There's no denying that when you hear Creative Labs, one's mind will automatically acknowledge superior audio products for home, pc and gamers. It's time for a revamp at Creative this time of the year with various lineups are being issued the latest additions and technologies. New products have been released and launched, such as the new X-Fi SoundCard series (to be reviewed soon), Zen mosaic and the product that today we'll taking a closer look at, the new Zen X-Fi Portable Media Player.   

First impressions makes one realise how much this version resembles the Creative Zen we reviewed way back in November of 2007. Keeping to the same release date, a year after, the new Zen keeps much of the older player, but adds some nifty features to make it fit into the X-Fi branded products that spreads over different lineups. 

For those new to the scene, X-Fi (Xtreme Fidelity) is Creative's latest audio experience, and has been the way forward for 3 year snow. The first product in the X-Fi Range was the SoundBlaster X-Fi, which offered superior audio quality, fidelity, and environmental effects over the Audigy series. Apart from EAX 5.0, the forte of this card were the X-Fi elements, mainly the Crystalizer , which is a hardware-level enhancements to the audio stream making separate sounds enhanced in their own right; CMSS-3D concerns positional audio in virtual space, where surround audio can be virtualized on stereo setup and 2 channel audio can be upmixed to sound best on surround channels.   

When you see an X-Fi branded product from Creative, you'll know what you should be expecting from the product. When I first glanced at this item, keeping these 2 distinct features in mind, I expected superior audio quality of highly compressed MP3s and movies, with restored peaks of certain tonalities, and even surround simulation of movies played on the Zen with a pair of headphones. We'll see if this holds later on in the testing page.