Buy Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD USB Audio System with THX SB1240Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD USB Audio System with THX SB1240 Product Description:
- Audiophile-grade components deliver unsurpassed USB audio quality with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 114dB
- THX TruStudio Pro is specially designed to bring the same great audio experience found in live performances, films, and recording studios - to the PC
- Phono preamp with RIAA EQ allows direct connection of your turntable to convert your vinyl to CD or MP3
- Gold plated connectivity for maximum signal quality and easily accessible front mounted headphone and microphone jacks with convenient volume control
- Creative Media Toolbox software allows you to record, playback, cleanup and organize your digital music easily
Product Description
USB Sound Blaster X-Fi HD is an audiophile grade sound system with premium connectivity for your Notebook or PC. The front panel includes a conveniently located 1/4" microphone input and ¼ inch headphone jack with studio quality headphone amp and volume control. The rear panel features optical I/O, gold plated stereo RCA I/O plus an integrated phono preamp for direct recording of your vinyl collection from your turntable. Media Toolbox software lets you record, convert, enhance and organize your digital music easily, while THX TruStudio Pro technology brings you the same great audio experience found in live performances, films, and recording studios.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
69 of 73 people found the following review helpful.
Great sub $100 DAC, can be a pain to set-up though
By Spralwers
There are not many reviews for this product, so I am going to go ahead and write a fairly in-depth one.Like other reviewers, I only got this because it is a high quality DAC (digital to analog converter) in the $100 price range. I am not ready to shell $300+ on a DAC yet. I may use the recording feature in the future to rip video game music, taking advantage of the SPDIF in port. When I do I will update this review.The reason why I picked this DAC over other ones within the price range (like the Nuforce headphone amps) was because of the SPDIF in port. I did not want a DAC for just my computer. I wanted one that I could hook up my game consoles and TV to as well. Sound quality is huge to me; I find sound quality to be more important than picture quality. A good picture looks nice, but great sound is really what makes you feel like you are there. That is where I thought this DAC would really come in handy.Now on to the actual review, since I have made clear why I bought this item.This DAC is high quality. It sounds better than the Realtek HD Audio on my motherboard, it sounds better than my Insignia 32'' LCD, it sounds better than using analog output from my game consoles, and it sounds better than my Hanns G 21'' monitor (yes, that actually has a headphone out port that I can hook to speakers). Like all other reviewers who favor this item, I can hear all the more subtle parts of my music. If you have good speakers (I am using a pair of Alesis M1 Active 520s) and/or headphones, then you will hear the difference. After all, what is the point of having a high quality DAC if your playback equipment is not built to accurately reproduce music? In case you are not someone too familiar with sound systems, I can not stress this enough: Make sure you have good equipment before buying a DAC!For music playback, this DAC is easy to set-up - simple plug and play (I'm using Windows 7, 32 bit). Just plug your device into the USB port, wait for the generic drivers to install, and you are done! Even with the generic drivers, you can output 24 bit/96 KHz on both optical out and line out ports. The line out ports are the standard, stereo RCA out ports. In addition, it has a 1/4 out jack for devices that use TRS cables. However, by using the generic drivers, you do not have an EQ. In that case, just use the EQ of your music player. There is a neat little feature that allows you to boost a certain bass frequency by a certain amount (such as 50, 75, 200 Hz up to levels like 3dB, 6dB, 12dB) in the windows console, and I found that to be incredibly useful for making my speakers output more bass, as I do not have a subwoofer.Using the SPDIF in however, is much trickier and that is where I took off a star. As of writing this review, there is no documentation on making use of it, at all. I would know because I spent at least 3 hours searching through the manual and the creative knowledge base and I did not find anything. If you want this device to decode digital signals from some sort of entertainment device other than a computer (like a PS3), follow these steps:-First off, before we begin, know that this does NOT decode dolby and DTS surround formats. For instance, if you are watching a DVD/Blu-Ray, make sure that you are NOT outputting the Dolby/DTS surround formats. It only decodes two channel, stereo, PCM.-Replace the generic windows drivers of the soundcard with Creative's drivers by installing the drivers located in the installation CD.-From the same CD, install Creative Entertainment Console and Creative Audio Control Panel.-In Creative Entertainment Console, go to Mixer, and under playback, uncross SPDIF in. This passes anything that comes through the SPDIF in port to whatever speakers/headphones you have connected to your DAC.-Make sure that under the recording tab in the windows console (when you right click the speaker icon and click on recording devices), you do not have, "Listen to this device," checked off for SPDIF in. There will be weird delay issues if you have "listen to this device" checked off in the windows console and SPDIF in enabled under the mixer tab in the Creative Entertainment Console.-While you are under the recording tab in the windows console (when you right click the speaker icon and click on recording devices), make sure you have SPDIF in set as the default recording device. This tells WINDOWS to accept the input coming in from SPDIF in instead of the other inputs: Line in, Phono in, and Microphone.-In the windows console, make sure you have the sample rates for SPDIF in and Speaker be the same.Another reason why I took off a star is because, as of writing this review, you can not download the drivers for this device from the website. This soundcard was designed with netbooks in mind, and guess what? Netbooks do not have CD drives! If you are planning on using this device for a computer without a CD drive, make sure you have access to a computer with a CD drive so you can rip the installation files. Stuff like this is why Creative support has such a bad rep.In conclusion, great DAC. Simple plug and play if you are using it for a computer, but can be a huge pain to set up for other devices. I will update this review when I use the recording features. Even though I have not fully tested this product's features, I thought it would be helpful to at least say that it works, and works well, for music playback since this device does not have many reviews.Update 8/6/2011:I've used this to record video game music with the RCA line in ports, and I've connected my guitar and bass guitar to the 1/4'' microphone input and recorded myself playing. Perfect. No issues here whatsoever.I also want to add that if you want to be able to record music that's playing directly on your computer (say you want to rip audio from youtube), this device has the "What U Hear/Stereo Mix" option. Just know that you need to install creative's software to activate this feature.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Another Level
By Gene B.
