I didn't take your response as combative; no worries. I don't want people looking for a true HRTF headphone surround solution to mistake the E5 as being capable of that. And honestly with it's end audience being audiophiles we really don't care about HRTF or gaming features like scout mode. What I personally would have loved to see in the E5 would be L and R cross mixing to better replicate the sound stage of a speaker set up. This doesn't require a lot of processing, it just mixes a little of the left channel into the right, and right into the left and it makes the sound move out of the center of your head and puts it in front of you. There are certain sound effects in music tracks that sound natural on a speaker set up, but make your head hurt on a headphone because in real life your left ear hears sounds that your right ear would hear even if the sound was to the right, but on a headphone since the driver is directly over your ear, it's possible to play a sound in the left headphone and your right ear will never hear it. For instance an audio track that used a slight delay between left channel and right channel, on a speaker system may sound like an echo BOOMboom TATtat. But on a headphone it would cause confusion as the sound appears in left and then right miliseconds apart.
That being said, if Creative Labs wanted to add a true HRTF function to the E5 they need only enable it in the windows driver and let the PC do all the work of encoding surround to headphone. That is what Plantronics does with their Gamecon. The headphone is just a dumb USB device, it has no special processing built in, but the windows driver runs everything through the dolby headphone plugin before rendering it to the headphone's DAC. The driver is detected as a multi channel surround device by windows in order to provide the dolby headphone with surround information. I don't doubt that Creative Labs could easily do that on the driver side without modifying anything in the E5's firmware, but again, I think the emphasis should be kept on audiophile needs and not try to make it a gamer card, you have the Xfi for that.
One other request is that you unlock the other bit and sample rates that conform to the USB audio standard. Without installing Creative's drivers, the E5 is only allowed to use 24bit 48khz sampling with no other options available. My guess is because this is the native bit rate of the digital mixer built into the E5, and when you install the Creative driver it's simply re-converting anything higher or lower, back to 24/48 before sending it to the DAC. I know the DAC chip itself supports 24/192 but you guys obviously have a digital mixer built inline between the USB decoder and the DAC, hence the reason you can't enable a true direct mode. Blu-tooth is always mixed because the digital mixer is always on and can't be turned off, even in 'direct mode'.
