Creative Labs Express Sound Card

I heard this causes the headphone jack noise problems. I also heard it's not better and a waste of money. Should I get it?

 

causes? isn't this supposed to fix it?

where did you hear it causes it?

 

I heard it fixes it, as well.

 

I say it's a waste of money. That adapter that gives you the 5.1 outputs doesn't even seem to exist. I got one of these guys for less than half the price: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829126101

Also, if all you want is to clear the buzzing, somewhere in these forums I saw that someone bought some sort of filter that fixed it, and I imagine that would be cheaper still.

I think creative as a company seems to be full of crap. How can you price a sound card at $200 and not be full of it?

 

Because some people have spend $1500 on a pair of tower speakers, $700 on a center channel, $700 on rear channel, and have two 12" TC-3000 subs. Obviously I'm not talking about myself, but I've watched movies on a setup like that and the guy was definitely not going to take any chances that his sound card would put out anything less than utter perfection.

I mean, you could say the same thing to nvidia:

How could they have a GPU for $800? Because someone will buy it

 

I really doubt their $200 sound card produces sound quality that is any better than, say, a $50 sound card. Sound cards just don't impress me much. Video cards, on the other hand, do impress me. With Nvidia's top of the line card, you know exactly how much more performance you're getting than the next one down. For $200 I'd expect my sound card to offload physics calculations from my cpu. I'm going to take a computer engineering course on Nvidia's G80 processor next spring. Maybe by then sound blaster will have a similar course.

 

I think you're missing something here. The fact that you obviously don't give a crap about your SQ as much as others.

The people who buy that card are the same people who buy an iPod, send it to these people and spend $250 to turn it into a direct line out and then hook up a portable amp just to run their HEADPHONES on the go. Do you see what I'm getting at? Trust me, Creative knows there is a market for that, and just because you don't belong to it, doesn't mean it's retarded.

 

well the X-fi series can offload audio processing from the CPU.
Thats not the point, yeah you have benchmarks for video cards with etc etc FPS.
Sound quality on the other hand is very subjective, I'm certain an audiophile can easily tell an expensive sound card have much better sound quality. If you are the type of person that can easily tell the difference between a FLAC file and MP3, or digital optical I/O vs regular jacks, a $200 soundcard is probalby a good idea.

I can't tell the difference, so I'm using a $20 soundcard lol.

 

$250 X-fi

Also, if you look closely at that card, it has 64MB of RAM and FAR FAR FAR more features than you will ever find on the cheaper cards. The SQ of that card is probably the same at that of the $130-$150 version, but it has a completely different feature set and therefore a very specific purpose.

 

Wait, wait, wait. So is it worth getting the Creative card over the sound blaster one?

 

There are also audiophiles that will tell you a $1000 power cord makes their stereo sound better than with a $500 power cord.

Are there any tests that show the x-fi to have better sound quality than their previous generation cards?

 

The only test I need is that I heard the difference between my old Audigy2 ZS and the new X-Fis (though I don't have an X-fi myself because I knew I was going to sell my desktop). You can't necessarily "judge" sound cards in the same way as other things, just like you can't judge speakers on paper. If you look at a lot of high end speakers, they have the same tech specs. 20-20K Hz, 100-200w (sometimes more), and often times have the same excursion. However, they all have their own unique sound. Some are more attenuated to highs, some more to lows, some can be "boomy", some can be all midbass, some might even sound muddy (*cough* BOSE *cough*).

I don't have anything to prove to you here because you don't want to hear it. If you're happy with your audio, leave it at that. However, I have heard the difference, I know it's there. For a notebook, however, I wouldn't bother. I'll never extensively use it with a high powered system as I'll be in a dorm, and I have other means of playing music that doesn't involve my laptop.

 

Argh! should i get the creative or the sound blaster???

 

dude...what are you talking about?

creative makes the soundblaster...

 

I meant the software one or the sound card one.

 

When I said tests, I obviously didn't mean factory tech specs. I meant lab tests which determine useful things like frequency response and signal to noise ratio. There is nothing your ear can notice that can't be seen on a waveform.

The software one is completely useless. If all you want is to eliminate the buzzing, the sound card is pointless as there are cheaper and equally effective ways of doing so. I would suggest waiting until you get the computer and decide then if you have a buzzing problem or not before you start spending money to fix it.

 

I've never bothered to look. I'm sure you could find one somewhere, but there really isn't much point in it.

 

Why do you say that? It should be interesting to see if the sound quality really is better or not.

 

Dude I gotta tell ya, if you don't mind saving a little more money, I'd go with just the High Definition 2.0 audio.

This Creative Labs Express Sound Card is supposedly an "X-Fi" card. And judging by the name of it, it goes in the Express Card slot, so it's not internal.

I would save my money and wait to see what else becomes available later on that you can hook up thru the Express Card slot, or maybe thru USB. That's what I'm doing to save a little more $.