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Home / News / Creative reinvents hi-fi

Creative reinvents hi-fi

And there we were, thinking our audiophile CD players sounded OK. But as it turns out, we were wrong - after all, it is only high fidelity. Ladies and gentlemen, the future of music is - according to Creative - Xtreme Fidelity, and the only thing capable

Here, ladies and gentlemen, are the first carriers of technology that will (according to Creative) replace all conventional hi-fi products in the home. Hmmm. Either this hyperbole signals the creation of something really quite impressive, or Creative feels it has something to make up for.

All the PC sound cards feature the 24bit X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity processing chip, which totes 51million transistors and is apparently 24x as powerful as Creative’s excellent Audigy chip. This means it can take digital music (CD, WMA, MP3) and output sound superior to the original studio recording. Erm…

Creative’s touting the X-Fi output as an audio format comparable in quality to DVD Audio and SACD that (crucially) doesn’t require the purchase of new discs. Assuming it works, that’s got to be a nice thing.

There are 4 models at launch, ranging from the £250 X-Fi Elite Pro with its external I/O module, pre-amp (with high impedance inputs for electric guitars) and 64MB of sound processing RAM, to the £100 X-Fi XtremeMusic, which merely sounds very good. All cards feature CMSS-3D spatialiser technology for accurate recreation of a surround soundstage from 2 speakers or headphones.

All this is intriguing – we look forward to having a listen and relaying our thoughts to you. One thing’s for certain: even if the hi-fi bods like the sound X-Fi makes, they won’t want to keep the name. Ex-Fi is so much more sensible and British.

Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home