Finally got around to installing one of the X-Plosions.
It is, needless to say, breathtaking.
For my sample this time, I treated myself to the full 2:24:03 of "Lord of the Rings" soundtracks from lossless FLAC source. There's a great mix of music in that, from strings, heavy percussion, choral pieces, blaring horns and, at times, solo vocalists. As an aside,
"Special Edition" recordings of the Lord of the Rings soundtracks are now being released. The first one was absolutely worth the $50 I paid for it.
First thing: The tiny flaw in these cards is that it takes a heartbeat for sound to start, once sound is played (i.e. you usually miss the first half-second of a sound if the card has been idle) still exists. I get around that by setting my recording properties to use "line in" as the sound source and turning up recording and playback volumes for that source. That seems to correct the problem.
There doesn't seem to be an audible difference between the DD5.1 mode on the X-Plosion and the X-Mystique, although the X-P supposedly samples Dolby at a higher bit rate. The mix is still bass-heavy and lacking on the center channel. The review Groltz posted indicates that the HDA cards don't use the center at all; this is not true; the cones on my center channel speaker are moving in DD mode. The center, in either DD or DTS mode is a mix of the left and right front speaker rather than a discrete channel. Dolby Prologic II and DTS:Neo6 both use a stereo "narrowing" effect to make the center more apparent to a listener. This card does not seem to do that, but it's still possible to emphasize the center by using the volume control.
The real new toy here is DTS Connect. Bitrates are higher, but compression is lower. Does it sound like $150 worth of extra goodness?
Well, I think so.
First, the mix to the center channel seems to be better. I still had to play with the builtin multichannel volume control, but it only needs to be at +3 (+3 what? I have no idea. +3) to meet my expectations. Bass is less prominent, less "boomy" than with the Dolby Live mode, enough that I actually felt the need to bump the volume on my sub a bit.
Those were things I could tell without doing any critical listening at all.
Two places where I can usually hear compression artifacts from MP3 sources are in the crash of cymbals and in brass. Getting voices and strings to sound good usually isn't that hard. Trumpets are
rough.
Since we're doing re-sampling and compressing the audio signal prior to output, I expected those things to be the best place to find differences between the different types of output the X-Plosion could produce.
I switched from my game PC, which still has an X-Mystique, and the X-Plosion in the new machine I just built, and in places the differences were night and day - in DTS, soaring brass themes were absolutely crystalline. The same tracks (Return of the King - "Anduril" was the main one I compared) in Dolby Live was somewhat muddy in comparison; horns lost the precise timbre I could hear in the straight PCM or DTS. The Dolby mix was still pleasing, but lifeless.
In straight solo vocal (e.g. Fellowship of the Ring - "Breaking of the Fellowship"), there was almost no difference between the two forms of encoding, once I matched the volumes for all channels.
As a sort of tiebreaker, I tried to consider a more generic orchestral tracks (Two Towers - "Helm's Deep" and "Samwise the Brave"). "Helm's Deep" is positively operatic - musical drama writ large. And to be honest, while I could hear some difference, but neither Dolby or DTS was more pleasing. Both cards do bombastic very well. "Samwise the Brave" is a delicate blend of strings and woodwinds... and on that track, the choice was much clearer, as I found the DTS version to once again have a more precise timbre on the high end of the scale.
Gaming-wise, I managed to go a couple rounds of botmatches in UT2004. I turned on EAX and maxed out all the other settings in the game. Sound was appropriate for the experience. Gaming, even EAX, isn't exactly demanding for a card like this.
All in all, I do feel that I got an upgrade in sound quality I can easily hear, one that was worth the money I paid. I'm still waiting patiently for my digital inputs, but other than that, I'm quite pleased. I haven't heard the latest card Creative is shoveling, but for someone who is considering a PC connected to a home theater receiver, I really do think X Plosion is the way to go.