Picking the XtremeMusic over the Revo is an easy call, but handicapping it against Creative's own Audigy2 ZS is more difficult. The Audigy2 costs 40% less, and you still get hardware acceleration for 3D audio and DVD-Audio playback support. However, the Audigy2's EAX's only scales to 64 voices-half that of the X-Fi. The XtremeMusic also offers much more balanced playback than the Audigy2, avoiding its predecessor's tendency to favor foreground vocals at the expense of background instrumentals. And that's without the 24-bit Crystalizer and CMSS-3D effects.

Of course, the 24-bit Crystalizer and CMSS-3D aren't for everyone. Despite Creative's claims, we didn't find that the Crystalizer made MP3s sound better than the original CD. Some listeners may favor the sharpness that the Crystalizer lends to the foreground elements of certain recordings, but we prefer higher quality recordings over Crystalized low-bitrate MP3s. We also prefer a real multi-channel speaker setup to virtualized speakers via CMSS-3D, but for those occasions when headphones are a must, CMSS-3D does come in handy. Users should also enjoy CMSS-3D's ability to expand stereo recordings for multi-channel playback, and we're quite pleased with Creative's philosophy of not messing around with the original intent of the recording.