Road gamers who have the scratch they need to buy an insane SLI / PhysX enabled notebook might not be all that happy with the sound performance they have been getting out of on board speakers - there's only so much air small speakers can push. So the arrival of these cans from Creative could be music gunshots and shell casings to the ears.

The Creative Aurvana X-Fi Noise-Cancelling headphones will do what any headphones do, but now you also get the X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio technology in the mix too. Fancy name, but what's it mean? There's an intelligent 'Crystallizer' engine to replace missing areas of compressed audio, plus the critical 'CMSS-3D' surround speaker system every hardcore freako gamer demands.

A nice touch is the on-board controls for volume as well as independent on-off for noise cancellation, the Crystallizer engine, and the CMSS-3D. Two AAAs will run the headphones for nine hours, but they'll run without any of the special features if the batteries are dead. Every set comes with an iPhone-compatible extension cable (though it sounds like it extends your cable to 3m - not very 'on the road' friendly?), plus airline adapter. $399.95 is the Xtreme price point. Specs after the jump.