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Creative Xmod - Restore your MP3s to beyond studio quality

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Originally posted by: gersson
wireless HD RAPTOR X: 7.1 from 1 speaker.
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You can get that with a pc speaker and a pc power cord. It's not hard to figure out how and why. :laugh:

 
Originally posted by: MS Dawn
Creative really needs to knock it off with the studio quality crap. It's getting old for those of us that actually spend time in a real studio where nothing in the chain has "creative" written on it and never will.
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yeah right...way too funnyeee
 
Originally posted by: fisher
my car stereo does this too, it's the button labeled LOUD.
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Loudness contour is a function where a gentle boost of bass frequencies is augmented at lower levels and gradually tapers down to flat as the volume is raised. It helps out to hear extended bass response at gentle levels.

The "crystalizer" function on the sound cards is a compander algorithm with a dynamic gate that modifies dynamic range and works on low and higher frequencies. On some movies the effect can be desirable under certain conditions.

Claiming it "remasters" compressed content to sound better than original is ludicrous, however.
 
Originally posted by: gersson
lol stupid SNAKE OIL creative. The only reason I bought the Fatality X-FI is cos I thought BF2 uses the X-Ram. This thing is PURE BS.
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I agree. We're going in the wrong direction.

Hey, why don't we record at 24kbps then upconvert to 320kbps? It's gotta sound better than a recording originally encoded at 192kbps. 320 is a higher number.

This is the "digital vibrance" of audio. UGH!
 
Originally posted by: Aflac
It's snake oil, don't kid yourselves. It will not work as advertised. Once you lose audio data through compression, it is impossible to get it back.
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Not true, not true at all. As statistical understanding of signals and computing power improves its possible to predict (based on priors) the original signal. Will it be identical? Maybe, maybe not. Can a lossy signal be improved to be near lossless? Yep. My research is in image processing, but given that sound is only 1D this is definately possible in real time.
 
Originally posted by: Markbnj
Originally posted by: Aflac
It's snake oil, don't kid yourselves. It will not work as advertised. Once you lose audio data through compression, it is impossible to get it back.

acegazda: actually, it's more worth it if you have junky headphones. I'm not really going to go into details here, because I'm not an expert by any means, but there are threads all over Head-Fi bashing this thing.
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QFT
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Again wrong. Look into the literature on higher order statistics (HOS) of signals. Applying a lossy compression algorithm on a signal with higher-order dependencies preserves these dependencies. These are far more important to signal quality than lower-order correlations (eg, 1st and 2nd).
 
Originally posted by: MS Dawn
Originally posted by: fisher
my car stereo does this too, it's the button labeled LOUD.
Click to expand...


Loudness contour is a function where a gentle boost of bass frequencies is augmented at lower levels and gradually tapers down to flat as the volume is raised. It helps out to hear extended bass response at gentle levels.

The "crystalizer" function on the sound cards is a compander algorithm with a dynamic gate that modifies dynamic range and works on low and higher frequencies. On some movies the effect can be desirable under certain conditions.

Claiming it "remasters" compressed content to sound better than original is ludicrous, however.
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it's close enough for my ears. 😀
 
Once it's lost, it can never be found again, it can only be predicted. I guess you could loop through all the possibilities and compress them and find out what the compressed data ends up as but it'd be a billion years till we have the processing power to brute force it. And frankly I haven't found any upsampling (image or audio wise) or deblocking that impressive. Not that that's surprising. I do remember Intel had some project that took some huge supercomputer months to redo this JPEG image and it actually came out decent and revealed more detail. Good luck doing that in realtime though.
 
Originally posted by: xtknight
I do remember Intel had some project that took some huge supercomputer months to redo this JPEG image and it actually came out decent and revealed more detail. Good luck doing that in realtime though.
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That sounds very interesting. Do you know where I might read up a bit on that, xknight?
 