In this brief review, I am only going to comment on the sound quality of this device. I do not have the intention of using any of its other features (recording, software conversion, etc). With that being said, wow, this thing is a bargain! I mainly bought it to pair with my AKG 172/702 headphones and laptop, but I am also using it with my Swans M200mkIII speakers. All of those items already sounded great in themselves, but once I paired them with this dac(AKM4396VF btw), the boost in quality was a tad unbelievable. Some of the more popular expressions uttered when one upgrades a component in their audio chain are that you can hear things you never knew were there and that you would need to re-audition your music library...and those extend down to this dac. In fact, it's so good, I'd almost retire my DAC1 (whoops, thought it was April) . I have not tried the THX sound shaping algorithms yet, and I don't really plan to, but it is a nice bonus that they at least are the company behind them and not some generic technology. The headphone amp is indeed of good quality, but the higher ohm cans will still want some more power to sound their best(like my 702s).All in all, I am extemely impressed with this product. I bought it on a whim as a "try out" purchase(couldn't pass up the price), and it will now be staying in my system. The only gripe I have with it is that unlike its desktop specific brother (titanium), I can't upgrade/replace the op-amps. That drawback won't really be one to most of the people who shop this unit though. At this price (whatever price Amazon has it at when you read this), it deserves some serious consideration by the home audio enthusiast on a budget.Just so everyone understands, I am not trying to allude that this dac is on par with the upper echelon, but it does sound way better than it has any right to given its price/s.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.Excellent quality at a bargain price
By jeepcoma
I had for many years an external Audigy 2 NX that finally stopped working. This was a great unit for the DVD-Audio support and 192/24 support for headphones (96/24 for 5.1), and so a requirement was that any replacement could support playing all my ripped lossless archives at 96/24. Since the NX had permanently migrated to my desk at work, I didn't really care about the 5.1 support, and my main focus was on headphones (since I use it at the office). It also had to be USB, as this is replacing the crappy internal audio on my work computer and I like to be able to use it on multiple systems.First place I checked was creative.com to see what was new, and started doing research on some of the offerings. I looked at the X-Fi Go! which would have been my choice if ultra-portability was my priority but I liked the extra features of the X-Fi HD: everything I need and nothing I don't. I really loved the 1/4" jacks which make perfect sense for an audiophile targeted item, and the split line-in/phono-in and line out is just excellent. I've been using this for about 2 years now so have a pretty good idea on the pros and cons.I agree that setup can be a pain, though it seems to mostly be a driver issue and poor ability to control the mixers and mute what you need to through logical software menus. Ironically I have more trouble with Win 7 than I did on XP. A few things to note: The phono-in and the line-in is a shared connection, though it's very difficult to tell through the software which was it's configured. I wish instead of controlling this through software there was a physical toggle switch on the rear of the unit to select. If you plug something in through the line-in and it sounds awfully distorted, it's running through the phono preamp and you need to mute this input (good luck finding it in the windows mixer and the creative version, it's terrible to hunt for and not obvious at all). Once you get that sorted out, you'll be able to enjoy HD AM/FM radio from your Sony XDR-F1, at least until you undock your Win7 computer and then redock. At this point, everything will look like it's configured fine but you just won't hear anything. The solution is to go into the windows mixer and disable the line input and then re-enable, and you're back in business. I did not have this issue in WinXP.So how about quality? Well it's really quite incredible, and the dedicated headphone amp is all the more impressive considering it gets its power from the USB 500mA connection rather than an external power source (like the NX did). How powerful is this you ask? Well let me tell you I did some back to back testing using some heavily modded AKG K340s (which are said to be notoriously difficult to drive) through the X-fi HD headphone jack, and compared that to the line-out feeding through Transparent Audio interconnects into a Darkvoice 336SE (which is also said to be an excellent pairing for the K340s at a relatively bargain price) and I honestly could not tell the difference between the two, as far as ability to drive the headphones. I tested using several lossless MFSL and Hoffman DCC albums and some DVD-A recordings with a variety of music styles, and the $100 X-Fi sounded JUST AS GOOD as a system 5 times the price. Very very impressive. I've also done the same with a pair of Grado SR80i to the same effect.Originally I dismissed the THX stuff but have found myself using it lately. Since I also listen to a AM/FM radio through the line-ins, I mix a little of the "surround sound" into it to make it a bit more comfortable to listen to (and generally use a foobar plugin to do the same for my archived music). Depending on the quality of the station, the "crystalizer" and "speaker" options can give a little more punch, and the "dialog" option is nice for static-filled AM stations if you're listening to talk radio. Even Pandora streaming audio sounds really good (I was afraid the K340s would reveal all the MP3 artifacts but at the HQ setting I generally don't notice anything, though I am working usually rather than critically listening).This has been an excellent bargain purchase and in truly an excellent addition to any audiophile's desktop arsenal. I'd really rate this 4.5 stars if I could because frankly the software/driver support is clunky and could be much improved. A physical toggle switch to select between line- and phono-in would go a long way to reducing the problems people have reported with crappy audio through the line-in. And despite the excellent powering through the USB port, I do wish it had an external power option that would allow you to use the unit as a standalone receiver, for example with the XDR-F1 I could listen to the radio independent of having a computer available, but that's pretty minor. This is a really excellent unit and I feel as if I should buy a few spares so that when this one gives up the ghost down the road I'll have a fresh replacement ready to swap in. Excellent job Creative!
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