Yeah, if I turn off CMSS 3D, then can't really tell if sound is coming from behind in DirectSound3D / OpenAL games with headphones.

To my ears at least, it seems their 3D effect in Sens_oal.dll sounds better. But that implementation has other oddities, EAX reverb may be too pronounced, The Suffering for instance, that doesn't even use EAX, sounds reverby all the time, when I launch Mafia 1, the sound when profile menu shows up, is reverby. It's just weird.

Perhaps long term, the future is in OpenAL Soft. Creative may as well be considered dead as a company at this point. I've read of people having problems with their X-Fi drivers and just giving up on them on Win10 machines. As for my experience with Audigy RX, it's easy to get the driver to bring the OS down, can't unload the damn thing without BSOD. Doesn't matter if it's Windows XP or 11...

Just exercising its OpenAL a bit with MetaAudio plugin (Half-Life) kills EAX permanently until reboot. I mentioned Amnesia: The Dark Descent before. It's a buggy fragile mess. Their legacy cards may as well be considered a paper weight with no future. Or you think someone will come up with full-featured drivers that don't suck? Given the obscurity of these cards alone, it seems unlikely.

SansPlomb95 wrote on Today, 19:25:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-15, 15:20:

Sadly, due to having only Vista+ drivers, my X-Fi Titanium HD THX is a beautiful lemon - an anomaly that existed only for the small number of users who didn't see Microsoft's trap.

I believe there is a working custom WinXP driver from DanielK for the Titanium HD, this card still uses an E-MU 20K2 chip after all.
I might have tried it myself two years ago but I completely forgot the outcome, I think it worked as expected.

I would be very interested to know if anybody here has successfully installed drivers for Titanium Hd in Windows Xp. The only thing that is certain is that in Daniel K' latest support pack there is a footnote saying that Titanium Hd is not supported in Windows Xp, on the other hand in previous packs by him that footnote is omitted. That has led some to believe that his older drivers might support the T-Hd in Xp, but from my search through various forums i have yet to find someone to confirm this, in fact in think i have stumbled upon a couple of cases where it was supposedly confirmed that it doesn't work in Xp.