INTRODUCTION

   The move by all motherboard manufacturers to include low-cost (in most cases at least) onboard sound cards just over a decade ago may have been a good indication that audio was not nearly as crucial/important as graphics for most consumers and gamers but there's always been many who disagree and for those people there's one name that has been around since it all begun back in the late 80's and early 90's, Creative Labs (Creative now). It may have already been almost 30 years but it feels like yesterday that i got my hands on the Sound Blaster 16 model (remember, back then there was no integrated audio so to have sound you needed an ISA card - or a PCI card later on) followed by the AWE32 and AWE64 models (and eventually the entire Audigy series) so due to my very long history with their products I’ve always kept an eye out for updates by Creative. The Sound Blaster AE-9 Hi-Res PCIe Sound Card is their latest flagship model and it's been plugged on our primary test rig for almost 3 weeks now.

   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.

   The Sound Blaster AE-9 was developed by Creative with a simple goal in mind, to overwhelm the PC audio market with its specifications and features. To that end Creative equipped the Sound Blaster AE-9 with the audiophile-grade 8-channel ES9038PRO SABRE (current flagship of the ESS PRO series) DAC (digital-to-audio converter) which supports 32-bit stereo (analog output) playback at 384kHz (129dB SNR and THD of just 0.0001%) and the 8-channel SABRE9006A DAC which supports 24-bit discrete 5.1 surround sound (analog & optical output) playback at 192kHz. For optimal audio results Creative paired the ES9038PRO SABRE DAC with Nichicon fine-gold capacitors, swappable OP-AMPS (left and right channels are amplified separately), clearline technology (shields the card against voltage rail issues and microphone noise) and an external audio control module (ACM) which can be used both as a headphone amplifier and as an audio input device (6-pin power connector required). It also goes without saying that through their command software Creative has packed numerous features in the Sound Blaster AE-9 including a very detailed equalizer with 34 different presets, their various filters (virtual surround, crystallizer, crystal voice, bass and scout) and the very popular Dolby Audio and DTS Connect encoders (S/PDIF only).