Product Description

ExpressCard Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2766 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Creative Labs
• Model: 70SB071000000
• 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

Outstanding Performance
Execelent And High Quality sound, very easy to install and the performance of your notebook was increased, with the combination od the 5.1 or 7.1 sorround sound speakers.
It had manny options to set up your type and quality of sound, for games and music

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.