For a long time and since the invention of headphones, there has been a relentless search for the so-called “Holy Grail” of headphone audio ; the challenge has been to make headphones sound as natural as what we experience in the real world around us rather than sound “confined” inside our heads in an unnatural way. Award-winning manufacturer Creative claims to have nailed it with its Super X-Fi technology , and in this article we are going to explain what that technology is and how it works.
According to Creative, the vast majority of audio tracks created today are intended to be played on external speakers, and as headphone users we listen to that type of content constantly. This means that the audio is pumped directly into our ears, creating a claustrophobic soundstage where sound seems unnaturally trapped in our heads, something that is acoustically wrong and, according to this manufacturer, it assumes that good audio in headphones is a fallacy. .
How does Super X-Fi technology work?
In real life, audio is spacious and deep; Everyone perceives sound differently based on our individual and unique facial structures, as well as the shape of our ears. For a natural and expansive audio experience that is truly tailor-made for our individuality, the audio has to be produced in the headphones based on how each individual person perceives sound in real life.
For this Creative uses a complex inverse computing system to calculate how the audio signal from the headphones should be and thus reverse that claustrophobic effect that they are talking about, bringing the source of the signal out again so that it sounds natural, as if we were in the real world. In addition, Super X-Fi personalizes the audio experience provided by headphones by relying on the unique profile of each user, taking into account the complicated pathways of how external sound travels to the ears.
This is what they have called holographic audio . Imagine capturing the listening experience of a high-end multi-channel speaker system in a studio and recreating the same expansive experience – with the same original depth, detail, realism, and immersion – on headphones. By mapping the shape of the listener’s head and ear and transforming the audio based on those parameters through Super X-Fi technology, the audio is experienced as if it came from outside the headphones.
Super X-Fi technology is based on computational audio, using complex algorithms and computationally intensive techniques to personalize the audio for each individual person through a sophisticated head and ear mapping process. Indeed, as you can imagine, in order for this audio to come true, it is first necessary to allow the software, equipped with an Artificial Intelligence system, to first scan the shape of our head and ears. And how is this done? In the simplest way possible: uploading photographs of our head from the front and in profile , as well as one closer to one of our ears.
Hundreds of anthropometric parameters are extracted from the head characteristics with high precision by means of a real-time image detection and analysis system. These parameters are then used by the Artificial Intelligence engine along with the dynamics of the headphones being used (since obviously not all headphones behave or sound the same, so the audio is also customized for the headphones in question) and the synthesizes creating a multidimensional map of the desired acoustics.
Using this synthesized map, Super X-Fi technology then recreates expansive and natural audio that provides a “magical” (according to Creative) listening experience customized for each individual user. For the end user, all this power is made simple and easy to use, since everything is done through an application on a smartphone. It is as simple as taking pictures of the ears and head and then selecting the headphones that are being used; the software will do the rest.
A chip specifically designed for this technology
The first incarnation of this comes from the hand of the newly created chip called UltraDSP, customized and specially designed for Super X-Fi technology. This chip is designed for Super X-Fi audio processing and packs 5 times more computing power than most of the brand’s Sound Blaster chips while at the same time consuming less than half the power.
It is an integrated SoC that incorporates a huge cache memory optimized for audio processing at the highest possible speed, so that it is capable of encoding and decoding in 32 bits up to 8 channels of high resolution of 24 bits of audio at 96 kHz simultaneously. In fact, it even has a built-in audiophile quality DAC (analog to digital converter) that ensures the best possible quality.
This SXFI chip can reside in the headphones themselves, although it also supports its inclusion directly in amplifiers or any other audio hardware device such as USB dongles for wireless headphones or it can even be installed in smart TVs. Super X-Fi can also exist as a software technology simply, using in this case the CPU resources of the PC where it is installed. This will obviously have the disadvantage that it will consume system resources, so the ideal is of course to be able to have this UltraDSP chip directly in the audio hardware that is going to be used with the technology.
Later, Creative has plans to make this technology available to developers so that they can implement it directly in their programs or even at the operating system level, since Creative’s goal is to work with all audio brands and manufacturers to extend this technology. to the entire world (this implies that we will be able to see the Super X-Fi technology integrated in non-Creative headphones, although they will surely charge royalties for their use).