The first compares the STX to the original titanium, not the Titanium HD.
Quoting from the first article too:
"As for the drivers, I have to speak to this. Both drivers suck. Many of you out there who have used Creative, Realtek or Asus will know that the drivers can be unreliable at any stage during ownership. Luckily, I didn't run into these issues, but I did notice that the Creative needed more driver fiddling than the Asus to get the same degree of sound quality. The ease of use of the Asus makes it better for those who know less about audio."
Meaning Creative drivers need fiddling to get the best audio quality out of them. Nothing serious.
I have the original titanium and I've never had any problems, besides the card stopping to work intermittently, that was 1 year ago, disable enable and it would work fine, it's been a year I never saw this problem again. It could have been due to anything, not necessarily drivers.
About ALChemy, it's only a piece of software that converted EAX calls to OpenAL calls, since Vista dropped support for EAX. That's all. It has ALWAYS worked with me. Always. (It isn't related to driver or driver issues).
The ones you hear majorly whining about Creative are those who used to try them on Nvidia chipsets. They used to hiss and crackle. This was due to the Nvidia chipset prioritizing PCI-E bandwidth and data for the graphics cards, choking the soundcard. Since these chipsets have stopped producing since 2008, it's no longer a valid point nowadays.
The second review concerns the xonar dx, when the Titanium HD was not yet released.
The third review concerns the Titanium HD, and look what they said in the article:
"We’ve seen similar specifications from both Asus and Auzentech, but this is Creative’s first attempt in recent years to focus on audio fidelity for music rather than gaming."
Creative focuses on audio fidelity.
"For music production, we prefer our Hercules DJ RMX console, while the Asus Xonar Essence STX is clearer for audio playback."
Meaning it's Titanium HD vs. STX, not vs DX, let alone vs DS.
"Even then, gamers will be better off with Asus’ Xonar DX, which has outputs for 7.1 analogue surround sound and great all-round audio quality."
Emphasis on "great all-round audio quality". Meaning the Xonar DX may be more suitable for gamers, not due to BETTER audio quality, but it can be done due to "great all-round audio quality".
Although we can probably guess that Shant needs it for gaming, he did not specify so. Titanium HD is good for music, for example. In terms of audio quality, it seems better than the DX, but less than the STX.
AND the STX is more expensive, around 170+.
This is my point.
