today on my video blog we're going to unbox the azente xfi home theater HD so
this is the very first sound card or
well I think there's one other one but this is the first one to do it correctly
for support for Dolby true HD and DTS HD
Master audio so what that means is when you're playing back a Blu-ray movie
there's absolutely no down sampling you are getting the audio exactly as it is
recorded most sound cards are not able to do that so let's get this unboxing
going on another thing it's got listed on the front is that it's support it's
got support for HDMI 1.3 HD audio pass
through so here we go this is an xfi
card so that means that it's using the creative xfi chip and let's get it
started here so oh on the side this is even labeled for us check that out so we
got the bundle pack and then we have the xf5 home theater HD so why don't we do
the bundle pack first we just yeah we'll do that okay so let's find out just
exactly what comes with this sound card
it's a very expensive sound card so it better come with some good quality audio
and some good accessories here so first of all we have our breakout cable so
this is where you're going to get all of your standard analog connections so you
got your side front rear sub line in and
mic ports and those all come out of kind of a serial looking Jack on the sound
card okay so then we have an optical cable this is kind of a sweet looking
optical audio cable because yeah it's clear that's that's
pretty neat actually okay next we have a
DVI to HDMI adapter okay so it comes
right with one of those that's pretty awesome and then we have an HDMI cable
this looks like it's about a 6t cable 6t HDMI cable and then we have oh this is
interesting okay so sorry that was a toss link fiber optic digital cable and
and then this is the adapter for it so there we go now now we've clarified that
okay so what else do we find in here here's your installation CD so that's
got your drivers on it you're probably going to want to download the latest drivers for something like this anyway
then you've got a little pamphlet including a 10% discount at uh
cyberlink.com so you can grab power dvd9 which you will need for blu-ray playback
it's not done natively in Windows Vista or Windows 7 and then we will find a
quick installation guide so wow that doesn't seem all that quick but it's in
multiple languages so let's focus down on what we're actually going to be using
here which is English for me anyway so that just shows you where to plug in all
of the stuff to the back of the card that's very interesting let's get the card out now all right so here we are
pulling out careful the sound you are about to hear is extremely real that is
an awesome warning and I love it okay
here is the sound card itself the home theater HD quality assurance seal let's
take that right off quality is no longer assured no I'm just kidding that's not
how it works okay there is the back of
the card so the first thing you notice about this is that it is a PCI Express
1X card now you can use a PCI Express 1X
card in any PCI Express slot whether it's 1X 4X 8X 16x so that's really good
flexibility there here is the analog IO so that's where we plug in that breakout
cable we saw before this is
the headphone out or it's right there so
does this card actually have an amplified headphone jack is the question
that I should be asking myself uh yes it
does this has an onboard headphone amplifier so that's terrific if you're
using headphones that have um a high
impedance okay so digital out is right here then we've got our HDMI out and our
HDMI in so what that means is from your video card you're going to go DVI out
into the HDMI in here and then it's going to add the audio so that's where
you're getting the lossless audio algorithms added basically it's it's um
it's an encryption device basically so you can't do it with any previous sound
card because that's where it's all done is right on the sound card then HDMI out
will carry the video from the DVI the audio that's been added by the processor
on the sound card out to your receiver so let's have a look at the front of the
card here so here's where you're going to find your front plugins so if you
were to plug in any um I believe creative has like a front
Bay that you can plug into that uh right here we've got a spit if in so if you
have to plug one of those in that'll go there at the top there's a few little
fingers and to be perfectly honest I'm not sure what those are for and then
right here this is one of the features that azex cards are very famous for so
this is a swappable stop U socket for
your opamp so what that means is that you can actually take this out if you
prefer a different one to put in there so a lot of guys are doing out with
these cards anyway that's pretty much it for the xfi home theater HD thank you
for checking out my video blog