I have to admit, when I first saw the Creative Xmod I thought it was just another gimmick. I thought to myself how you would take an existing file and make it sound better, let alone claim to make it sound “studio quality”. Compressed music takes a lot out of the music in order to achieve smaller file sizes. Compression has gotten a lot better over the years but even the best loss-less files result in about 50MB files for 4 minutes of music. Most compression such as MP3 and AAC formats use lossy compression, meaning you will compromise sound quality for smaller file size. I figured for $60 I would give the Creative Xmod a shot and see if it offers what it claims.

From previous reviews, people seemed to be pretty happy with the product. This gave me another reason to try out the product. I figured if I liked it I would let lightenment users know and the same goes if I didn’t like the product. The Creative Xmod claims to make your music sound better through speakers or headphones, make your MP3s sound better than your CDs, and offer surround sound through two speakers or headphones.

The package comes with the Xmod, some earbuds I’ll probably never use, a USB cable and a case. It is a pretty small unit for those using it with a portable MP3 player or a laptop. The only problem with using it with a standalone MP3 player is that you need to purchase a USB power adapter, which also means it’s not totally portable. For those using a laptop or desktop computer the unit is powered through the USB port.

I used the Xmod with my iMac and Mac OS X recognized the Xmod in the Sound control panel immediately. It’s unusual that the volume knob on the unit is digital, but it only controls the alert volume on my Mac. This isn’t too much of an issue since I like to control volume on my Logitech Z-2300s. The line-out and USB ports are on the back and on the front there is a line-in and headphone jack. The buttons are aligned along the side to control the X-Fi Crystalizer and X-Fi CMSS 3D, while the volume knob of course is on the top. Blue LEDs indicate on and off for the unit as well as the Crystalizer and 3D features.

I kept both the X-Fi Crystalizer and X-Fi CMSS 3D features on. To my surprise, my music did sound a lot better. Highs were a lot crisper and lows seemed to be a lot more precise. I listened to quite a few tracks and all different genres of music. Movie playback seemed to be good as well. I was afraid the music in the movie would wash out the actors voices, but this was not the case.

Now I don’t know if the sound is studio quality, but the sound of my Logitech Z-2300s are very good and it sounded much better after adding the Creative Xmod. It was as though I had just bought a new better set of speakers. It was well worth the upgrade and would recommend it to users. Now keep in mind it’s only $60. It won’t bring a symphony into your home office, but it will improve the sound quality of the music stored on your computer. If you are looking to upgrade your sound card, it is a whole lot better than the one built into my Macs. When I used to built my own PCs I almost always used Creative cards. They seemed to be ahead of the curve most of the time. I’m pretty happy with my purchase and enjoy the musical experience on a daily basis.