Years pass and then back in 1994 they release the high-end SoundBlaster AWE32, the Cadillac among soundcards and not just because of the quality it brought to the PC platform, no this card was as big as a whale! I actually still own one (I have a huge collection of ancient hardware) and mind you that the AWE32 still produces very nice quality sound although not up to par with today's standards. I wanted to tell you a little about the AWE32 as something that was introduced on that soundcard came back on some of the X-Fi products. On board memory. Yes it's true, the elderly among that soundcard generation AWE32 could manage soundfonts 2/4/8 MB banks for all your MIDI and sampling love and loved that extra memory. Things changed and some of the X-FI products now have 64 MB of memory equipped on the card. Why? We'll tell you later, not specifically for soundfonts that is :)

It was May the 12th when Creative Labs announced the first in a long and rather annoying series of web announcements on SoundBlaster.com. I say annoying because every couple of days/weeks they would release a small piece of information on X-Fi, I don't know who's idea this was, but Creative you lost the majority of interested people after the second released fragment of information on your website. I really do believe this 'scratched' the X-Fi launch as people where confused, was it launched already, why do we have to wait weeks on more info, etc.

Creative's X-Fi Product Models

In that long period of announcements earlier this month Creative released information on the actually product models there are releasing. There will be four models in the first X-Fi line of products.

• ExtremeMusic (129 euro)
• Platinum (199 euro)
• Fatal1ty FPS (249 euro)
• Elite Pro (349 euro).

Clearly we are missing something in the product line, the low-end and mainstream users are left alone as the first and cheapest product starts at 129 EUR. So if you are interested in a X-Fi product you at the least are an enthusiast gamer or need to be a musician or music/movie lover or for that matter a combination of these. Actually, hey this is Guru3D.com's target audience. The products will start to sell in the second week of September 2005.