Creative Labs X-Fi Titanium HD PCI-E

as far as output goes this sound card is amazing in quality and really impressive with output level, has nothing on the soundblaster 16 or awe64 but shure as hell beats any thing modern. im happy with this card accept of one big thing, and for me its big. i only can use one audio output at a time, this sucks, i live in a house with a large amount of electrical interference so to keep my siganls clean i use thick cables short distances and avoid splitters. this sound card forces a jack off then you use a high one. basicly i have 3 sets of amps, front amp, rear amp, and several sub amps i chain together. i do not use surround sound as my setup is for music quality and surround only lets music play on front L and R. the audio effects are pointless but atleast i can turn them off. and the quality of this card is amazing, it made a cheep set of usb speakers sound good, and my amazing speakers mind blowing. 
I was really shocked this could not reconfigure the jacks, i mean even realtech cards do that, and i payed 90$ for this one so i assumed i would have more control than with a realtech card. if i could use all the outputs at once it would be 4.5 * and if i could reconfigure all jacks it would of bin 5*.
The extra gain from the card dose help canter balance the fact im using splitters. and when i ran this up to 2500wrms of bass over 4 subs (3 15's and a 18") and my sound dynamics constert monitors in the back, my optimums on my monitor (and sadly i got mad and kicked my sonys to pices in the back) my system came to life, cant wait to show off my setup in a party im having this satruday, it will also be the first party with my 18" running off of a 1500wrms amp on 1 ohm!

Ingame shotgun sound from behind actually freaked me out first time I heard it and had to check my back!
 
If you want a sound card, then go high-end or not at all. The motherboard inbuilt ones can do sometimes better than cheap soundcards. This one is a bit more expensive, but very high-end and will make a huge difference! You will be left to wonder how you lived without. Crystal clear sound, hear things you couldn't even notice before in your music and games.
 
Very satisfied with the card and it looks reasonably well built too, zero issues but software could of been better.
 
Ensure correct setup for best quality sounds. Set on DTS Connect encoder seems to work best. You can disable and ignore X-Fi Crystalizer.

After my E-MU 0404 USB that serve my workstation @ China dying (I'm using E-MU 1820m back in Singapore), I was thinking of buying another E-MU products. But when I try to look around, the choices is slim at China and the price is high.
 
There is two choices here - either going to Creative products or opt for Asus products.
 
I would like to try out Asus products, but I am TOO familiar with Creative products, knowing the strength and the weakness of each product, thus at the end I purchased the X-Fi Titanium HD - which is possibly the best product if someone looking for an all rounder. And to be honest, I do not know how long will Creative continue producing this product, that is another reason I bought this card.
 
You can find all the comments on the Sound Quality of this soundcard all over the internet so I will not comment much about this. Further more, sound quality is very personal and subjective - some preferred punchier bass and some preferred more high or warmer sound, add up different cans having different sound signature.
 
I listened to FM Acoustic system once, it taught me one thing: Music is for listening and to entertain me.
 
To me, equipment is for me to enjoy the music, not to analyze the frequency spectrum - no, I am not saying the objective measurement is not important. But most of the recent cards are measured pretty well and it is up to the users how to mix and match for their preference.
 
To me, equipment is a Tool - Knowing your Tool will help you to understand how to setup your preferred sound.
 
Thus, my comment is: This is a very Powerful soundcard - probably the MOST powerful soundcard (no, not about output power but the features) since it utilize 20K2 chips, plus hardware SRC, etc. Too bad the potentials are not fully explore. Who to blame? Microsoft? Creative themselves? Game Developers? Or the Users?

It did what it supposed to do....and some...
 
I mainly use headphone, speaker I just use my onboard and use windows settings to switch from the TIHD to onboard realtek 889 codec.
 
Burr-Brown DAC plus the National amplifiers, awesome!! Shines every headphone I plug it into....
 
After getting a dedicated headphone amp, I stopped using the HEADPHONE Out and switched to the Line Out instead...using a dedicated amplifier, the sound somewhat becomes a bit tame. The harshness of the treble gone, bass was tighter and soundstage didn't sound like cave-like-feedback.
 
All in all, I love it...I don't use the Creative Control Center, I just use the driver and ASIO on foobar to listen to FLACs or CDA
 
No hissing, everything was quieter (does this card has Noisegate )
 
Although it also comes with 3D Audio processing bla bla bla, I just off it...off everything that might 'color' the sound. So no Crystalizer or Hall effects for me...
 
