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Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Opamp Upgrade
RayvenX 21 May 2007

 Pricing of
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LM4562s Galore!

This mod depends heavily on your ability to solder small, surface mount components and will obviously invalidate any remaining factory warranty on your card. OCWorkbench and the author of this article accept no responsibility for the failure of the modification process. We do not recommend that you attempt this mod unless you are totally confident with your soldering skill.

The best thing to do if you're not experienced with PCB-level soldering is to take some old hardware you would otherwise dispose of and experiment with de-soldering and re-soldering components on the board until you can get a clean, shiny & tidy solder joint on every leg of the SMT component you just soldered with no crossed traces. You will probably find this mod much easier using some de-soldering wick and will most certainly need some very thin solder (of which you will only add a minuscule amount to each leg of the IC). These instructions apply to any 'full height' SB X-Fi card. The Xtreme Audio is not a 'true' X-Fi card, and I've not seen any of the half-height Xtreme Gamer cards to know if they use a similar analogue stage.

Firstly, you will need your choice of OPAMP. I used a National Semiconductor LM4562 in SMT packaging (full part number is LM4562MA for the SOIC part, which is what you want) because it's very highly regarded by Audiophiles. You can get them as samples from National Semiconductor themselves or alternatively, they should be available from good electronic component distributors in your country. Of course, if you chose to use a different OPAMP, you need to ensure that the pin-out, size and electrical tolerances are suitable. I will leave you to do your own research but it is the general consensus that you will find it hard to do any better than the recommended part. Most will only want to replace the main line-out channel's opamp and as such only need 1. If you aim to replace all of the output channels, you will need 4 of these. If you record with your card and want to do the line-in as well, you will need 5, and that's a lot of soldering! For the purpose of this article, I only replaced the main line-out channel's opamp since I only use 2 speakers.

Picture of the victim card

This card is out victim for today's work; an HP OEM SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Music. One of the later production runs complete with heatsink, it is identical to the retail card but for lacking the largely irrelevant AD_EXT and SB_IO connectors at the far end of the card.

Locations of the opamps on an X-Fi card

This images shows the locations of the opamps on the X-Fi card; likely you will want to replace just the front line out, labeled in green if you do not use surround sound or care too much about the line in recording quality. All of the opamps are interchangeable, despite being a different size and model numbers. The LM4562 is a suitable replacement for all. Obviously, replace as many or as few as suits you. Ensure you retain the correct orientation of the part, otherwise your time soldering it on will be wasted! Work slowly and ensure that your connections are clean. A good solder join is visibly shiny. If you have problems with the output after changing the opamp go back and check your connections for continuity to the nearest component with a multimeter. The slightest fault in the connection can result in no sound or sound heavily biased to one channel.

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