CreativeLabs USB Sound Blaster Audigy2 External Sound Card Sound System (70SB030000000)

First of all, you will hear the difference. I absolutely guarantee it. You're laptop (or default pc) audio cannot even begin to measure up to the awesome power of the Audigy. You will hear it the moment you plug this marvel into your USB port. Even your mundane and boring-to-the-death windows system sounds now carry a cadence that was simply not there before.The sound card supports 7.1 speakers (for hardcore gamers) as well as the more pedestrian 5.1 setup (like mine). the handling of surround sound is superb. The availability of EAX (the patented SoundBlaster HARDWARE sound package) provides for seemless transitions, and the direct hardware equalizer and on the fly effects are a tremendous bonus if you are planning to use this second sound card's output for DJ-ing (like i am).The fact that this has an independent power supply might seem inconvenient at first, and frankly... it is... There is a tradeoff, however... You will not believe how loud your speakers can actualy go now without distorting! Deafening. Almost like a pre-amp in that respect.The negative reviews for this card startle me. Jeff Rutsch is incorrect when he says the USB cable is short. Its 4 feet. Too long for me, actually... furthermore, if you want a 20 foot cable, go out and buy it! No issues whatsoever with magnetic shielding... Its a SoundBlaster for heaven's sake! I have also not had any problems with the installation (even though it took a good hour!) or recognition. It does help if you "Safely Remove" it and/or plug it in before booting up... Otherwise the remote does not always work properly. Also, talking about CD sound, Jeff (even if he is a computer guru, as he claims) did not do his homework. By default your CD-ROM drive converts the digital audio into analog for playback. If you do not adjust this setting, that is the way it will stay after you install the new hardware. Come on Jeff! That was both in the help file and the tutorial program! You should have read those!Woody Jin's comments also amuse me. There apparently is a white noise that you can't really hear, but its there. What??? :| If you can't hear it.. its not there by definition... Right?As a matter of fact my experience has been that my onboard laptop audio sounds like a woodsaw compared to this.... Actually the Audigy2 does not produce *any* background noise. At all...My only "problem" with this device is that it almost neccecitates a speaker upgrade... I am eagerly awaiting my new set of speakers right now, in order to better experience the explosive sound of the Audigy2 card...

This product is a waste of money and I can't strongly enough recommend users away from it. First, the sound quality is just not very high. I barely noticed an improvement from using the computer's on-motherboard sound. This product slightly, but definitely noticeably, gives off a clipped & distorted sound, like a poorly encoded MP3. In addition, this product isn't well magnetically shielded, and must be placed as far as possible from any other part of your computer - not so easy when it's packaged with such a short USB cord.Playing a CD through my computer and this soundcard, vs just playing the CD from a Discman, showed a night and day difference - the sound from this product can't compare. Running this product through recording software, even with short shielded wires, showed me a background hiss of -55 dB. Most consumer electonics will have S/N ratios a few orders of magnitude better than that. You wouldn't want to record your LP collection using this product, which is part of the reason I bought it.In addition, the product is buggy. It worked fine at the beginning, and then as I added to my computer and changed the system configuration, it would act very erraticly. If I plugged the device into different USB ports, it would have completely different behaviors, none of which were correct. The installation software is buggy, I've been caught it loops where trying to exit merely re-starts the installer!Creative's Support was very quick and attentive, but not helpful. I know computers well, and I've worked with plenty of hardware, but I've never experienced such a buggy product. As the product is so mediocre even when it is working, I can't recommend this product to anyone.

The sound quality seemed pretty good, it has lots of functions and decent software,plus digital outputs. Most of it is pretty unnecessary though, especially if you have a dvd player, i have a cheap one Apex-$40 which sounds as good if not better on the same speakers. As for recording, i only have a bad computer mike so its probably its fault. As another review will tell, this card seems to have a tendency of ceasing to function completely at for me 15 months of use. Search other options or risk an okay soundcard with a 7.5 month half-life----skip it.