Product Description

EXPRESSCARD SOUND BLASTER X-FI XTREME AUDIO NOTEBOOK

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1006 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Creative Labs
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds

Features

• Make your MP3s sound better than CDs with Xtreme Fidelity. Enjoy headphone surround that sounds like a room full of speakers. Hear immersive EAX® sound effects in your games.
• Play DVDs and enjoy cinematic movie sound with PowerDVD®. Connect to multichannel speakers with the Surround Sound Upgrade Kit (sold separately).
• X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio technology intelligently restores the highs and lows for rich, crystal clear music playback.
• Restore detail and vibrance to your MP3s. Hear headphone surround that sounds like multichannel speakers.Turn stereo music and movies into surround.Enjoy Realistic sound effects in games.
• Experience cinematic surround sound from DVD movies

Customer Reviews

Be Aware: ExpressCard only available on newer notebooks
I assumed that my Dell Inspiron 9300 was new enough to use this card, but I was wrong. The 9300 has the older CardBus or PCMCIA type slot. Only after reading about ExpressCard in Wikipedia did I realize I had made a big mistake. It is a newer faster interface that is not compatable with CardBus. Oh Well, maybe it's time to get a more modern computer so I can use my fancy new soundcard!

Works Great
I bought this card for one reason - I use my laptop for games, and I am running Windows Vista. The onboard soundcard in my laptop doesn't support any EAX-alike (hardware 3D sound) features, even for only 2 channels. This card supports every last one. If you use Creative's ALchemy software, you can run old EAX titles with full hardware sound, in Vista, when using a Creative card. For games, an absolute must-have.

For music, it's decent. It has the "X-Fi Crystalizer", which is essentially a compressor. It can make some songs sound great, and I'm sure I would use it a lot more if I didn't know how to tweak my music manually. Same goes for movies.

For music production, well, it's a little bit lacking. I can get down to 5 ms delay using ASIO4ALL, but it doesn't seem to have native ASIO nor that one Vista sound interface nobody uses ;-). This is kindof a bummer, but it has more support than my onboard card, so it's good enough.

Overall, the card is very nice. I'm not sure about the value - the current going price is kinda steep - but I don't regret the purchase at all.

amazing
I got this sound card and the optional surround sound upgrade kit for about 80 used here from a seller at amazon and its terrific. I haven't written a review in over a year but I felt that I had to for this product.
I had the Creative Notebook ZS soundcard that worked well for my XP machine and when i got a new computer with Vista and installed it, the sound was never the same.
With Xp the sound is rich and detailed, with Vista, it always sounded as if it was a "copy of a copy" -- sort of a washed out sound. The ZS's drivers weren't made for vista and the vista updates for it never worked as should.
The X-Fi card's drivers are engineered for Vista and you can hear it. The sound is rich, detailed and LOUD. Installation went extremely smoothly and there is an built in update engine so you don't have to go to the Creative website and manually update it.
The interface is very user friendly and there are heaps of features that come along with the superb sound.
I highly recommend this product to anyone who is interested in excellent sound.