INTRODUCTION

   Even though I’m not really old i happen to be old school so if you've been following my reviews then you should be well aware that I’m not that much into wireless PC peripherals. Sure, several significant technological leaps have in large part closed the gap between wired and wireless peripherals but i always feel more "confident" when using the former rather than the latter. Still i can't really deny that some manufacturers have released several impressive wireless gaming peripherals with no equal wired counterparts. Thanks to their highly acclaimed proprietary Super X-Fi technology Creative has been one of the most popular PC manufacturers for the past year or so and since many of you asked today with us, we have one of their 2nd generation models, the SXFI Theater Super X-Fi Low-Latency Wireless Headphones (GH0380B).

   Creative is a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products. Famous for its Sound Blaster® sound cards and for driving the multimedia revolution - which established a user base of 400 million - Creative drives digital entertainment with cutting-edge audio solutions that include premium wireless speakers, wireless headphones, powerful audiophile-grade digital amplifiers and next-generation home-theatre systems. Aiming at the new mobile networked generation by bridging the worlds of the computer, smartphones, and tablets, Creative continues to reinvent the Sound Blaster, with its ground-breaking Sound Blaster Roar series and USB-audio class of products such as the Sound Blaster X7.

   What makes the Super X-Fi headsets by Creative stand out compared to the competition is their ability to "fool" our ears into believing that the sound comes from an external multi-channel professional speaker system. This is actually a two-step procedure with the first requiring the end user to map his/her head and ear shape via a smartphone app. According to Creative this scan extracts and provides hundreds of anthropometric parameters to an artificial intelligence (AI) engine which via complex algorithms and computationally intensive techniques synthesizes a multidimensional map of the desired room acoustics. That's not all however the SXFI Theater model has up its sleeve since it also packs two 50mm neodymium dynamic drivers (frequency response of 20Hz-20KHz with 32Ohm impedance and 114dB sensitivity), low-latency 2.4GHz wireless technology (with a range of up to 10m/33ft in open space), 3.5mm wired connectivity (Super X-Fi enhancements can't be used with this), detachable uni-directional microphone (100Hz-8KHz frequency response with 2.2KOhm impedance and sensitivity of -42dB), fully customizable RGB LED ring and a 1300mAh (3.7V) rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack which can provide up to 30 hours of playback time (LED ring off). This is actually my very first contact with Creative's Super X-Fi technology so let's move forward with today's review.