Sound cards. From the world of Creative dominating nearly the entire sound card market, to today's relatively adequate integrated audio, all the way to competition to who can make the best discrete audiophile sound card, the choice consumer has for computer audio is better than ever before. I've always been a big fan of Creative hardware for excellent performance and flexibility to push the potential of low end to high end computer audio. However, there always seem to be some limitations in place -- whether it's software issues, or other onboard hardware used in conjunction with the audio processor -- it really limited their popularity to a few certain users only. Lately, two high end sound cards gained a lot of press. One is the Asus Xonar D2 which we've already reviewed back in October 2007. It's excellent with the DACs and OPAmps used, but I personally felt a bit of limitations with its scalability and processing power. The second is the Auzentech X-Fi Pr elude. Now this is one interesting product. Being the first third-party manufacturer to license Creative's excellent X-Fi audio processor, the X-Fi Prelude is a combination of a favorite audio processor amongst many, with pretty much all the benefits of a high end board such as the Xonar D2 as aforementioned. Is this really the ultimate consumer sound card money can buy? Let's take a close look and see how it goes.



Link: APH Networks