Up next in 10
Gain Super Hearing with the Creative Zen Air SXFI Earbuds -- DEMO & REVIEW
555 views
Sep 20, 2024
Great Active Noise Cancelling (ANC), super long battery life, cool design, but what really stands out with the Creative Zen Air SXFI is Super X-Fi Spatial Audio. Except when audio geek Dave Taylor checked it out, he found that the earbuds worked really well but the Super-X Fi wasn't as stunning as he hoped. Includes detailed demos and lots of screen captures too... Check it out at: https://amzn.to/4cF1Vm3 Visit Dave's Q&A Web site at: https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ #creative #creativeaudio #superxfi #sxfi #earbuds #anc #zenair #creativezen #askdavetaylor
View Transcript
0:00
These earbuds have a lot of tech inside
0:02
Let's check them out. Dave Taylor here, and I'm checking out these
0:12
Let me open this up for you. These are the Creative Zen Air SX-F-I earbuds
0:19
and they feature Super X-Fi spatial audio. But we'll come back to that
0:25
Let me start out by giving you a close-up. You can see they're pretty chunky earbuds
0:29
but they feature 10 millimeter neodymium drivers. They have AAC and SBC support, active noise cancellation
0:39
Bluetooth 5.3, they're IPX5, so if you're super sweaty, while you're on a run with these in your ears, it's not a worry
0:48
And the earbuds, because they're a little bit bigger, have a little bit bigger batteries and they can run for 12 hours
0:54
just by themselves, put them in the case, and you've got a couple more charges giving you
0:59
a total of about 39 hours. When you need to charge them, USBC on the bottom
1:06
or it does actually support wireless chi charging, if that's your thing
1:10
Now, one of the cool things is that they are super comfortable
1:15
and it is already connected with my phone, which is super great
1:22
and they have six microphone voice pickup. So, as a first demo, let's just go into voice
1:29
voice on my phone and what you're hearing now is my voice as picked up by the creative
1:44
Zen Air XXFI or X-Fi I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce that but you can hear
1:50
it does a really nice job with the audio pickup now let me stop this because there's
1:57
much more to look at because there are two different apps. Let me take these out
2:03
They are pretty good at sealing my ear, so it does give me that sort of weird plugged ear effect
2:10
which is not entirely pleasant. It's great for listening, but I found that when I was on the phone
2:16
it was a sort of awkward experience. They have a pass-through mode in some devices
2:22
and I haven't been able to figure out if this has something like that where it a more normal sound of your own voice but I did have a phone call unusual for me to actually use my phone as a phone And the person on the other end said I sounded crystal clear
2:37
So that was good to know. But it comes with two apps. So there's the creative app
2:42
And that's the one you're going to want to use to manage all of the settings on the earbuds themselves
2:47
So let's jump into that. And let's see, that's this one. And so you can see that it
2:54
It gives you access to a lot of features. You have equalizer and they have a lot of custom equalizers that you can just pick one
3:03
I really likes the footsteps enhancer. One can only presume that's for gaming mode
3:10
And then ambient control lets you focus and work on the ANC settings that you prefer
3:17
And you can see there's adaptive. There's also ambient mode. And you can also adjust how much you want, which is really handy
3:24
And then custom buttons. So you can decide what happens. These are touch sensitive sides as is usual with this device or these type advices
3:34
And you can decide what happens. If I double tap on the left, then here are the different options of what I can enable or disable
3:42
which I find really helpful. So all of that's really cool. This is really nice
3:48
It's really easy to work with. Where this gets interesting is if we switch into the Super X
3:54
spatial audio. Now, I already have some music chosen, so let's go all the way back to the very
4:01
beginning here. So you can see it's selected these earbuds, and now I can browse music, I can
4:09
personalize, and I've already done this. Personalizing is super interesting because what you're doing
4:14
is you're actually taking pictures of each ear and of your face, and then it's figuring out a 3D model
4:22
And then it's coming up with a custom equalization setting for your head shape
4:29
So notice what's happening on the bottom, personalizing your Zen Air, right
4:35
So this is one of the issues I have with this is that every time I enable this feature
4:41
it then re-downloads that setting to my earbuds. And I don't really understand why
4:47
It seems like that's probably a bug in the software. But I can go here
4:51
I can browse music I can go into just pick electronic and we can go here And so now when I playing this music from Wendy Carlos if I put my earbuds in and what I could do is I could enable or
5:08
disable that super x-fi and let me get to another track okay here we go
5:20
tangerine dream better choice and it's actually pretty interesting. So you can see the super x phi app is a separate thing and where it gets kind of cool is that once you have this configured, you can go into headphone selection
5:41
And let's see. Oh, it won't let me do that because I have these earbuds. Let me put them in the case. I should disconnect them
5:50
and you could actually use this feature once you've set it up with any device of this enormous list
5:59
So you can see there's this huge list of supported devices including things like the Apple AirPods
6:06
So this is another way to get spatial audio through Super X-Fi
6:11
There's a lot that's really interesting about this. And having said all of that, and the intent of it is that it's supposed to give you more depth
6:20
and more soundstage and everything. But in practice, I found that it actually wasn't as pleasant sounding as having that
6:29
feature disabled. So the earbuds, I think, are really nice. They have a really nice sound stage
6:37
They have a really warm presence. And there's plenty of bass to go around if you really like to turn on those lower frequencies
6:45
But when I switched into Super X-Fi, I found that things got a little
6:50
little more tinny. It did give me more depth, but it wasn't as pleasant a musical experience
6:56
I will admit, this is a personal preference. Your experience may differ completely, and you might
7:03
turn on Super X-Fi and say, oh, wow, that is awesome. But my personal experience is that I really
7:10
like these earbuds. They have really nice ANC and really nice sound reproduction and enormous amounts
7:17
증 battery, but I prefer them without that super x-fi enabled. So it worth pointing out that it is also a really cool metal interior case And it comes with four sizes of ear tips It comes with this little cloth bag
7:37
And of course, in addition to the ear tips, it also has, as you would expect, a USBC
7:43
It's actually a USBA to USBC charging cable. And here's the other sizes of eartips
7:49
So I guess there's three sizes total. They have plenty of documentation
7:53
so they're not going to leave you hanging. So ultimately, it gets down to your personal listening preferences
8:02
My experience is that really nice earbuds, really comfortable, they work really well, still trying to fine tune that experience on phone calls
8:12
which I don't have very often, but I'm not a huge fan of the Super X-Fi
8:18
Now, this is a relatively new technology, so it's possible I'll get an update
8:23
on my app or something and then lo and behold it will just suddenly sound a lot better and there's lots of
8:30
settings in super x-fi that you can experiment with to try to get better results so that's really what
8:37
i got here i think that these are really worthwhile earbuds i think at the price they have a remarkable
8:43
amount of technologies including anc including six microphones for really good audio pickup and including
8:51
really nice sound reproduction. Even if you never try the super x-fi, I think you'd be a very happy
8:57
camper if you had these in your ears. So we need to talk about price. Before we get there
9:04
I'm going to ask you to subscribe to my channel. Click on that subscribe button, hit that bell icon
9:09
for notifications. Give me a thumbs up if you found this of value, and of course I hope you did
9:14
Excellent. These are the Creative Zen Air SX-X-F-I earbuds, and they're are 799 at amazon.com for under $80 full ANC with really good sound reproduction these are a really
9:32
solid option definitely worth checking out that's all I got hope to catch you in my next video
#Audio Equipment
# Computers & Electronics