Where the Xonar D1 takes off into orbit is with multi-channel audio! The implementation of Dolby Headphone and Dolby Virtual Speaker work a lot better than Creative's CMSS-3D. This means that games and movies sound incredible from headphones, something that is important if you like to play games or watch movies late at night. I do, that's why I bought reference headphones and made my own headphone amplifier, so that I can enjoy high quality audio at any time of the day. With the Xonar D1, I can now enjoy high quality surround sound at unsociable hours. The EAX implementation, in the form of DS3D GX, is not exactly as good as Creative's hardware EAX, but it comes close, and I prefer the Xonar's Dolby Headphone + DS3D GX to the X-Fi's CMSS-3D + EAX. You would laugh if you saw me during this review, regularly trying to turn my speaker amplifier down in fear of waking the neighbours, when I was actually listening to headphones!