Oh, that's Creative...

Let me just point out, before getting off on a rant, that if you're even remotely interested in using a computer for making/editing music, your sound I/O should be nowhere near the computer itself. The inside of a computer is a set of monkey bars, upon which the RF demon spawn of the various parts of the computer itself will play. (Parenthetically speaking, that's a hell of a metaphor, if I do say so myself.)

So, what do we have here? Creative Labs has figured out a new way to rip off pro-sumers: the X-Fi sound-card series. Now, the first thing I notice is that this is a PCI card with jacks on it. That automatically rules it out of the race for a Reasonable Solution To Your Pro-sumer Audio Needs. (See painful metaphor above for reasoning.) Basically, you take a run-of-the-mill Soundblaster Platinum Live XT-Whee, and you make it black as midnight, and give it some shiny gold bling, and you can charge 5 times as much for it.

Well, we don't cotton to that sort of thing in these parts. They're gonna be asking US$399 for this thing down at Best Buy (and that's _without_ the stupid service plan. Shit, don't get me started...) and I don't think you need me to go in to all the _actual_ semi-pro sound I/O you could pick up for that amount of money.

Okay, I need to go to my quiet place and converse with my power animal now. Wake me when this is over.