The journey of X-Fi spanned across the millennium from its humble beginnings in 1989 as a sound card for the PC called the Sound Blaster.

X-Fi is not just another super-good sound card. It's not just about delivering better audio, it's not just about adding more features, it's not just about higher performance; (we've done all that and this time, we've done it even better) - it's about a paradigm shift in digital entertainment.

It's not just about how you'll listen to audio; it's also about how we'll make audio 'listen' to you. X-Fi is not just a better Hi-Fi.

It will definitely change the way you perceive audio and the way you use audio. After savouring X-Fi, you'll never want to go back to your old Hi-Fi anymore.

But X-Fi is Xtreme Fidelity.

The implications for X-Fi are far and wide-reaching; and they're going to be extreme. Besides setting a whole new standard for digital audio, X-Fi is set to win the hearts of all other digital audio devices, simply because it is so, so damn good.

X-Fi has made numerous claims; one simple but seemingly incredulous claim is that all your compressed and truncated MP3 music will sound better and livelier than its original. Sounds too good to be true? You have every right to be doubtful. It is an extreme claim. But, as you may see, in digital audio, we've come a long, long way. Please let me elucidate...

250 million-plus Sound Blasters ago...

In the fall of 1989, the first Sound Blaster was born. It was only an 8-bit mono-channel sound card. To me, its audio was so bad that I had to specifically select cheap and poor speakers for playback, so that I could mask out some of the harsh artifacts of the coarse 8-bit audio. But for all the PCs of that era, Sound Blaster was a godsend, for it gave a 'voice' to all the dumb PCs. And Sound Blaster rapidly became the de facto audio standard for PCs.

Even though the first Sound Blaster could already perform some audio 'miracles' back then, it was only driven by a very, very tiny audio processor unit (APU). It had only about 100 thousand transistors and 1 MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) of processing power. Worse still, we could hardly afford any IP (intellectual properties) protection for it. The only patented IP on it was the OPL2 FM music synthesis chip, but the chip was from Yamaha Corporation, the king of audio during those days. Our only protection was through the trade secret process. Inevitably, the Sound Blaster was blatantly copied by many competitors to our detriment.

In order to secure our future, I knew that we had to invest more into R&D and hence, as our company grew, our commitment to digital audio research grew stronger and stronger over the years. I will always feel indebted to the 250 million-plus Sound Blaster users, for without their support, the X-Fi would just be an implausible dream.