Dolby Digital Live for X-Fi & Audigy   Posted on 23/05/2008 at 23:45 by Nicolas

	We might be tempted to say that certain bad habit die hard at Creative. The creator of the Sound Blaster recently announced on its forum that Dolby Digital Live encoding would soon be possible with the Audigy and X-Fi although it will not be free. In fact, this technology from the Singaporean company has been long awaited. On the other hand, it will be included in the price of the recent X-Fi Titaniums. Contrary to what happened with ALchemy for Audigy, there seems to be a good reason this time: Creative has to pay royalties to Dolby when making this function accessible for products that were not originally announced with its support. Finally, this is only theory as daniel_k has already put online a method which enables its free access with these cards. We’ll just have to wait and see if this is entirely legal...

High end PCI-Express X-Fi   Posted on 19/05/2008 at 17:34 by Marc

	Creative has launched two new X-Fi sound cards in PCI Express format, the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series and Champion Series. Up until now, Creative only offered the X-Fi Extreme Audio in PCI-E with limited functions compared to the high end PCI X-Fi. There is now ASIO as well as EAX 5.0 and 64 MB of X-Ram. SNR also changes to 109 dB and, a first for Creative, these cards finally support Dolby Digital encoding. The « Champion » model additionally includes an internal rack, which on its façade gives you access to a micro input and headphone output in its 3"1/2 version as well as RCA jacks on the 5"1/4 version. These cards will be available in the next few weeks for a price of $219 for the Pro model and $299 for the Champion.

X-Fi Surround 5.1 in USB 2.0   Posted on 14/05/2008 at 17:49 by Nicolas

	Creative has officially launched the Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 which connects to a PC and is powered via the USB 2.0 interface. It’s mainly intended for PC laptop owners and is equipped with gold plated connections as well as an optical output. Of course, there is support for 24 bit Crystalizer and CMSS-3D functions as well as EAX Advanced HD 4.0, OpenAL, and not to forget ALchemy in Windows Vista. Drivers are also offered for Windows XP and there is still USB 1.1 compatibility although it adds limitations (Surround 16-Bit/48kHz instead of 24-Bit/96kHz 5.1). The Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 will be available at the end of the month in Asia. In Singapore the price will be S$99 or roughly 55€ if we take into account the difference in taxes.

SpursEngine SE1000 in a laptop   Posted on 13/05/2008 at 22:02 by Nicolas - source: Xbit-labs

	In a 54 page PDF document titled "Strategies for Growth: 2008", Toshiba presents in black and white its intention of integrating the SpursEngine SE1000 in certain "media center" type laptop PCs. You may recall that the desktop version of this card in PCI Express x1 format has 128 MB of XDR DRAM and a processor derived from the Cell (which equips the Sony PS3)set at 1.5 GHz which enables it to encode and decode MPEG-2 and H.264 in Full HD in hardware. While this may seem like a risky bet, Toshiba should have its reasons for believing there is a market for such a laptop, and if it is the case, big industry names such as Corel and CyberLink should help them to break into it.

Free ALchemy for Audigy!   Posted on 08/05/2008 at 17:10 by Nicolas - source: tweakers.net

	While Alchemy’s version for Audigy has now been available for more than 10 months now, Creative decided to make it payable while the X-Fi version free. You had to spend $9.99 to take advantage of this "wrapper" that enables going around certain limitations inherent to Windows Vista by preventing the management of DirectSound 3D effects by a specialized DSP. In reality, it intercepts DirectSound 3D effects and converts them into OpenAL thus enabling to continue to benefit from audio acceleration in hardware as well as advanced functions such as EAX. This rather unfortunate choice should soon just be a bad memory because the Singapore company should soon put it on line for free the week of May 19th and has pledged to reimburse those that chose to pay. So this is some good news and probably not entirely unrelated to the upcoming announcement of the Sound Blaster X-Fi 2 as Creative apparently judged it necessary to improve its image that suffered in the "Daniel_K" incident.