Creative X-Fi hits the road, running though but

CREATIVE LABS, PIONEER of sound on the PC isn't sleeping and watching the PC sound market shrink, rather deciding to expand the number of products that use its excellent X-Fi sound chip.

The drivers are harder and harder to develop, so the company has to find a fresh way how to optimise its hardware too.

After licensing its tech to a Californian company, as our own Ferret wrote here, Creative is moving on.

We've known all about the iPod and its effect on pedestrians for ages now - even with the best add-on speakers, compressed 128kbps MP3 files sound so-so, nowhere near the CD quality. This also is one of reasons why yours truly buys music DVDs and compress the sound to MP3 himself (usually 220 or 320 kbps). Now, X-Fi is coming to iPod and notebook market courtesy of new series of external sound products that expand usually modest sound capabilities of these devices.

Xpod... it may be for an iPod, but this could be a cool device

Named the Xpod, this device is extension of external Xmod Wireless - these two are using X-Fi chips to produce clear and higher-quality audio from a compressed source, and offering streaming the sound to different components in the house as well. We have seen this concept live and we have to admit that we were impressed with the difference in sound quality and the range of streaming. But, this is not all.

ExpressCard finally hit action

We have waited for a decent reason to fill our ExpressCard slots for ages, and now X-Fi is available in the form of full-sized ExpressCard. This is also Creative's first product that utilizes PCIe bus. We hope desktop PCIe sound-card is not far away. This card brings full capabilities of already existing X-Fi chip to the notebook market. It remains to be seen how the drivers will react to the change from PCI to PCIe, though but. µ