Yesterday I talked about the Beyerdynamic MMX300 headset, which is probably one of the best consumer headsets money can buy (made in Germany and shit), and today it’s more like “Made in Korea”. Today, my Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 arrived, replacing my Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeMusic. “Now”, you might say, “replacing one X-Fi with another doesn’t seem too smart”. Well. The chip is the same, sure, and so are the drivers and the rest of the software. But this is where the similarities end. What Auzentech – the only add-on board manufacturer ever allowed to use X-Fi chips – actually did was upgrade the whole rest of the board, that’s the new solid capacitors, the amplifiers (the front stereo OP-AMP is even socketed and replaceable) and some very high end AKM DACs, which are supposed to do digital-to-analog conversion at very low noise rates. And that was the thing I was particularily interested in.
You see, when I turned up the volume on my Lake People G93 amp, I could hear tons of background noise and some low frequency hum, and I simply didn’t like that audio pollution. Plus, when my fat graphics cards started computing and/or rendering, it got a lot worse even.
Before presenting the results, here are some pictures for you. As you can see, with the Auzentech Prelude I picked a card that sits on classical parallel PCI. I had to take that route because that PCI slot between my fat GPU boards is the only interface left for an internal sound card:
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- Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 box
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- Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 front
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- Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 rear
On the front picture you can see the socketed stereo OP-AMP for the front stereo channels, right beside the analog Aux/CD-ROM connector. This amp is [upgradeable]. This is the one powering the front channels, or your classic 2.0/headphone output. Above the X-Fi chips heatsink you can see the 2 x 32MB = 64MB Creative “X-RAM”, that can be used for caching audio samples for faster playback as a replacement for using system memory. Some older games like Battlefield 2 or Quake 4 and Doom 3 can actually use the X-RAM, not that it helps much. 
The four small chips left of the X-RAM are the AKM DACs, and probably the parts that I’m currently profiting most of.
Now, I can turn the volume ALL the way up in idle, and there is nothing. No hum. No noise. It is only one simple thing. Dead! Silent!
This is perfection. All I hoped that card would do it does. Now, with the Beyerdynamic MMX300, my trusted old Lake People G93 and that “new” Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 sound card, my audio world has finally been fully restored to what it was always supposed to but never has been!
And as a little plus, the pre-amp seems to also be more powerful than my old X-Fi’s, which I welcome, having to drive some 600Ω headset. 
Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 © 2013 by The GAT at XIN.at is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Hi Guys,
I have a set of T7700 7.1 speakers that I use with this sound card. Is there a small in-line preamp I could use for the side channels? I had some issues setting up. 6/8 aint bad – and I’ve adjusted the levels to compensate as much as possible.
Hello Eoghan,
I’m afraid I can’t really help you with your Creative Labs Inspire set of speakers, as I am mostly using headphones with my Lake People G93 amp, like 98% of the time. I am living in a flat with walls as thin as paper, which is why I can hardly use my speakers.
And said speakers are just JBL Balboa stereo speakers too, with a subwoofer, all attached to a regular, cheap HiFi amplifier, as that setup is rarely used anyway.
So I’m sorry to say I can’t really recommend any preamp for you, as I’m not experienced enough in the field. I would’ve assumed a set like the T7700 would be well balanced already, and amplified by its own built-in amp?
ive been running a prelude for several years and love it. Installed a new Gigabyte GTX 770 last night and have been having a nightmare time getting drivers, and particularly Dolby DTS to install and run again. I installed the drivers through device manager finally but rest of the Auzentech suite is not working.
Good luck, tell me how it goes
Installing the drivers was problematic at first, using Auzentechs regular setup.exe. I accidentally quit the installer the “hard” way using task manager, because it was seemingly stalled. Reason was, that setup asked whether it should overwrite my old X-Fi XtremeMusic drivers, but I didn’t see the dialog window, because it popped up in the background. Should’ve looked more closely. But when retrying the installation, I alt+tabbed the dialogs into the foreground and confirmed each overwrite, worked fine that way.
About DTS Connect I can’t really be of any help I’m afraid, as I am using Windows XP Pro x64 Edition (64-Bit XP) and PC-BSD UNIX. Auzens DTS Connect is only available on Windows Vista or later though. Plus, I wouldn’t want to use it anyway, as my audio setup is strictly stereo only. So I am decoding/mixing DTS to stereo in software, leaving that to libav/ffmpegsource embedded in players like Mediaplayer Classic Homecinema (Win) or VLC (Win/UNIX).
The rest of the software suite – volume panel, console launcher, audio control panel – is working fine on Windows with one exception: The audio control panel will stall and make the entire machine almost unresponsive when launched if the Amazon background application (“Amazon Music Helper.exe” from their cloud player) is already running. Crappy software anyway.
May I ask why you had to reinstall your audio drivers when adding a new graphics card? This doesn’t seem connected. Or did you reinstall the whole operating system for some reason?