#Sound blaster software review install#
#Sound blaster software review driver#
#Sound blaster software review windows#

#Sound blaster software review driver#

I have a small desire to pull out my old Turtle Beach Santa Cruz 5.1 PCI card from my box of retired computer parts (got a good 4 years out of that in the early 2000s) and see if it still works, but driver concerns make me not want to try (I still have a PCI slot on this motherboard I think).Once again, the main tab of the Sound Blaster Command software is nothing less than overcrowded with a plethora of available settings. Not to imply that all cards will die, since there are a lot of good reviews around the internet for this card (hence why I bought it in the first place), just adding two data points. I figured they wanted to find a way to blame me because obviously it must be user error or my computer for two to die, right? Ignore the fact that this computer has been using other PCIe cards for about 4 years with no problems, and I've never had any other card die since I started building my own computers 15+ years ago. I had a hassle returning the second card for a refund because I was outside the 30 day window of the original purchase (due to the two weeks it took for the original RMA), but I complained a bit to customer support at Newegg and they eventually let me return it.Д¬reative replied to my bad review at Newegg asking for me to contact them and troubleshoot, but I no longer had any desire to have the card and ignored the request. After an RMA the second card worked for about another week or two, then stopped sending any music and just popped and hissed a bit. Same effect with both front and back ports. The problem I had was that after about a week the output got really scratchy with heavy distortion at a medium volume output and the OS volume control stopped working completely. This got me disappointed at the start because I'd just spent the money to try to improve my sound and I couldn't hear any difference (outside of using their EQ or other software settings). Honestly couldn't specifically identify any differences, but I had to remove the card to get the onboard to work, so it was a couple minutes between listening so anything small had no chance to be found. Using my AKG K612 headphones (120ohm / 101dB sensitivity), I did some basic listening comparisons between using the SBZ headphone outs and my onboard Gigabyte implementation of ALC889 (including the onboard going through my Tapco mixer as an amp, which just seemed to add a bit of hiss when I turned it up past normal listening levels). I had two copies of this card last year (yes, that's a bad sign already). I dialed it down a bit and that produced good results: Certainly reason enough for me to avoid using it but let's measure it anyway.ДЇull output was a bit above required 2 volts and caused a lot of distortion. Overall software experience is as bad as one would expect from Creative.

#Sound blaster software review windows#

So I had to rely on ASIO4ALL layer on top of its low level stock windows driver. Its ASIO interface would not work and kept saying the device was not there or some such thing. It added an auto-update which immediately told me there were critical updates available even though I just downloaded the rest of the stuff! For grins, I let it try to update, only to have it fail catastrophically with bad error dialog boxes, etc. It installed a bunch of stuff with yet another interface than their other boards. Installation of the crapware package was not smooth. I almost gave up but decided to re-seat the board and try again.

#Sound blaster software review install#

Despite said lights on first install, Windows did not recognize it and the 150 megabyte package of crapware from Creative refused to install anything saying there is no hardware. Alas, that didn't help me much in getting it working. It has some red LEDs that come on when powered on.