SXFI App

Latest update found my Zen Hybrid 2 headphones automatically. I previously rated this app with 1 star because nothing seemed to work. The built in music player is still completely broken, and should just be removed entirely from the app. It seems like once my headphones’ SXFI capabilities were enabled, they started sounding better in other music apps like  Music. Confusingly, there is also a Creative app that provides equalizer functions, which overlap with the SXFI app equalizer, not to mention iOS always has equalizer presets. As someone who has taken college courses on DSP and signal filtering and op amps, the overlap of equalizers makes my head hurt. Anyway, I bringing the rating up to a 3 because it recognizes my Creative headphones now and that seems to have enabled them to “play nice” with other Spatial Audio technologies like Dolby Atmos. Before that happened, the headphones sounded intentionally muffled and too bass heavy with or without Spatial Audio enabled, like a piece of cardboard between the ear and the speaker.

I’m not even gonna mention the pathetic uselessness of this bloatware, other reviewers already covered that. But tell me, have YOU tried to take a picture of your ear that has to line up perfectly with some arbitrary shape on the screen ? Here’s a hint - in my family we suffer from lack of EYEBALLS on our EARS. Please go ahead try it yourself and let me know how that went … how many tries it took YOU to give up on this solution looking for a problem ?

The app doesn’t even have a way to browse the local file system to look for music. I asked their tech support what sources they will support for music and how to download it, and they told me to ask Apple. I asked why they can’t use network-attached storage with a protocol like WebDAV, as other vendors do, and they disconnected the chat. Lousy software. Lousy support.