I’m just listening to some of my favorite songs on a new Creative Labs X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series sound card. Despite all the trouble with Creative Labs, after the price dropped to a reasonable level, I decided to go for the X-Fi.
As a side effect, I now can download official up-to-date drivers directly from Creative Labs. To get the newest drivers from Creative Labs, you need to have the newest product from Creative Labs. Too bad you need the latest drivers to get anywhere.
On Windows Vista x64, I couldn’t notice any chance in sound quality. The X-Fi sounds exactly like my Audigy 2 in every detail. Also had some blue screens again. I’m not giving up yet, I had planned a recreation of my backup image with Windows Vista x64 SP1 for some time now, maybe this is the right time to do it and get rid of any possible left-behinds of the Audigy driver.
On Windows XP, the installer had some trouble, but after that, the X-Fi sounded very different from the Audigy 2. I haven’t fully made up my mind yet, but I think I can make out more detail in the music than before. I’ll have to see whether this is actually due to better mixing quality or some stupid psychoacoustic music coloring technique (CMSS and Crystalizer are disabled, of course).
It can drive my Sennheiser HD-650 pretty good without any preamp. I’m not listening at a very loud level, but at least on WinXP, the output level is quite a bit higher than what I was used from the Audigy 2.
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