<p>Creative makes some of the best PC audio equipment on the market, especially for gamers, and the Sound Blaster Recon3D is no exception.</p>
<p>I've never really invested much in high-end sound cards, as I had previously found them to be not worth my money. However, the Recon3D has made me seriously reconsider my stance on audio cards in general. The hardware is spectacular, even if the software itself has room for improvement in certain places.</p>
<p>Creative makes some of the best PC audio equipment on the market, especially for gamers, and the Sound Blaster Recon3D is no exception.</p>
<p>I've never really invested much in high-end sound cards, as I had previously found them to be not worth my money. However, the Recon3D has made me seriously reconsider my stance on audio cards in general. The hardware is spectacular, even if the software itself has room for improvement in certain places.</p>
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I realize this is not all that related to the article but I was looking for a video capturing card to record some footage from my ps3, does anyone here know about a cheap piece of hardware I can buy?
save your high end sound card money and invest it in a better video card
Just bought a new PC on boxing day and I have an ASUS p8p67 pro b3 board and my 5.1 works just fine!
@article: Creative isn't that great, it's fantastic if you don't know any better. Better like the Asus Xonar for example and other cards.
All I do is game, listen to the odd song or two and plink around with making music and not once have I found the quailty to be poor enough to warrant an upgrade and I LOVE audio.....my car and home theatre system is where I splurge :)
I will never buy a Creative product again. If I ever need another sound card, it will likely be an Asus Xonar, or even more likely, the onboard.
It's like...every other Creative product, ever.
Good to see they haven't changed things up in the ten years since I last "enjoyed" using their drivers.
USB headsets have a built-in DAC to convert the digital signals from your USB port to analog signals that the speakers/drivers can output sound. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a built-in sound card.
This is a huge frustration with my Fatal1ty soundcard: the TOSLINK input will ONLY work with an unencrypted source. That's pointless to send 2-channel sound through an HD cord. I run a 7.1 channel setup, and I really want a soundcard that has a decrypting input.
TOSLINK/Optical connections only have bandwidth to pass 6.1 audio (compressed into Dolby Digital or DTS) or uncompressed stereo. It's not a drawback of your particular brand of soundcard. To take advantage of it, you have to "bitstream" the audio and let your receiver decode the audio, rather than have it be decoded on your computer first and sent out raw.
I have a Creative Soundblaster Platinum, and play 6.1 DTS audio just fine through Optical. Are you running Windows 7/Vista? If so, find the "playback" section of your sound device settings in Windows and set the "SPDIF Out" as your Default Device. Now DTS/Dolby based media will play in full surround.
With uncompressed multichannel sources (PC games) it gets a little more complicated. What I used to do for gaming (before I used HDMI bistreaming via my video card) is compress the audio source in realtime, with Creative's "DTS Connect" software. I bought it for $5. For years I was unaware DTS Connect existed and was relying on Dolby Prologic on my reciever to make a guess and do faux-surround for me.
I may forget to check back here in case you reply, PM me here or just hit me on Twitter @blassster.
Here is the link to DTS Connect:
http://us.store.creative.com/Dolby-Digital-Live-and-DTS-Connect/M/B006GK76QE.htm
If you pursue this route, turn Windows and your game's volume down to 20% or so if you experience distortion. Also, make sure Speakers is set as your default audio output device when running DTS Connect.
Hope this helps.
Creative lives off of name only these days.
I got them over time from other reviews. They're currently set up in a RAID0 array.