Creative Labs Sound Blaster Extigy Sound Card

I own a laptop on which are two crappy speakers. Audio data is provided to those speakers through a crappy sound card. I am an audiophile, and I must have the ultimate experience with sound. I bought the Extigy because it is a powerful soundcard that connects through the USB, which the only possible way to get a new sound card for my laptop. Plus, I do a lot of music editing and recording, and I needed a line in.I bought the Creative Labs Inspire 5300 5.1 speakers along with my sound card, because a great soundcard matched with lousy speakers is a waste of money. The audio quality I got from the Extigy is superb. The 24bit audio sure makes a difference, and the surround sound works very nicely.The included software I have mixed feelings about. The drivers installed without any problems. However the sound editing, jukebox, and all other programs are on not the best. I rarely use any of their provided software.One of the best features is the remote center. I placed all my music into the remote center player, and I can access all my songs from the remote control, by selecting album, artist, or genre.I have quite a bit of difficulty getting the Dolby Digital decoder to work. It works fine on the sample file. However, it will not play my DVD's in Dolby digital mode, just in stereo mode.An absolutely awesome sounding soundcard matched with good speakers, but use your own sound editing software. Lots of physical features, and everything can be controlled from the remote.

Don't let the ads or products specs fool you. This sound card does not live up to what it promises. USB bandwith does not allow the Extigy to live up to the Creative standard of its other product lines. While you gain ease of installation and a remote, you lose all software, EAX HD (it claims to support it, but in fact does not) and other features. This product hogs CPU usage because it requires the computer to do most of the processing due to USB limitations. When your computer is doing many things at once, audio quality suffers. It claims to support S/PDIF in but in fact only supports it as a standalone. Any digital signal passed to the Extigy is converted to analog before being transferred to the computer resulting in a significant loss of quality and the impossibility of actual digital recording. I am completely disatisfied with every aspect of this product and am subsequently returning it.

Is has been working for almost 5 years since I bought it. The best sound card I have had! Thanks!

This is actually my second Sound Blaster Extigy of this model. I purchased my first one in 2004 and I have yet to see another sound card come close to this one. What I love the most is that this sound card works both through USB and as a stand alone device. I recommend this to anyone who needs to hook an Apple TV or any streaming media device to a monitor with HDMI which otherwise wouldn't carry sound.After almost ten years, its still a great device!

I was all the time hesitating to replace my laptop with a powerful desktop. And this card changed my plan totally. Now I don't envy any multimedia PC anymore. Hooked up with Logitech Z680 5.1 speakers, it produces sound like a dream.My notebook has only 1 USB1.1 port. Before purchasing this card, several of my usb devices shared one USB hub. When I got this card and assigned it one port of the hub, unfortunately, the sound was full of scratches. I had to go to Bestbuy and get one USB PCMCIA card. After I connected it to the PCMCIA card, the sound that I was expecting finally came out. So be sure to give it a separate port, otherwise, it is not guaranteed to work fine.Another suggestion, be careful to select the applications from its bundled CD to install. Some of them are crap. The manual and help file are talking about some operations you can never find on your PC. I went to their website to see if I can get any help there, and answer was negative. Fortunately, I got my problem solved before having to call the company.But On the whole, it is a good buy.