Creative Releases BlasterX AE-5 Gaming Soundcard

I have Creative Sound Blaster ZxR which was supposed to be their BIG thing for Sound Blaster series and I must say driver support for it is absolute ****.


Once in frikkin' couple of months I get sound gone because Windows Update updates it as Recon3D - a thing Creative did not bother to resolve with M$ so far.

Or the fact that if I try and set Fast Boot in BIOS there is a chance addon card won't be correctly detected.

Or sound channels getting messed up for Headphones occasionally when you have SBX Surround enabled, right channel becoming left, left right and the rest disappear.


Really the hardware may be good, but software and support... sheeeeesh, I never seen anything as **** as that and I bet this new product will suffer the same.

 

Did you already tried the Creative custom PAX Drivers?
or this http://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?sid=126331&h=13a

 

I've stopped using Creative soundcards after they dropped 7.1 support. They however have a little software solution called Soundblaster MB3, which adds all the still unsurpassed bells&whistles of their superior surround support and EAX to any run of the mill mainboard onboard sound. I'm using that on top of my Realtek audio chip with a 7.1 speaker setup, and yes, it was worth the 29€.

 

No problems with either Z or ZR on Win7 or Win10.

The worst drivers I've encountered have been on the motherboard and one Asus card which name escapes me atm..

I doubt costum drivers for motherboards adds proper EAX support. One of the mistakes Creative did was not to license EAX fully, other cards just emulated EAX badly.

 

$150-$180 to try and make headphones sound better with audio resolution far beyond the human ear can even hear. 5.1 speakers only (instead of 7.1 speaker support). And a color light show! ROFL.

I guess there will be suckers who'll fall for this. But, eesh. What a joke.

 

Sound quality is going backwards. EAX 5 was amazing, there's nothing right now that come close.
This card is irrelevant and besides some leds, it won´t bring anything different.

 

Nothing can beat an external Soundblaster X7 card from creative, i am really done with them pci-e cards, it takes space, and when u have a SLI-setup then there is no room anymore for such a thing.

 

So true.
I'm not even touching Asus crap drivers, only UNi Xonar Audio Drivers (modded drivers for Xonar and other C-Media 8788 audio chipset based sound cards).
http://maxedtech.com/

 

Haven't used a sound card since Auzentech went out of business and my HT HD went the way of the dodo. Perfectly happy with a receiver and speakers/headphones combo for all my music/gaming needs. I'm not sure what the point of a sound card is these days.

 

Should be great card,I miss old Creative sound blaster cards.

From a goood guy who bring modded drivers for ASUS, C-Media and Creative soundcards:
https://danielkawakami.blogspot.ro/

 

I don't know about sound quality, but I'd agree with sound "importance" started to take a back seat. But recently with VR becoming more mainstream, a lot of studios are going back and developing some pretty cool 3D sound processing stuff. Steam Audio is starting to get integrated in to the major engines:

https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/

It's in both UE4 and Unity now.

Also UE4 with 4.16 completely revamped it's audio system:

https://youtu.be/ErejaBCicds?t=2416

This video shows some of the new stuff including a completely modular synthesizer.

 

Where is Dolby ATMOS? (5.1.2 | 5.1.4 | 7.1.2 & 7.1.4)
Rest is Briliant:

32-bit with 384kHz !
This DAC ->>> ESS ES9016K2M SABRE32 Ultra DAC

But USD149.99 is way too much for a SC without ATMOS....

 

Who needs that? I don't think it's gamers... Unless I missed something, games come with 16-bit/48kHz (or 44.1) audio.

Even my 24-bit/192kHz Xonar goes completely unused in that department. Everything I throw at it is just 16-bit/48.

Am I missing something?

 

Interesting, i'll check it out. Thanks for heads up!

Edit: Well, i can't say if drivers are good or not, download links only works for Asus Xonar Windows 10 drivers blog entries. Older are dead... Pity

 

Yes, and it eats off PCIe lanes.
I am currently facing unpleasant thing with sound card. I picked PCI version instead of PCIe, because it had better board with less noise.

Now, with Ryzen boards not having PCI slots, my only option is to get PCIe to PCI bridge card. Unfortunately there were not many great external soundcards back then, and I did not find any with 6,3mm jacks for headphones.

But from space perspective, External take more of space as they have cables, power supplies and are in box which is often bigger than internal card. But, their main advantage is that you can easily use them with anything. (notebook/tablet/...)

It is internal mixing rate + rate at which it is willing to communicate with other software in PC.
So, it improves a quality of mixed sound a bit. I clearly noticed jump from 48 to 96kHz. But from 96 to 192kHz, I think it was more of a placebo since It took quite some listening to actually get to point of thinking there is difference.

So I say, 384 kHz looks pointless to me. + in past I met 2 games which were crashing if I had sampling at more than 96kHz.

Looking at bitrate, 24/32bit is not pointless, but again stem from 24 to 32bit is damn hard to notice.

 

A possible that the root causes maybe your motherboard or just bad card with Fast Boot in BIOS enable I'm not sure if my motherboard has that enable.
As for sound channels getting messed up, I seen that odd thing like that happing just be sure update to latest driver that come out in mar, 2017 SBZ_CD_L13_1_01_10.exe also note you may want to so fresh reinstall of Windows 10 as it well know for causing goof ball odd thing to happing.
The problem I have with Creative Sound Blaster Z is lack good Linux support drivers.

 

I stopped using sound cards once we had fairly cheap speakers that could connect via USB and had built in DAC's like Audioengine does. To me its a no brainier to take money from sound card and buy more expensive speakers with a built in DAC. It sounds better and you don't have any 3rd party software to install. To each is there own but I really like this setup.

 

Mixing is not affected by sample rate. Only by bit-depth. Also, mixing is done by windows (mixing multiple applications) or by each app/game (mixing multiple sounds in-game.) The sound card has got nothing to do with it.

24-bit mixing of 16-bit sources can improve mixing marginally. But that's about it.

It looks more like an audio production sound card that's got nothing to do with gaming.

 

Looks cool, but my ZxR will last another 5 years ^^