Creative Sound BlasterX Kratos S3 review - Audio Listening Tests

Audio Listening Tests

Though listening and experiencing sound is a subjective thing, we'll give it a go. First off, we choose quality and as such for the music we listen to FLAC files, uncompressed lossless data ensuring we on the binary side of things have our stuff perfect. And why FLAC  you wonder? FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality.

Music

Limp Bizkit - Behind Blue Eyes
We listen to a live acoustic version of the songs. Everybody knows the song and the warm and full sound once the tune starts at "None knows what it's like ...", and that's the case with the speakers as well. bass and Treble are there, the mid tones are incredibly flat and dull sounding though.

Johnette Napolitano and Danny - The Scientist
As pure and fragile as a sing really can be, actually a better cover (IMHO) than the original from Cold Play. We feel the guitar is a sounding good. Voices sound actually okay here, the overall feel is nice and warm sounding. 

Prokofiev's Montagues and Capulets
(Introduction) as played by the London Symphony Orchestra from Romeo and Juliet. Yes, the song is as long as its full title. The sound was clear. Reasonably good with clarity on strings and cello, it is my favorite dramatic piece of classical music. 

Foo Fighters
The two Foo Fighters tracks I listened to are diverse. An acoustic version of Foo Fighters Learning to Fly and something to scream your lungs out with, Darling Nicky was simply stated juicy. I'm a bit of an audiophile but once the lead singer starts screaming 'Come back Nickeeeeh' from the top of his lung you know for real that the Kratos S3 goes flat and dull. That really didn't do the foo and righteousness. The acoustic version of Learning to fly was fairly good though, where the synthetic bass sounds great again I once again miss a little more dynamic/acoustic bass in this song. It's hard to rate but 5 out of 10 points would apply best to describe the bass quality. Whereas the mid and high-tones are clearer and sharper.

Overall for an acoustics session the speakers sound good, however where you need rich audio with lots of instruments going on, it all becomes falt sounding rather quickly. 

Gaming

We played several games using these speakers and for what it's worth, ehm yeah, it gets the job done. Perhaps all I can say is that if you are a hardcore gamer and play games where environmental sounds are pretty important you might want to look for a 5.1 or higher speaker set because no matter what you do with a 2.1 set you will not hear the enemy sneak up on you from behind. Flipping that coin around works also, gaming can provide just as much enjoyment to many. The speaker system sounded quite good when imaging large environments in an FPS series for example. If you look at it from another point of view, it obviously sounds 10x better than any standard monitors speakers. So from that POV the immersive sound and richness of in detail, is much better suited.

Tweaking audio

 
You may download an audio suite from creative labs that will help you further tweak the audio. However it tweaks the analog signal of your audio card, this is not applying it physically to the Kratos. You'll need to register, acquire a license key for activation. Incredibly annoying stuff TBH.

 
Once activated you can now tweak audio a bit. The software offers preset filters which do help the Kratos S3 in different game genres such as Adventure and Action, Driving Simulation, FPS, RTS or Sports. It's not a bad suite, but stuff you could achieve with your audio card or motherboard sound solution just as well.