New family of voice controllers from Creative

Creative Technology’s sound control division has found itself in a rather difficult position due to the ever-improving quality of motherboard sound generators. They also seem to be beginning to take note of this, so we can finally report the introduction of a whole new family.

The company has patched up its EMU10K series chip introduced with Live! Over the past seven years, which while just proving to be enough, nowadays takes more than that to get someone to buy a separate sound card.

The company claims that the new X-Fi, or Xtreme Fidelity sound processing unit, will be 24 times faster than its predecessor, providing better quality than ever before for listening to music, games and movies.

The unit, which is made up of more than 51 million transistors, is capable of performing more than 10 billion operations per second. By comparison, the Audigy EMU10K2.5 consists of 4,6 million transistors and is made at 0,18 microns, and the X-Fi is also ahead in manufacturing technology: it already has a bandwidth of 130 nanometers. Its clock is 400 MHz, Audigyé operated halfway through this point. The multi-component solution hides a 24-bit signal generator with a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 110 dB and supports Creative Multi Speaker Surround 3D headphones and multi-channel speakers.

Thanks to the highly accurate technology, the company claims to be able to convert audio of any resolution to 136 dB THD + N, while converting already digital recordings from 44,1 kHz to 96 kHz without any problems. For many, it can be important to take on all the computing operations, that is, it causes about 0 percent processor load. The new X-Fi is already unveiled at next week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, so we’ll probably learn a lot of important details about it.

It is already rumored that the deservedly famous EAX has reached another stage: EAX 5.0 promises more realistic effects than ever before in the latest games. The audio controller is likely to be used by Creative not only on desktop but also on professional solutions, which in itself indicates excellent quality.