Creative Unveils ‘Super X-Fi’ Concept

Creative is no new-comer to the world of audio. In fact, they’ve been around for nearly 4 decades. Many of us may very well remember using their ‘Sound Blaster’ products as kids – a line of products which are actually still going today.
However, this year at CES 2018, Creative unveiled their latest concept in ultra high quality audio – Super X-Fi.

As Good As The Real Thing?

The idea here is that Creative have developed a way to alter the sound going to a set of headphones by use of various hardware and DSP (digital signal processing) tech, in such a way that the person listening to it will perceive it to be a totally new experience. Creative calls it “headphone holography”.
Basically, Creative is so confident in this Super X-Fi technology, they literally claim it to be “as good as the real thing”. By “real thing” they mean listening to a set of high end full-sized speakers, rather than a set of headphones.

 

How Do They Do It?

Well, of course the finer details are a tightly-kept secret, but Creative has included a rather…errrmm…creative way of doing it.
If you read our article on how eartips can affect the sound of an IEM, the same holds true for our own ears. Each person’s physiology is unique to some extent, and in the case of our ears, no 2 ears are exactly the same. The subtle differences in the shape of the ear, the width and depth of the canals (to name just a few), all have an influence in how sound is delivered to our eardrums.
So, in the case of Super X-Fi, Creative were clever enough to incorporate these unique differences into the basis of their technology. As Creative describes it:

“We custom fit audio to the individual by the advanced Head and Ear Mapping of each person by using real-time image detection and analysis from the camera on a mobile phone. This technique maps hundreds of anthropological features in high-precision. An artificial intelligence (AI) engine then extracts these features and merges it with the mapping of the acoustics of a three dimensional space to personalize sound just for you.

Using this acoustic map, Super X-Fi™ recreates the audio holography to give you a breathtaking listening experience for headphones. It’s as good as the real thing!”

This also required that Creative develop an entirely new an custom SOC (system on chip), which they claim is 5 times more powerful than the most powerful chip used in the current Sound Blaster products, whilst consuming less than half of the power. That’s a very interesting feat to achieve, something of great importance if Super X-Fi is to be used for portable applications.

Speaking of portability, the Super X-Fi’s hardware is packed into a thumb-drive-sized unit. This is similar in concept to something like the Audioquest Dragonfly.

 

Availability

Whilst Super X-Fi doesn’t seem to be quite ready to hit the market yet, they are also busy developing an app for both Android and iOS which would allow you to get a taste of what’s to come. You can sign up on this page to get notified of when the app is available.