Creative has just followed up with a member for its X-Fi series. Dubbed the SB-XFI-SR51 Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1, the external USB sound card boasts 5.1 surround sound and Xtreme Fidelity. The company’s Xmod also belongs to the same USB category in the X-Fi family except this less costly solution cannot do surround natively and emphasizes on the surround sound virtualization on headphones with CMSS-3D. Both the Xmod and the XFI-SR51 come with ‘crystalizer’ that supposedly improve sound quality of lossy MP3s.
Moreover, the XFI-SR51 can decode Dolby Digital as well as DTS audio, and it is fully compliant with OpenAL for Vista gaming and EAX Advanced HD 4.0. We will be more excited if the future Sound Blaster supports lossless Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA for our Blu-ray MCE. In the mean time, Asus Xonar U1 Dolby USB sound card is worth a look too for road warriors.Permanent Link
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