Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi 5.1 Pro review

At just under £60, the Sound Blaster X-Fi 5.1 Pro is at the cheaper end of Creative’s range of sound cards. The compact black USB audio device is small enough to sit comfortably on top of your PC or shove into your laptop bag. A pair of RCA phono connectors on the back output the front stereo audio channel when in 5.1 mode. Alongside them are 3.5mm stereo jacks for the rear and centre audio channels.

On the side are a dedicated 3.5mm headphone output as well as line and mic inputs. An optical S/PDIF output allows you to send digital audio to a compatible surround-sound amp and a driver option can encode PC game audio into a Dolby Digital Live stream, so you can stream 5.1 gaming audio over S/PDIF to your amplifier. There’s a volume knob on the top and a tiny remote control to adjust the volume and skip tracks from across the room.

The output bit- and sample-rate is 24-bit/96kHZ on the stereo phono outputs, but only 16-bit/48kHZ on the other surround channels. Our surround sound test movies and games still sounded good, with plenty of detail and clarity, but the sample rate limitation means that you can’t listen to a 96kHz DVD audio track at full quality on all channels. When it comes to stereo music the 5.1 Pro does a very credible job of playing everything from Tchaikovsky to power metal. We particularly appreciated its clear reproduction of subtle tones at low volumes. We also noticed some of the characteristic brightness on cymbals and hi-hats that we’ve heard from many recent X-Fi cards.

Although many USB sound cards are designed with audio production in mind, the X-Fi 5.1 Pro is a more modest consumer affair. It can record at up to 24-bit/96kHZ but there’s no dedicated ASIO driver for low-latency recording. It’s fine for internet telephony and voice chat, but don’t expect to be using it to record the masters for your next album.

Thanks to Creative’s driver software, this little black box has full support for environmental audio and 3D positioning effects in games using standards such as EAX 5.0 and OpenAL. This makes it far better for gaming than most external surround-sound audio devices, although it lacks the dedicated gaming mode audio control panel we’re used to seeing from other Creative sound cards. The driver also includes various THX TruStudio Pro effects, including virtual surround sound and a Crystalizer that attempts to interpolate details that are lost in compressed audio. Both are enabled by default – we strongly recommend disabling them before you listen to music, particularly if you favour lossless formats. A copy of PowerDVD with surround sound support is also provided.

The X-Fi 5.1 Pro sounds good and its software makes the most of your games and movies. If you’re after a reasonably priced 5.1 multimedia sound card to use with your laptop, this is a great buy. Desktop users are still best off with the Asus Xonar DX which costs slightly less and sounds a bit better.