[ZeaviS]

Hi, I have a sound blast xtremegamer and Senns HD-595 pluged into the front panel audio in. When using CMSS-3D while listening to music, I notice the surround effect, but the quality of the music sounds muffled and the highs don't sound good at all. I was wondering if this is because of settings I have enabled or maybe because the Senns already have soundstage? Or does CMSS-3d just suck with music?

Right now I have speakers set to headphone in the creative control panel, crystallizer enabled and I'm in entertainment mode. Thanks for your help guys.

 

[SonicDawg]

You've got it. The so called Crystallizer and CMSS-3D are just bad for music. Every time you enable DSP with creative cards you end up resampling the signal, not to mention whatever god aweful sound algorithm they use for their "effects".

They are better for game and movies, and nothing else, imo.

 

[ADD]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZeaviS /img/forum/go_quote.gif Right now I have speakers set to headphone in the creative control panel, crystallizer enabled and I'm in entertainment mode. Thanks for your help guys.

I agree that the CMSS-3D mode of the X-Fi is horrible for music. The version used in the older Audigy cards was even worse again. I don't agree, however, that the card is not good for music - it is - it just needs to have all the DSP gadgetry turned off.

For me, the best results for music listening with headphones with the X-Fi are obtained by using the card in Audio Creation mode (ensuring EAX is turned off) and the standard 2.1 speaker configuration. Then use Foobar to play back your files with either Channel Mixer or the Stereo to 4 Channels DSP first on your list of DSPs, followed by Dolby Headphone as the second listed DSP. Note that Dolby Headphone is restricted to a maximum 48 Khz input sampling rate and accepts either 16 bit or 32 bit floating point input.

 

[liamlw]

for music, run audio creation mode with 'bit-matched playback' ticket. also run 2.1/2.0 speaker mode, instead of headphones. these gave me the best results with x-fi music, and now my prelude

 

[ZeaviS]

Thanks for your input guys.

While researching this before I posted, I've noticed people talking about Foobar but I don't know what it is. Is it a media player or is it some plug-in?

 

[ADD]

Hi,

Yes, it is a media player. Relatively spartan-looking and compact, but incredibly powerful. The website is here:

foobar2000

The most basic components needed to get up and running for headphone listening using an X-Fi- are the ASIO Plugin and the Dolby Headphone Plugin.

You need to mix stereo to either 4 channel or 5.1 surround upstream of the Dolby Headphone plugin. For that you can use the Stereo to 4 Channel plugin which is supplied with Foobar. There are a couple of surround mixer plugins too, but I don't recommend them as I have found a few issues with one of them (can distort in some circumstances), and another one does not sound as good as the simple stereo to 4 channel option (to my ears anyway).