Next, a poly phase Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter is used to produce a sampling rate four times greater than the desired output sampling rate. First, the sampling rate of an incoming audio stream is doubled. The SRC is actually made up of 256 individual sample rate converters, all of which tackle sampling rate conversions in the same manner. Much of the X-Fi’s muscle ripples through a sample rate converter (SRC) that Creative claims pushes over 7000 MIPS. The X-Fi’s processing power is divided between five internal units: the sample rate converter, digital signal processor, and mixer, filter, and tank engines. Manufactured using 0.13-micron process technology, the chip has roughly half the number of transistors of an Athlon 64 and more than 11 times that of the Audigy, so it’s quite a leap from previous generations. Read on to see how the XtremeMusic fared and why the X-Fi is such a bold departure from audio chips of old.īefore exploring where the XtremeMusic fits into the Sound Blaster Xtreme Fidelity family, let’s take a moment to explore the 51-million transistor X-Fi audio chip that’s at the heart of Creative’s new Sound Blasters. Modesty has never been one of Creative’s strong suits, but could there be something to all the X-Fi hype? To find out, we subjected the most affordable X-Fi offering, the $110 Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, to a punishing battery of performance, quality, and listening tests against competitors ranging from M-Audio’s Revolution 7.1 to integrated “Azalia” High Definition Audio. The X-Fi also upgraded EAX to support up to 128 simultaneous hardware-accelerated 3D voices, and promised to enhance compressed audio playback to sound better than the original CD. A radical departure from architectures of old, the X-Fi arranged its on-chip components around a pipelined audio ring with a whopping 4096 internal audio channels. Then, in May of this year, Creative surprised many by announcing an all-new Xtreme Fidelity audio processor loaded with 10,000 MIPS of processing power-24 times that of the Audigy chip it would replace.
VIA challenged Creative’s dominance of the market with various respins of the Envy24, and although they were generally well-received, those chips’ lack of hardware acceleration for 3D audio ultimately limited their appeal. Creative had bought out Aureal and Sensaura, and seemed content to issue only incremental improvements to its Audigy line of sound cards. F OR A WHILE THERE, the PC audio market was pretty boring.
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