Creative Sound BlasterX G1 7.1 24-Bit/96 KHz HD Portable Gaming USB DAC Sound Card with Headphone Amplifier - Black

I will review this item for its out of box sound quality. I have installed the software, but that is not my primary focus.I'm by no means an audiophile. In fact, I'm just starting to get into headphones. I have a pair of Koss KTXPRO1 headphones (amongst others) and for the price, they are astonishing headphones in their own right. However, to me they have a warm tone and I feel the bass is so strong that it tends to obscure some of the other sounds. So I decided to get a cheap DAC/amp to see what effect it had on audio in general and these headphones in particular.The test I did was simple. Play some flac files in VLC on my laptop, listening on the G1 and Koss headphones and then unplug the G1 and plug the headphones into the laptop while the music was still playing. The difference was like night and day. The most obvious difference was the volume. Without moving the volume slider on the headphones, after switching from the G1 to the laptop headphone socket, the audio was ridiculously loud and it was murky and bass-heavy. Going back to the G1 gives it so much more clarity. I can barely imagine what a set of high-end headphones and a high-end DAC must sound like.So, the Sound BlasterX G1 at £30 completely transforms a set of headphones I got for £22 and I have no doubt that they will improve my other, more expensive headphones in a similar way. Cannot recommend this soundcard enough.

Very powerful USB soundcard. It drives over-ear headphones with no problem considering it has an amazing 300ohm output. With a pair of 32ohm over-ear headphones I use it at volume 10-15-20/100. Sound is clear, like Creative have used me. I've owned the old Creative Soundblaster Z 5.1 PCI sound card, the old Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality Champion PCI sound card (used it for 10 years), the Creative X-FI HD USB SoundCard and I'm used to Creative's sound and enhancements. You have to download the latest drivers from the Creative support pages in order to benefit from the full range of enhancements, the link enclosed in the package is old and it's a limited version of the SoundBlaster X software. The Crystalizer is great for standard mp3/Youtube/Music Streaming, bass boost is a little too overwhelming (it does depend on headphones you use), I use the EQ for upping the bass. I think it's the best product in this range of portable external DAC with software enhancements like EQ and emulated surround sound gaming for using with over-ear headphones. Though I've never used it for gaming, I'm sure it performs brilliantly as I already mentioned I owned several Creative products and used them for gaming purposes in the past.

I have problem with mic but on headphones it works really good

For such a small Dac this sounds good to my untrained ears.Just plug it into the back of my pc and plug my IEMs into the 3.5mm jack.Download the Blaster X G1 software from Creative web site.For gaming there is about eleven different profiles, two of which are Call of Duty series and counter strike global offensive.Music, movie, first person shooter pre-set, equalizer with different type of music presents.When I checked the bit rate it was stuck on 16bit 44100hz, you have to download the BlasterX Acoustic Engine Pro Software Pack for Windows, choose the generic setting and restart your PC ,then you can change to higher bit rates.Sounds good ,software's good, worth the cash.

This DAC is absolutely terrible, there have been mentions of the slight hiss sound that come from it but when you have a high end set of earphones the hiss is extremely noticeable, and ADDS hiss to quiet music! The ironic thing is this sound card is only silent when there is no audio playing, as soon as any audio source starts the hiss comes back!There was also a very odd rumble sound produced when I tried to watch a film, this was not apparent when I used the normal front panel audio coming from my motherboard, which by the way is almost dead silent and it is a mid range 2012 motherboard with average audio quality, absolutely appalling for this product to be a dedicated unit for better sound and have worse audio quality than on board audio.There are a few downloads you have to do to get the full experience with this device but even this is ridiculously complicated for no reason, you have to download a program for the X G5 which also works with the X G1 but it does not tell you this in the instructions and this same program cannot be found on the download page for the X G1, they just gives you the site for the downloads in the instructions.After installing and uninstalling many programs for about an hour I finally got it working to a point where I could get the virtual 7.1 surround feature and the audio adjustments, well almost, the equalizer would constantly bring up a message with something along the lines of 'Cannot open read only files, this may be a sign of corrupted files' the program would then auto close and I had to reopen it every time. This got me worried so I checked over everything on my system and it was all fine, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the program at least five times and the problem persisted. The virtual surround is also terrible if you have it set to headphone mode, the center channels are heavily distorted and the only way to fix this is to switch it to the no headphone virtual 7.1 which did help but introduced yet another oddity which meant that the audio played louder in the right channel than the left.Overall this product is disappointing, of course I may have had a dodgy one but with similar problems reported by others it's obvious that there are some factory flaws with these units.