Creative Labs USB Sound Blaster X-Fi 70SB109000000 Surround 5.1

List Price: $115.50 Discount Price: $53.44

Features:

• X-Fi Crystalizer technology restores the detail and vibrance to your compressed music and movies. All the highs and lows are intelligently enhanced so you¿ll hear everything in crystal clarity.
• Slip on your headphones and X-Fi CMSS-3D technology moves the sound away from your ears and into the space around you. You¿ll feel like you¿ re sitting with your favorite band or in the best seat in the movie theater.
• Expand your stereo music and movies into surround sound with X-Fi CMSS-3D technology. Voices are centered in front of you. Ambient sound appears all around you... just like a live performance.
• Realistic sound effects in games Bullets whiz past your head. Explosions shake the room. Take your games to the next level with EAX ADVANCED HD sound effects.
• Cinematic surround sound from DVD movies Watch your DVDs in cinematic surround sound with PowerDVD software featuring DTS and Dolby Digital -EX decoding (free download with purchase).

Customer Reviews:

Nice Concept but would not do what I needed on my Notebook [Posted on 2008-09-15]
Creative has a great reputation with its products. I needed a USB input device to take the line out from my receiver and use that as input on my Dell Latitude D810 notebook. I am converting vinyl to mp3. I could never get enough gain to get a usable signal so I had to return this item. In other contexts this item may work fine but for me it was not suitable.

Waste of money if youre running Vista 32 or 64 bit!! [Posted on 2008-09-18]
I purchased this Creative Labs X-Fi 5.1 external sound card to watch movies on my new laptop based on Creatives reputation, past creative products and the reviews that I read here.

The good:
Playing music is awesome. Mp3 files trully do sound great.

The bad:
The previous reviewers must not have been running Windows Vista. (I'm running the 64 bit version). After plugging the card into my USB port, installing the the software, and plugging in my Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speaker system, I sat down to watch a movie. There is a terrible sound lag that makes watching a movie seem like you're watching a baddly dubbed foriegn film. The actors speak and the action happens before you hear the sound. I have tried to reinstall the software and drivers numerous times and the only way to correct the sound lag is uninstall the Creative software and drivers and go back to the Vista drivers. Unfortunately without Creatives drivers you loose the mp3 fuctions that make the music sound so good. Also, when using creatives software / sound card my cpu is really being worked hard sometimes up to 100% cpu usage when watching a dvd (it averages about 30 - 40% with music and nothing else running). I'm running a 2.0 ghz dual core processor with 4 gigs of ram???

I contacted Creative support over a week ago and have yet to get a reply. I am very unhappy with this sound card and with Creatives customer service. If you want to read more about the sound lag just check out creatives public forum, theres over 9 pages about this issue.

I've heard that if youre running Windows XP there is no lag. So if you are running XP or just want to listen to music this might be right for you. If your running Vista don't waste your money. Creative should not advertise that this is Vista compatable until they figure out this lag issue!!!

Works Great! [Posted on 2008-09-18]
I recently purchased a Gateway Desktop computer and it does not have all the necessary output puts for quality sound. I simply plugged this handy little machine into a free USB port and connected it to my Stereo with an Optical cable and now I have great sound.

Creative Labs USB Sound Blaster X-Fi 70SB109000000 Surround 5.1  [Posted on 2008-09-25]
I moved to take a new job. When I left, the sound worked fine on my desktop PC. However when I set it up at the new location, there was no sound. I tried everything, updating drivers, reinstalling sound devices, but nothing.

I finally decided that my sound card was bad. I ordered Creatives USB sound blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 and WOW! The sound came back and is now way better than before. I would highly recommend this for a great external sound card.

Excellent [Posted on 2008-09-28]
I was a bit skeptical b/c of the reviews on amazon and creatives website but that was due to a bad driver but since then Creative has a new driver that fixes the problem of audio lag and it works great. I now have full surround sound on my laptop through my logitech 5.1 speaker set.

This is a great product and I am so far satisfied.

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