Once upon a time, when talking about high-end sound cards, the only answer one would get was "Creative". Obviously, other producers, like Yamaha, were also producing sound cards for professionals, but Creative always had the largest part of the market, and managed to bring together decent prices and excellent quality. Now, they are facing a serious challenge from Asus, as they just announced new products to arrive in the Xonar family...


In short, the story goes like this - Asus plans to introduce soundcards that can both input and output HDMI, as well as a card with no less than 3 HDMI ports.

One of the first cards to arrive in the near future is the Xonar DX, basically a Xonar D2X cut in half. This card is designed to fit into home entertainment center PCs using the PCIE X1 interface, and it doesn't have the aluminum EM shielding that was practically the D2 and D2X's trademark. Leaving the above aside, Asus will provide gold-plated brackets, as well as a full set of features, including the 4-pin floppy power connector.

A product currently between the hammer and the anvil is the Xonar AV1, a card developed to be the foundation for future Xonar-based products, with capabilities well ahead most consumer and prosumer-level card currently on the market. The Xonar AV1 will come together with a HDAV-DB1 daughterboard, having more than 10 different inferfaces, including two external and one internal HDMI port.

These being said, I am not getting into any additional details for now, because I am sure we'll hear a lot about these products in the future, but one thing is certain: as Sony feels threatened by the Eee PC, Creative may soon feel Asus' breath down its neck...

 

Your video-games look wonderful if you have a powerful video card, but there is nothing that beats the "realistic feel" offered by a professional soundcard. And we have chosen to present the X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series from Creative. Like other sound cards from the X-Fi, it has the revolutionary X-Fi powerful audio processor, which delivers blazing-fast frame rates in games with hardware accelerated Direct X, while the X-Fi CMSS-3D module delivers incredible surround sound over stereo headphones for gaming, movies and music. Why is this X-Fi such a powerful audio processor? The chip offloads audio processing from the CPU, accelerating Direct X, OpenAL and EAX 5.0 games and providing realistic cinematic audio without impacting frame rates, with 64MB of X-RAM for fast loading of high-quality sounds. Also, the gamers need to know that this card was especially designed to bring out the best in terms of high quality and accuracy in the sounds from the game Unreal Tournament 3. Darragh O'Toole, Senior Brand Manager for Audio with Creative said: "The difference between gaming with motherboard audio and Sound Blaster X-Fi is stellar; X-Fi technologies put you right at the heart of the game" (...) "Unreal Tournament 3 deserves to be played on the best hardware to guarantee that the game sounds as good as the developers intended. Our partnership ensures that our existing customers know how great the game is and that new gamers know how much better their systems can sound with Sound Blaster X-Fi", he added. The developers of Unreal Tournament 3 worked closely with Creative to ensure that their game sounds as good as it looks when experienced using a Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card. The highly anticipated game offers support for advanced audio standards including EAX and OpenAL which can be enjoyed equally in Windows XP and Vista when the user has Sound Blaster X-Fi installed. So the fun is guaranteed in UT3, but the Creative sound card can bring out the best in music too, 24 bit and 192kHz quality level, along with the software media applications that come bundled or can be downloaded from the creative website. Unlike many people have said, this card (along with others from the X-Fi series) is supported under Windows Vista 32bit and 64bit. The price is quite acceptable too: $165.