Back when Mp3 players were starting to be a fad or better yet the ipod fad I was very dissatisfied with the ipod's sound quality, luckily for me one of my friends had another curious mp3 player called Zen and the first minute I knew it was from creative I send him some songs so I could hear it on the Zen the next day. It blew me away on how good the sound quality was compared to the many ipods and I decided to buy one and was very happy with it. Although I always dreamed and knew that some day creative will enable the X-fi 24-bit crystalizer technology onto one of it's mp3 players and a couple of mins ago I found it while random browsing. The Creative Zen X-fi MP3 Player. It's sleek and sexy, has X-fi, has Wireless LAN, has built-in FM, has the famous colorful screen of the Zen players, wide support of formats for audio and video and a little speaker said to be very powerful. Now I would love to buy this but the price seems rather high considering what the max capacity is. And the other thing I'm afraid of is to get screwed over by another Zen. Since my Zen vision M and apparently many many more stopped working after the warranty expired. I've seen so many threads on the support forums that I don't dae to buy this unless I see it's not as faulty as the other ones.

If only this product was guaranteed to work 4 years then I would go out first thing tomorrow to the nearest Circuit city or the nearest store that has it in stock and buy it just like that.

http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=213&s...c_id=15752

What do you guys think? I know some of you dislike Creative for their drivers or can't differentiate from the superb sound quality the X-fi's bring over integrated sound but would you consider buying one? I'm certainly am.

I'm actually looking at getting one of those, they look great.

I miss my Zev V Plus (lost it), for such a small device, the sound quality was excellent, and so intuitive to use.

My opinion - go for it.

That is a very nice mp3 player. I love its functionality as well as small form.

I currently own the "Creative Zen." It is very similar to that mp3 player (minus WiFi and X-Fi). The Creative Zen is easily the best mp3 player I have ever had.

Things I like about my Creative Zen:
-good firmware support
-good battery life
-price
-small form
-great for watching videos
-16GB is plenty enough of storage
-expansion SD bay
-drag and drop

I hope you enjoy your new mp3 player. I wish I waited a few more months. I could have gotten this one! Nonetheless the Creative Zen is an incredible mp3 player.

EDIT: Check out this thorough review of the Creative Zen X-Fi:
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2008/07/creative-zen-xfi-review.php

thats cool, i wish there was an option for a hard drive instead of flash

I'm waiting for a major player to release a hard drive-based MP3/WMA player to give competition to the iPod. There is next to no HDD based, non-Apple players out there.

Baddass. Great features on that baby, although I'd like to see a player with support for FLAC or APE out of the box.

FordGT90Concept said:

The Zune?

I don't care to carry my entire library around with my anyway, so I prefer the durability of a flash-based device. No moving parts, yay!

Although if you do want to carry around your library, you'll surely need an HDD in there.

Sean Costello said:
Hahaha!!! Brilliant! ROFL

Speak for yourself sir, I have an 8 GB Sandisk with an SDHC-compatible slot for extra memory, which can be up to 32 GB with SDHC.

...

...[/riker]

OK Pickle ...

"Although if *I* want to carry around *my* library, *I'll* surely need an HDD in there."

... unless I transcoded everything down to 128kbps. *barfs*

FordGT90Concept said:

Er... It's definitely a contender, from a "major player", and they actually have their s**t together. Give the software a spin. Their first version was pretty lame, but their second revision is spot on when it comes to management and sorting albums. imo they "out apple'd" Apple with how clean and straight forward it is. Plus I can make WMDs with it if I so desire.

Anyway, on topic with Creative, their UI has gotten better, and it's a nice player. Though I've gotta say, I don't understand the X-Fi crap. What exactly is the technology doing that makes it "sound better"?

Why would you want to make Weapons of Mass Destruction with your Zune?

And how would you do that?? Connect it to really big speakers, stick on Rick Astley and drop ot over Baghdad?

Lolz! Dublin

~Vel you need to hear for yourself the difference the 24-bit crystalizer makes on the X-fi cards or at least give it a try. For my ears it definitely makes the acoustics, the symbals the voice sound a lot sharper and cleaner, the guitars and almost every other instrument most of the time get a cleaner and crystal clear sound. Movies also benefit from some effects but music shines with the 24-bit crystalizer as do games. My favorite cd to listen is Opeth's Damnnation where you can hear clearly Martin Lopez's snare skills and the purity of the cymbals. Favorite game that has the best gun sound imo is Battlefield 2, I've made comparisons with software audio and hardware audio using using high quality and the 24-bit option and the guns sounds a lot crispier, you can even hear the echo effect the gun makes like it's shredding through the osund barrier a lot more clearly. That is of the effect it has on some people like me, other people can't really hear the difference so meh.

But I'm getting doubts the mp3 players has real X-fi or just emulated since it's true what I read from that review that the X-fi needs quite a bit of power.

Brendan does your Zen also has the ability to input additional flash memory? If so, then does it add the content in it to the default library or do you have to access it from another folder? Thanks for that review page, it gives a very good review and points the pros and cons clearly. There are thing I didn't like about the X-fi Zen but if it's a thing that the other Zens suffer from then I think it'll be ok to buy it.

Well the main thing I don't understand about it is how the whole 24 bit thing actually works. The music itself is typically encoded as 16 bit, so unless they're doing some sort of extraction to try and make those 16 bits fill 24 bits and then smooth them out, I don't get what they're doing there. If you do in fact have 24 bit encoded files, all the power to you then, but you're probably going to need more than 16gb if most of your music is encoded in 24 bit. Just saying, the whole 24 bit crystalizer thing seems like a bit of a marketing ploy to me. Granted that I never have tried it out, I'm just curious as to what their system is doing to make it "sound better". IMO the best sound of the music is when it's unaltered, maybe just a tweak here or there to get your mid-tones up to snuff if your speakers aren't of the best quality.

And Dublin; exactly. x]
Driven insanity.

FordGT90Concept said:


ummm.... Creative Zen Vision W is in that hdd catagory

The Creative Zen X-Fi 32GB is an excellent device and is currently my favorite flash based portable media players. For those of you saying your looking for a HDD based player, I think your choices are now down to the Apple iPod Classic (80GB/160GB), Microsoft Zune 80GB, and various larger Archos devices. There may be others, but it seems that most are getting away from HDD-based media players. Personally I have a Zune 30GB (1st Generation) and a iPod 15GB (3rd Generation). Both are great devices, though I now use the iPod only as a backup for (some of) my music collection. As far as hard drive based players go, you really can't beat the Zune 80GB unless you need the 160GB that the iPod Classic offers. I also owned a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 20GB in the past which failed prematurely and I am now wishing I would have RMA'd it instead of returning it.