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Soundblaster X-FI HD - great surprise :)

tomek

tomek

pfm Member
I am using since few days this nice usb soundcard with my notebook on my desk and i am really surprised with very good sound quality.

http://www.soundblaster.com/products/Sound-Blaster-X-Fi-HD.aspx

Sound is so good, i just can't believe it is possible for the price.
Headphones output is great and it even has one phono input with 24/96 resolution, but i didn't tested it yet.
Bass is very powerful, sound is just warm and natural.
 
Agreed, I use one in my main system and it was good enough to reveal differences in my amp ABX.

I want to do a DAC bake-off at some point, I wouldn't bet against the X-FI HD doing rather well.
 
I have a creative fatality titanium or something equally as daft sounding, agreed they sound much better than the on board HD audio. It has optical out too if I ever need it.
 
Careful about "X sounding better than HD audio", especially when using headphones. I use a battery powered headphone amplifier (PA2V2) to show people that all it takes is just a bit of (cheap) amplification to make a "night and day" difference with onboard soundcards.
There's no denying that anything else is going to be better in terms of DA conversion, but the difference between integrated soundcards and ie. SoundBlaster isn't as significant as it used to be when SB Live! came out and AC97 with (relatively) horrible noise levels was everywhere.

edit: I'd bet HD audio + my amp would still beat the X-Fi HD on high impedance / low sensitivity headphones, I've never seen a reasonably powerful USB-powered headphone amp.
 
I only use headphones on the pc for gaming but the discrete sound card sounds much better than onboard audio.
 
Careful comparing headphone outputs, many PC audio sockets are still 100 Ohm output resistance.
It would be great if Creative would work with Ubuntu etc to get a stable driver. I just tried my old Audigy 2NX on Ubuntu 13.10 and got a crash report about too many sources
 
davidsrsb said:
Careful comparing headphone outputs, many PC audio sockets are still 100 Ohm output resistance.
It would be great if Creative would work with Ubuntu etc to get a stable driver. I just tried my old Audigy 2NX on Ubuntu 13.10 and got a crash report about too many sources
Click to expand...
A friend of mine has Audigy 2NX and it didn't work for me on linux out of the box, despite having quite standard UAC1/UAC2 interface, so I set on figuring it out. It's been several years since then, but if I remember correctly, it had the same issue as Arcam rPAC -- if something tried to read its mixer levels, the card would "brick" until it was powered down. My guess is a firmware bug (based on weird behaviors of the rPAC).

Anyway, it can be worked around by preventing mixer read/set from happening, but not with PulseAudio, which does so implicitly. Unfortunately, it's not just udev or alsa scripts, newer kernels touch mixer as well, so one has to either revert that commit or create a new "quirk" section for 2NX in sound/usb/mixer_quirks.c. Either way, building a custom kernel is probably necessary as Ubuntu doesn't build snd-usb-audio as a module.

So there's that. If you're a little "tech savvy" and want to explore things, you can make it work. Perhaps my crude kernel patching tool for 13.04 could be used (it's built on the official Ubuntu instructions for building a custom kernel).

In the end, I found the 2NX to be vastly underpowered in terms of headphone output, even the builtin Intel HD seemed to be better using AKG K240.


edit: As far as Creative goes, it doesn't surprise me. It always had poor driver support for SoundBlaster on Windows (and IIRC even on DOS) and extremely poor Windows driver support for the E-MU series.
 
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