They don't listen and it's been quite a few months already. SBZ cards are out for years by now and they still don't have the LO feature. Well, at least over optical so it's fine (for PCs). Still, why was it cut?
Maybe the engineers of old left and the new ones never bothered or overall they changed their philosophy? Creative's old designs had tons of flexibiltiy and options. They even had a hardware AC3 decoder in older cards. You could not only connect AC3 outputs to the optical input, no, you could tell the media player to bitstream the AC3 of the movie to the SPDIF out. That's where the decoder took the stream and decoded it for you with no hassle and mixed HRTF in. Sure it's useless nowadays but the important point is how the sound card (driver) allowed to ROUTE streams. So in our case there's no routing of the HEADPHONE mode/output to LO or optical.
They used to do so much more than other sound cards that you'd miss out if you didn't go the Creative way. Now they cut features that were standard for more than a decade.
Again, it's only a problem if you play on consoles. Yet who in their right mind (if they have the time) would miss out on console gaming?
If the BlasterX G5 has optical in I'll sell the X7 and move on. Just gonna be using easier to drive headphones with it. Plenty of good choices anyway.
