Creative X-FI Elite Pro and Guitar

[Chubby_Rain]

Hi

The card has 64MB of on-board X-RAM, a built-in pre-amp for direct line and microphone recording, and high-impedance electric guitar inputs.

So if i plug my guitar into this thing will it amplify the sound without an amplifier and work pretty much like a guitar port.

 

[MCMONOPOLY]

Yup, the only diffenrence between the amplifier in the Elite Pro and a "real" guitar amp, is mostly sound reproduction to the extent that you will get a pretty "dry" sound from the sound card when compared to a dedicated guitar amp. I have an old Audigy 2 that i used to do my Bass takes with, and after fiddling around with the appropriate softwares, you can get a pretty nice sound with of that type of card, Especially the X-fi series, but if you intend to use this to get professional sound quality, you might be better off with a more professionnaly designed card from M-audio or others.

 

[Chubby_Rain]

so its going to give off the same kind of efefcts as a guitar port?

 

[foshizzle]

I have the X-fi and it has some effects that you can apply, but nothing like a real amp and real guitar effects. You can get a pretty good chorus and delay, but you can't get any kind of good destortion, or wah, or anything like that. The clean tone isn't all too bad though. It is very dry as mentioned above. It's not like an actual amp, but it works for practice and for recording.

If you have a program like Sonar where you can use a plugin like "Amplitude" (it's an amp modeler) then you can get some very useable sounds without an amp.

 

[MCMONOPOLY]

Well if you want the same kind of FX you can get from dedicated analog effects board or pedals, you might be able to get pretty much want you want, but you have to keep in mind that it will never sounds as good. Also if you plan on using your computer to process a lot of sound FX at the same time on a live track (by that I mean playing and having all the effects turned on while recording the track) you will need a pretty solid system to be able to enjoy this without any noticeable lantencies. AFAIK appart from Macs (which if i'm not mistaken, handle the hardware at a lower level thus giving the possibility to have 0 MS latencies), there's no PC based sound cards that can give you true 0 ms latencies for your effects, nomal latencies range from 2 ms and up (depending on effects used and your system specs). But to circumvent that you can still use all of your analog effetcs devices and still use your computer to output the sound, but be aware that in that case, you must make sure all your volume levels are low coming from analog or you will get massive distortion.

 

[foshizzle]

The latencies are very low when you have your X-Fi in the right mode. The delay is not noticeable for me on my PC. You do need a pretty decent system though to get a bunch of tracks going with lots of "live" effects.

I've never heard that Macs can operate with no latency before. Where did you hear that?

 

[MCMONOPOLY]

As StrangeStranger pointed out, i didn't mean exactly 0 ms latencies.. What i'm refering to is how the HAL is managed on Mac computers. As for bullshit theories, i'm wondering why 75% or more of audio creators/producers/mixers still use apple products Mac do a waaaay better job with audio appz, and thats a fact not a speculation, and for the sake of it, i will tell you that i became a believer the day that my friend received is DigiDesign Pro Tools setup; after fiddling around and hooking up is stuff (Digi002 mixer and software) we came about weird compatibility errors with is Mac (he has a G4) we decided to try and hook it up to my own PC to see if it would run or not. After installing everything we fired up PT to do some tests to get a feel for the speed and such. Took about 3-5 minutes just to get the darn PT started and even longer to bring up past sessions of recording (my PC at that time was a P4 2.4 with 512MB of Ram and 7200RPM HDD running Win XP), then a week later we received an update from Pro tools and got the Mac to work correctly, AND BAAAM!!! 45 seconds to get PT up and even less to bring up the same session I mentioned ealier and just to give you an example of how much the Mac was handicaped it was a Dual 867MHZ with only 256MB of Ram running OS 9...So I don't know if the Bullshit theories you implied were about the fact that Macs aren't that better at audio stuff but you have to experience it to truly see the difference. And about the X-fi, last i checked the minimal latency value you can set the ASIO driver at is 2 ms.

EDIT: BTW i'm in no way a MAc user, i can't stand those darn things, last time i tried to download a picture it took me 35 minutes to realize that you only need to click and drag the stupid image to your desktop..... :twisted:

 

[dsmartyn]

x-fi elite is an amazing sound card i have one hooked upto a gigaworks s750 i use it for recording guitar and using adobe audition the latency is LOW, my pc is pretty powerful though. it beats the ass of my mac without a pro tools rig by far and pro tools is way too expensive for home recording you can also get alternate ASIO drivers which will give you lower latency.

FYI 2ms is not noticeable when playing any instrument!

BTW you should try Ubuntu Studio it has a low latency kernel designed for audio/video production, good luck getting creative drivers tho

OSX is based on Linux go figure...