USB Sound Blaster Card From Creative – Laptop Enthusiast Rejoice

Creative Labs just came out with a hot little box for 5.1 digital surround sound for any laptop or PC.  What Creative did with this new Sound Blaster is rather than make a card out of it, the Sound Blaster is a USB based external device.  The X-Fi, as they call it, operates over a USB interface and will provide full cinematic digital surround sound in hi-fidelity with a 1 second connection.

Two Creative technologies are embedded into the USB Sound Blaster which are X-Fi Crystalizer and X-Fi CMSS-3D.  I’ve talked about these technologies before which are the key components to Creative’s solution.

Not to leave any stone unturned, here are the list of features for the USB Sound Blaster:

• Supports USB 2.0 for high quality 5.1 audio
• USB bus-powered
• Gold plated RCA front outputs and mini-jack surround outputs for maximum fidelity
• Optical Output for connectivity to surround sound systems
• 24-bit Playback and Recording ADC, DAC
• X-Fi audio enhancement technology
• Easily accessible Headphone out and Mic In for connecting headsets
• Convenient Volume Control with push to mute feature
• Line-in monitoring
• Host-based EAX advanced HD 4.0 and OpenAL support
• Creative Alchemy software that restores DS3D Games’ 3D audio in Windows Vista

The Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround Sound 5.1 system will retail for $60 – a great price for the package (available now).

Source: Laptop Logic.