# Oh, that's Creative...

- Site: Analog Industries
- Author: Chris Randall
- Date: 2005-08-09
- URL: https://analogindustries.com/2005/08/oh-thats-creative/

![Oh, that's Creative...](https://analogindustries.com/images/blog/creative_ripoff.JPG)  
Let me just point out, before getting off on a rant, that if you're even remotely interested in using a computer for making/editing music, your sound I/O should be nowhere near the computer itself. The inside of a computer is a set of monkey bars, upon which the RF demon spawn of the various parts of the computer itself will play. (Parenthetically speaking, that's a hell of a metaphor, if I do say so myself.)

So, what do we have here? Creative Labs has figured out a new way to rip off pro-sumers: the X-Fi sound-card series. Now, the first thing I notice is that this is a PCI card with jacks on it. That automatically rules it out of the race for a Reasonable Solution To Your Pro-sumer Audio Needs. (See painful metaphor above for reasoning.) Basically, you take a run-of-the-mill Soundblaster Platinum Live XT-Whee, and you make it black as midnight, and give it some shiny gold bling, and you can charge 5 times as much for it.

Well, we don't cotton to that sort of thing in these parts. They're gonna be asking US$399 for this thing down at Best Buy (and that's \_without\_ the stupid service plan. Shit, don't get me started...) and I don't think you need me to go in to all the \_actual\_ semi-pro sound I/O you could pick up for that amount of money.

Okay, I need to go to my quiet place and converse with my power animal now. Wake me when this is over.

## Comments (2)

**Det3** (2005-08-09):

Nevermind they use cheap Philips converters they get for $0.75 each, they have something like -98dB THD+N, barely past 16-bit resolution with the noise shaping on them.

I'd like to see someone who owns an Emulator-X or some other E-Mu card peel the sticker off of the E-DSP to see if it's just a Creative 10K2 DSP. Something just doesn't smell right there.

**blinkman** (2005-08-11):

X-Fi. I love that. What the hell is X-Fi? Not hi-fi, it's some other ambiguous kind of fi.