Creative Sound BlasterX - AE-5 Plus or AE-7?

darael

darael

darael

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Got a bit of a dilemma trying to decide which Creative Sound BlasterX to buy. Either the AE-5 Plus or AE-7.

I have been disappointed in the past by Creative's more recent offerings. The most recent being the AE-5, where I found the surround sound less than acceptable. Had I been able to enable CMSS-3D, I probably wouldn't have had any problems.

I am looking to replace my Creative X-Fi Titanium, which supports CMSS-3D and happens to work wonderfully with my hi-fi, connected using 3 x 3.5mm to phono cables.

Maybe it's drivers or the age of the card, but I've noticed some weird goings on recently. For example, Windows 10 might crash during startup at the Welcome page - my system is otherwise rock solid and never crashes.

Another thing I'm experiencing is sudden crackling or static noises, for no apparent reason. This almost always happens when skipping videos on YouTube.

The above issues happen on clean installs of Windows 10, on a completely different SATA SSD drive (my main use drive is NVME - I test installs on a spare SSD). So I've given in once more and decided to try a superior product, which, in my mind, should give me an acceptable replacement for CMSS-3D.
 
EsaT said:
Testing using live Linux would be one way, but that card is likely quite old now and something could be wearing down.
Though crackling could be also sign of DPC latency issue.
https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Wouldn't consider CMSS-3D really good for surround speaker set use.
Sure it does upmixing from stereo content like music, but that content gets bent quite heavily in the process.
Creative's newer algorithms are lot more gentler for music.
Though for headphone gaming CMSS-3D keeps details like foot steps very easily distinguishable.
Click to expand...
I think the latency issue was introduced in Windows 10 1803, if I recall correctly. I'm not sure that will ever be fixed, especially with the ageing drivers.

CMSS-3D has always been great for me and when I tested the surround with an AE-5, it was nowhere as good as my X-Fi.
 
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