Creative releases Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus Gaming Sound Card
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Cidious
How are these still viable? For that price. You get an external USB DAC that probably outperforms it by at least a bit.. I'm rocking a Topping D50s (or you can get a Khadas Toneboard for even way less) from an external power supply avoiding the messy power delivery from inside the PC and not wasting a PCI-E slot which are sparse on some boards to begin with.
I have no idea why Creative refuses to evolve.. If they would put their knowledge and research capacity into USB DACs instead of chasing the dead PCIE format they could still be a viable company... Change my mind.
sverek
Kaarme
I have a DAC headphone amplifier, needed for decent headphones. I connected it via optical, though, not usb, because I wanted to avoid the ground loop with the PC. Probably not an issue at all, but it eases my mind. In that sense the sound goes through the mobo audio circuits. But at the end of the day, the PC needs to decode the audio anyway, unless it's straight PCM. It's just computation, so it makes zero difference, unless there's a bug or other source of errors, since nothing of it is analog before the final output from the DAC-Amp. When you go all the way to analog, you should keep it out of the PC case.
Mufflore
RavenMaster
Seems kinda pointless to release a soundcard in this day and age which doesn't support Dolby Atmos or DTS-HD and doesn't have a HDMI ARC/eARC connection. So many modern soundbars and AV Receivers use ARC/eARC now for lossless hi-def audio. Even Creative's own high end soundbars use eARC now: https://us.creative.com/p/speakers/creative-sxfi-carrier
Mufflore
oops double post.
Mufflore
asturur
Also i do not want to sound rude or start an endless fight over high quality audio, but going lossless and output from a soundbar feels like an overkill.
I do not have great sophisticated ears, i cannot catch all the small differences in the output of expensive equipment, but how high end can a soundbar sound?, it can sound way better than a plain TV speajer i presume, but i m worried it stops there.
Mufflore
metagamer
Venix
Mufflore
Abc666
Soundcards are still relevant for some users, external USB soundcards still have way higher latency than internal pci/pci-e cards or onboard.
Anyway, creative would be the last place to look for a soundcard, they mess with the sound and remove it from the original sound. Last time i compared a soundblaster Z to Asus STX, the soundblaster was pure trash compared to the STX. Id rather use onboard soundcard than any card from creative.
RavenMaster
schmidtbag
It isn't clear to me if this does hardware or software processing. Creative has a knack for ruining perfectly good products by not releasing driver updates, but if this uses relatively generic drivers (by Creative's standards) and does all the fancy processing through hardware, this could be appealing. As a Linux user with a 5.1 surround setup, hardware DTS through SPDIF is very desirable.
I'd rather sacrifice a negligible amount of audio quality (for my setup) than latency. No additional space taken up with a PCIe card either. However, because of Creative's poor driver support (on any OS), I won't ever shop them.
sverek
DJLRADEON
a sound card on 2020 without an hdmi port ? how to get dts x and dolby athmos natively ? thanks to the integrated gpu it resolve the probleme and offer to me a second display to my yamaha av rciever with dolby athmos and 7.1 pcm
Mufflore
Witcher29
Still using an X7 here never ever i am going back to pci-e bs.
Sylencer
I got the normal AE-5 and im yet unsure if the card was worth it. My previous PC had one from Asus and i should've sticked with an Asus one tbh.