Sound Blaster X-Fi Go! sounds pretty sound.

James O'Malley Gadgets
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sb_x-fi_go_c4.jpgBelieve it or not, the USB device pictured is actually a sound card. The Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Go! (the exclamation mark is actually part of the name, depressingly) is designed to give laptop gamers “ultra-realistic” headphone surround sound. Now you can experiencing a harrowing and bleak war zone scenario when on the train too!

Squeezed into the device are lots of exciting technologies that probably require headphones that are slightly better than the ones that are cheapest in the Argos catalogue. There’s X-Fi 360 degree headphone surround, EAX Advanced HD 4.0 (added “environmental” sound processing so sounds come from a specific “position” rather than just everywhere then into your ears) and support for OpenAL hardware accelerated audio (which is like how OpenGL is to graphics cards).

Apparently the built in Voice FX chip will allow you to digitally alter your voice when playing online games – so it’ll be much easier to pretend to be a girl on World of Warcraft.

What’s pretty clever about the sound card is that because it is a plug & play USB device, all of the driver files and like are stored on the device itself on the 1GB of flash memory – which you can also use as basic USB storage.

If this sounds like your sort of thing (see what I did there? That’s journalism, that is), then you can get it for £39.99 – and Creative will even chuck in Creative Wave Studio and Creative Karaoke Player free.

Related Posts: The old version is pretty affordable | There’s an Express card version too

James O’Malley
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2 comments

  • Doesn’t do a chuffing thing for A2DP fed audio though does it?

    Which makes this kind of laughable for my use. Or can Bluetooth streams tap this hardware wizardry too?

    Looks doubtful, since you would appear to have to use the dongles line-out and not your notebooks line-out just to get it to work when cabled.

    Any thoughts?

    • Hmm.. not sure if it’d be possible to use it with bluetooth. I guess you could plug in the output on the Soundblaster to the line-in/mic of your built in sound card to act as a pass-through… but that’d be rather cumbersome and might create a massive feedback-loop or something.

      Or maybe you could loop it through using the computer itself? But I’ve no idea if this is possible or how you’d do it.

      Guess the best thing to do is to wait for the next version.

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