To those who are in doubt between this and the Asus Essence STX, might I say their both produce similiar performance if not identical.
 
 

I am not a seasoned Audiophile and not fully comfortable with all the terms used by reviewers here yet, so I am going to refrain from commenting on this soundcard in too technical terms.
 
What I will say is that Creative went all out with this board.  Determined to fix their poor reputation among audiophiles they threw quality components at this board, and it shows in the sound quality.
 
In the past with other sound cards from creative, system noise has been a problem.   This board is perfectly quiet.  With my ears I can not discern any noise/hum/pitch coming from the computer at all, regardless of conditions.  It probably helps that I have premium components in the machine that don't give off as much noise as cheaper computer components, but the sound card gets credit for being fully enclosed in some sort of shielded cover.
 
The card apparently uses a Burr-Brown 24-bit 192KHz delta-sigma stereo DAC.  This chip is apparently also used in high end CD players like Cary Audio Design's CD 306 and Halcro's EC800. The Op-amps are replacable if you like to tweak your gear, but the included two National LME49710 high performance, high fidelity op-amps sound great to me.
 
The line level RCA outputs on the back sound good to me, as does the dedicated headphone jack, capable of driving up to 300ohm cans according to the spec sheet.  With my 80Ohm Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro's the sound quality is fantastic, though I find that my comfortable listening volume is somewhere from 35-40%, so someone with higher impedance cans may find it a little weak.
 
I have not yet tried the digital output, but since it bypasses the on board DAC, I don't expect any surprises there.
 
My biggest gripe with this sound card is that in the name of sound quality a physical switch in the rear headphone jack turns off all other analog outputs.  I appreciate Creative trying to care about sound quality, but at the same time this is a huge pain.   What this means is that every time I want to switch from headphones to speakers, I have to crawl under my desk, and disconnect the headphones from the back of the computer.  This isn't just a pain, but I can see how over time this may wear out the headphone jack to the point where the solder joints to the board weaken.
 
To solve this I plan on getting a Schiite Asgard headphone amp and connect it to the line level RCA outs, as well as splitting the output with RCA Y splitters so I can still get sound to my speakers.
 
Drivers are rock solid.   No problems like we experienced back in the early Vista days with creative products.  Control menus could be better laid out and easier to understand, and a built in equalizer would have been nice (heck, maybe it's there somewhere, but I just haven't found it yet).
 
To sum it up, I think its a great value at $150 with a good enough DAC to listen to music on good headphones, at the same time as having all that EAX stuff on it for the occasional gamer.  too bad about the headphone out switch though.   That is REALLY annoying.

A bit expensive for a sound card, but its the best thing you can buy for a audiophile / gamer.
Even if you just listened to music i dont see how you can go wrong with this card.
 
While many people may complain about switching modes cut off the sound, i just leave it in audio creation mode and im perfectly content, never any driver issues here.
 
These have some sort of amp built in, enough to power any headphone.

The Creative X-Fi Titanium HD Is the new high-end sound card from creative,and has an impressive spec sheet like 122db in 24bit\96khz playback and using a high-grade components like Texas Instruments DAC,also it comes with a 16mb x-ram for hardware accleration in games(useless).
The EMI shield is a cheap plastic unlike ASUS metalic cover(but it takes less heat from other components unlike metal that is on the STX),and the EMI shield came scretched like some idiot at creative tried to clean it with glass paper!
Sound Stage is wider compared to an onboard realtek sound chip(alc889),with warmer and richer sound and good mid and high tones!
lows wise,the bass is good,nothing special,it could use more punch,and it could be fixed by changing the omp's as they are replaceable(it comes with generic 2114d's at the I\V section and LME49710NA in the buffers)
overall,very satisfied with the card,drivers work well under windows 7 64bit,with no problems at all,I like the warm,rich and  detailed sound of it.definitely worth the money!
 
december 2010:I was so impressed with the soundcard so I've god a nother one for my second computer that I'm gonna build,anyway I've got a rev C. of the card(first one is A)and the highs are just perfect,spot on,sound is more stable and more cleaner(or its all just in my head). 
 
 
 
 
 
if there are any grammer mistakes,please excuse me,english is not my first language!!