSA that you can find in 2.6.31 but it isn't working with the PCIe version that has a ca0110-IBG chip. (Sep 2009)
re:
:On May 15 2009 after some communications with Creative,Takashi Imai a developer of suse finally got a mergeable version of their X-Fi driver.The patch is now merged into sound-unstable GIT tree topic/ctxfi.Sound Blaster X-Fi#Linux support
re:
the suse developer name is Takashi iWai not Imai.(10-10-2009)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Guillemsola (talk • contribs) 14:28, 10 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Linux driver support 

message: The following sentences sound very commercial to me, shall we remove them as there's no source for such point?
"The audio processor on X-Fi was by far the most powerful at its time of release [...] X-Fi's resampling engine produces a near-lossless-quality result, far exceeding any known audio card DSP available at the time of release [...]"  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tfpsly (talk • contribs) 05:37, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed, my friend. The article needs to be thoroughly revised to remove the commercial blurb that plagues it, the irrelevant blurb on software features, and sections such as the one on how to resolve crackling issues and similar stuff that look like out of a support forum. --uKER (talk) 00:46, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Commercial spam?