Originally posted by: xtknight
Once it's lost, it can never be found again, it can only be predicted. I guess you could loop through all the possibilities and compress them and find out what the compressed data ends up as but it'd be a billion years till we have the processing power to brute force it. And frankly I haven't found any upsampling (image or audio wise) or deblocking that impressive. Not that that's surprising. I do remember Intel had some project that took some huge supercomputer months to redo this JPEG image and it actually came out decent and revealed more detail. Good luck doing that in realtime though.
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I'm only an aficionado when it comes to computers and acustics, but what you say seems to make a lot of sense.

As far as I know, lossy compression algorithms in sound work by using linear prediction patterns to reduce redundancy to the minimum, not true? Also, by taking advantage of the intrinsic limitations of the human ear, certain quick frecuency shifts are not coded at all, like a soft sound after a loud sound, or by not coding those +20KHz/-20Hz frequencies 99% of the population can't hear anyway.

Given that I can't imagine how the file might be restored, much less in real time.
 
Algorithms, schmalgorithms. I daresay that there is prolly no user's sound system tied to a computer that would allow the user's ears to notice any difference (if it did work as advertised.)

Nearly all of my MP3 listening is done in the car - and that environment really doesn't allow for noticeable improvement to the ear.

My senses agree with MS Dawn. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Noema
Originally posted by: xtknight
I do remember Intel had some project that took some huge supercomputer months to redo this JPEG image and it actually came out decent and revealed more detail. Good luck doing that in realtime though.
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That sounds very interesting. Do you know where I might read up a bit on that, xknight?
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It was on Tom's Hardware news years ago but I wasn't able to find it.
 
More ridiculous BS from Creative; trying to fix a non-existent problem. Upconverting MP3s? How about just re-ripping them! Effing retards.
 
Originally posted by: JEDIYoda
Originally posted by: MS Dawn
Creative really needs to knock it off with the studio quality crap. It's getting old for those of us that actually spend time in a real studio where nothing in the chain has "creative" written on it and never will.
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yeah right...way too funnyeee
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Stop opening your yap when you obviously have no idea what your feeble mind is up against.
 
Originally posted by: corkyg
Algorithms, schmalgorithms. I daresay that there is prolly no user's sound system tied to a computer that would allow the user's ears to notice any difference (if it did work as advertised.)

Nearly all of my MP3 listening is done in the car - and that environment really doesn't allow for noticeable improvement to the ear.

My senses agree with MS Dawn. 🙂
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A few of us have high-end systems hooked up to our computers. My receiver is probably worth more than my pc. I hear the difference between 128 and 192 mp3s. I heard a difference between my ZS2 and X-fi (although not worth the upgrade IMO). I even have a highend turntable hooked up to my PC. Yes, I am one of "those" people who beleive that vinyl (other than ticks an pops) sound better than CDs. So there are a few of us computer guys and gals out their who have highend hi-fi equipment connected to their computers. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Oyeve
So there are a few of us computer guys and gals out their who have highend hi-fi equipment connected to their computers. 🙂
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I salute one of the very few! 🙂


 
Originally posted by: Oyeve
Originally posted by: corkyg
Algorithms, schmalgorithms. I daresay that there is prolly no user's sound system tied to a computer that would allow the user's ears to notice any difference (if it did work as advertised.)

Nearly all of my MP3 listening is done in the car - and that environment really doesn't allow for noticeable improvement to the ear.

My senses agree with MS Dawn. 🙂
Click to expand...

A few of us have high-end systems hooked up to our computers. My receiver is probably worth more than my pc. I hear the difference between 128 and 192 mp3s. I heard a difference between my ZS2 and X-fi (although not worth the upgrade IMO). I even have a highend turntable hooked up to my PC. Yes, I am one of "those" people who beleive that vinyl (other than ticks an pops) sound better than CDs. So there are a few of us computer guys and gals out their who have highend hi-fi equipment connected to their computers. 🙂
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Fix your rig link in your sig so we can see what you have. 😉

What high-end equipment? Amplifiers etc? How does it all hook up to the PC and substitute for a sound card? I already have a great visual system on this PC, but I'd love to have a high-end audio solution (higher end than X-Fi and what not) as well.
 
MS Dawn, how come all of your images come from that same root URL? Is that where you host images or something?
 
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