Sound Blaster ZXR
Oh so good, yet oh so bad
Price: $270
Aimed at enthusiast PC gamers like us, the
ZXR is Creative’ s cream of the crop sound card. We whacked it into a high end
gaming rig to see how it would go, pumping audio through a $4,000 set of 5.2
Cinema Paradigm Monitor speakers and subs, as well as a set of Audio Technical
ATH-A500X headphones. Let’s hear the outcome.
Sound
Blaster ZXR
The main card hides its silicon goodies
behind and attractive red shield, keeping nasty EMF emissions at bay. It’s
powered by the Creative Sound Core 3D chip, which was also found in Creative’s
last round of cards, the Recon3D series. This time around it’s surrounded by
top-shelf components, unlike the Recon3D’s questionable choice of parts.
Expensive Burr-Brown Digital Audio Convertors are the centerpiece, as well as
the high quality TPA610A2 co-amp which is used to drive headphones up to 600
ohms. If you don’t like the sound of this co-amp, you can swap it out for one
of your choosing, a great feature for headphone aficionados. Premium Nichicon
capacitors are the final jewel in the audio crown.
In addition to the main sound, card is a
small daughter board, the DBPro, which connects via ribbon cable. This includes
another Recon3D chip onboard, and houses the SPDIF I/O ports, which we used to
connect the card to our Pioneer amplifier. Both Dolby Digital Live and DTS
Connect are supported, and we tested both modes.
Creative claims that these components
deliver a sound card with a Signal to Nose Ratio of 124dB, which should make it
the clearest gaming card on the market. Replacing our usual sound card, the
ASUS Xonar D2X, the ZXR initially revealed slightly more detail than the ASUS
predecessor. It wasn’t a huge leap, but then we played Battlefield 3 and
noticed how much better the positional audio of the ZXR was. The D2X gave good
3D audio, but the ZXR absolutely smashed it, making it much easier to place
incoming enemies. Turning on the Sound Blaster’s Surround feature, the
soundscape became even more believable; while a dash of the Crystallizer
setting gave our sound effects a little more crunch. We were in sound card
heaven, and spent the night testing a range of games, blown away by the
impressive detail and positional audio coming through our home theatre
speakers.
And then, the next day the software’s auto
updater loaded new drivers. Oh dear.
Suddenly the positional audio went crazy,
swapping the front with the back, and the sub with the rears. It was truly
bizarre, and even carried over to the headphone tests, were right became left,
front became back. So followed three days of deleting drivers, PCI slot
shuffling, and reinstalling drivers, but we couldn’t get the card to perform
correctly again.
We thought that the days of sound card
problems like this were well and truly behind us, but apparently not. It’s such
a shame – when this card works well, there’s nothing like it, especially if
you’re using high-end speakers. And we haven’t even touched on the Audio
Control Module or advanced voice capture features, not to mention the myriad of
other cool touches. This could be a truly great product that enthusiast gamers
must have… it’ll just take some solid driver development to deliver on the
potential.
·
The best positional audio and clarity
·
So many features
·
ACM module
·
It stopped working properly
Houston, We Have A Problem
We spent three days working with Creative’s
team to figure out why we had such weird channel swapping issues. The excellent
news is that they were able to reproduce the issue when using the same Gigabyte
Sniper G1 motherboard as us, which is the first step in solving the problem.
Creative stated to us that compatibility issues will be solved in future driver
updates, and we’d be very surprised if they don’t resolve it in the very near
future. As soon as they do we’ll post and update in the magazine, but until
then it’s wise to avoid these products if you’re running a PC with a heavily
loaded PCIe, bus, such as SLI setups or with multiple PCle devices. Those of
you with a single GPU or few PCIe devices should be fine.
Verdict: 7/10
PCPP hopes to use the ZXR as our benchmark
sound card for all future audio tests…once Creative delivers working drivers.
