Introduction

A few years ago, I was quite certain when I said that the sound card market was dead. With Creative's literal monopoly on the business, and its acquisition of big names like Aureal3D, EMU and tons of other big names, it has literally wiped out all its competitors. I, for one, do not believe that such an environment, devoid of competition, can really breed innovation.

It has come to the point that more and more users are turning to free audio solutions built into most motherboards these days, thanks to Intel's ruthless pushing of its HD audio standard codenamed Azalia. Tack on Microsoft's ditching of the DirectSound API support via HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). We thought that would be the final nail in the coffin for the future of discrete sound cards.

But it looks like we are not quite there yet. Let's get a quick overview on the sound card business to put things in perspective.

It's a general fact that Creative has ruled the sound card market with a ruthless monopoly since the year 2000, but that has brought up its own slew of issues. For example, it resulted in the absolutely terrible quality of drivers coming out the ass which is Creative's driver development team. Being one of the earliest adopters of the Creative Audigy 2 ZS, I have personally experienced first hand how awful Creative drivers are. They not only crashed games, they also crashed the operating system. Yeah, they're THAT bad.

Creative's hardware team isn't much better either. When it comes to analog board design, Creative sound cards have been marred by cheap components, jellybean DACs and awful compatibility issues, among other things.

What Creative has gotten right is their gaming arena support. That is when they aren't threatening to sue John Carmack. It is extremely extensive, to say the least and they keep improving EAX hardware acceleration. Most notable of the new features is its ability to offload sound processing from the CPU and leverage the EMU chip's processing power to do all the dirty work. Creative's audio chips also ship with the ability to process and replicate really complex soundscapes, like multiple order reflections and constant reverb. So how does Auzentech fit in?

Auzentech

Auzentech seems to be headquartered in the US, but as much as I can deduce, they're very much a Korean company, or at least their engineers are from Korea. This is because their boards resemble a few Korean-made sound cards and their cards are even made in Korea.

They first popped up late 2005 with their X-Mystique 7.1 sound card. They knew well enough they couldn't beat Creative at its own game when it came to gaming. So, just like Audiotrak and Onkyo, they concentrated on audiophiles and audio enthusiasts, delivering sound cards with board layouts that focus on analog quality, swappable operational amplifiers, better DACs and a slew of other features.

I very much consider myself a discerning audiophile. I love high fidelity music, I go into great pain to make my PC sound as good as any old geezer's CD/LP with a tube rig. However, as much as I like to listen to Micheal Stripe's raspy voice doing the Great Beyond in hi-fi glory, I do other things on my PC like play games and yes, play even more games.

To be honest with you, I'm not really concerned about stuff like audio separation, dynamics, tonality, transparency or accuracy when it comes to the sound of someone chucking a grenade my way. I just want to know where it came from so I can spray virtual lead in that pesky bugger's direction. That's where Creative excels in.

I wasn't really inclined to give up my Audigy 2 ZS even when Auzentech's high-end X-Meridian came along. I just thought it would be smarter to get an external DAC, or maybe use the X-Meridian as a secondary card. Then, Auzentech launched the X-Fi Prelude....