Creative X-Mod

Better sound for your laptop from Creative, plus the little white lies about its heritage exposed.

We were a little skeptical of the X-Mod’s promises. Just the little things in the marketing blurb, like the bold headings stating it could restore MP3s to better than studio quality sound. We were also halfway between doubtful and hopeful that something this small and inexpensive could boast the same electronics as the X-Fi.

The X-Mod is pitched at laptop owners who can’t do anything about their awful onboard sound chip. It’s a standalone soundcard, like the old Extigy, but as an added bonus it can act as an inline effects unit, so you can apply the Crystalizer and CMSS 3-D effects (that are an integral part of both the X-Mod’s and the X-Fi’s feature sets) to any analogue audio signal.

The X-Mod identified itself as an X-Fi when we plugged it into a computer, and worked without asking for any drivers. In fact, none were included. It also worked on a Mac without any extra configuration. It seemed too good to be true. We listened to it and decided something was wrong.

Although the marketing material does promote the X-Mod as an X-Fi, it isn’t. We opened it up to see acres of barren PCB, devoid of the capacitors that dotted the landscape of the X-Fi cards we’ve seen. There’s no X-Fi audio processor in sight, only a handful of surface-mount resistors, capacitors, buttons and a Texas Instruments DSP, which is the largest single chip on the board.

From the outset, the sound is much better than onboard AC97. But could it compete with the X-Fi, or even the Audigy? After running RightMark 5.5 in loopback mode we got these results.

TEST	X-Fi	X-Mod	Audigy
Frequency response, dB:	+0.02, -0.19	+0.02, -0.14	+2.86, -3.41
Noise level, dB (A):	-93.2	-84.2	-90.0
Dynamic range, dB (A):	93.0	83.8	89.7
THD, %:	0.0016	0.021	0.064
IMD + Noise, %:	0.0068	0.026	0.078
Stereo crosstalk, dB:	-94.2	-86.3	-73.3

These results put the X-Mod on par with an Audigy, although the signal is much noisier than we were expecting. When testing with the Crystalizer on, we saw a 0.7 to 1.0dB signal increase depending on how much of the effect was added.

You may have guessed that the big dial on the X-Mod is a volume control (which, incidentally, you press to mute the audio) but it’s not the only control. The entire top half of the X-Mod is a button. It will let you can change the wetness (how much effect is applied) of the Crystalizer and CMSS 3-D effects.

Don’t bother with the 3-D effect, it makes the treble muffled and the sound distant and artificial, albeit a little more spacious. The Crystalizer, however, gives the sound a sense of immediacy and depth that you normally lose through encoding.

When used with headphones, the Crystalizer-ed output will still sound like an MP3, only compressed, limited and expanded in all the right places. Creative is tight-lipped about the details of how the effect works, although we can say it does make MP3’s sound sweeter.

It won’t give you better than studio quality MP3 playback. It will, however, give you better sounding MP3 playback. Not CD quality, just better quality. It’s an X-Fi in the way that a Honda NSX is a Formula One car. Some elements and ideas are there, yes, but it’s not the same.