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As someone who has really loved Creative’s processing in the past (the amps have been hit or miss, typically leaning towards a bit bright and hard sound), I’m interested in this! But I haven’t heard it yet. I HAVE heard the Uber-expensive Smyth Realiser A16, the epitome of what I’ve heard so far in surround DSPs. The magic sauce for that (and this Super X-Fi, to some extent) comes from two ingredients (measurements): the way sound from a particular direction interacts with your head and shoulders, and then the way your headphone interacts with your ears. Smyth does this with microphones placed in your ears, then you listen to a sine-sweep to record how each frequency interacts with your head, and then another sine sweep through headphones. It processes “out” the influence of the headphone with an EQ, and then adds “in” the effect from each speaker at each speaker position. The Creative does a quick version of both. They don’t measure the exact sound response for your head, but they do take measurements of your head and ears size and shape with the app, and use that to make a pretty close compensation for how a sound would be affected coming from a direction. Then, by telling the app which headphone you are using, it loads up the General frequency response of that model (though not your specific unit), and makes an educated guess how to cancel out the headphone’s colorations. From all reports, it does a good job. Haven’t heard it myself yet. Kinda wish it had a line-out or digital-out feature, because there aren’t really any products inbetween the Super X-Fi and the $4000 Smyth realizer on the market right now that customize the processing to your measurements, and I’d like to use it with a bit better amp than I usually get from Creative (X7 was my fav, because you could swap opamps, but the G series also gave optical outputs to pass along the processes sound, and I liked that option too).
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