From an old thread...
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/soundblaster-x-fi/index.x?pg=3
Frequency Response - White is original flat sine wave.
Intermodulation Distortion (time domain high frequency ringing)
The Crystalizer looks alot like the "happy face" equalizer preset used in the 1980s in the West Coast. They called it "West Coast Sound," which was thumpy bass and shrill highs (changing the sound of the original recording).
Why does it sound good with the Crystalizer? Maybe:
1) you just like your sound that way, 80s style West Coast.
2) your speakers aren't very accurate (please don't take this as an insult, its just another postulation), perhaps because the drivers are too small to accurately reproduce the original recording.
So by equalizing it, it's more accurate than before. This helps alot if the speakers lack a large enough woofer for the low end and tweeters for the high end.
The graphs do show the side effect of such aggresive equalizing, which is very high amounts of intermodulation distortion. IMD also can occur from various other things like the gimmicky gaudy wattage numbers amplifiers were sporting in the 70s and 80s due to a technique called negative feedback, where the power was looped back several times. The effect of IMD is high frequency distortion. Not everyone is very perceptive of high frequency distortion, while others are (see owners of aluminum-based tweeters or midrange drivers).
3) You are sort of a genre specific music listener (or gamer) and the EQ helps make that type of music sound good to your ears. While these exaggerations might be fatiguing with other music, it doesn't really affect you based on your usage.
Q) does anyone no if you can configure the remote that came with it to skip from one track to the next because at the moment i have to come out of the game i am playing to change tracks?
You can bind keys on your keyboard using programs like Girder, or your keyboard drivers, to the change song/stop/pause functions on your media player.
Q)if i rip my cd's at 320kbps instead of the default 128kbps format will they be twice as good? the higher the better right?
Depends on the recording. The higher the dynamic range of the original recording, the more a higher bitrate matters in terms of preserving detail. On low dynamic range recordings like pop (or anything thats really loud and has exceeded the CDs 144db dynamic range because too much gain is applied), it would most likely matter less. Trial and error.
Q) is mp3 the best quality of fomat i can rip out of mp3 asf and wav?
It's the most prevalent. Best quality format? According to the spectrographs mp3s hold up very well in higher bitrates, but is not one of the better compressed formats at lower bitrates. I'm not too sure how it holds up specifically to those two formats however.