New Sound Blaster Recon3D Fits Mac, PC, Consoles

...an addon sound card for consoles? WTF? More info on this is needed. How could it possibly work for everything? It's not like consoles were designed to be able to disable their onboard audio. Or does it just use USB for power and reprocess the digital output from the console in some way, and if so, why bother?

Way to miss the mark again Creative

Ahhh Sound Blaster. I remember when all you needed was one of them and a 3DFX Voodoo 2 card and you officially had a ninja PC

Because anyone who has a good sound post-processing amp for either a HiFi or a Home Theatre setup knows the difference between good sound quality and standard output.

Of course, if you are prepared to spend this kind of cash just buy a decent AV amp and let that do the same job via the HDMI and don't buy this.

THX TruStudio Pro....meh....i preferred CMSS 3d to this.

Man, so sad to see such a great company continue to circle the toilet. I spent good money on an Audigy Platinum EX card with external breakout box. It did good game audio, and had very clean inputs for doing beginning audio recording. But now everything is digital, there is no need for signal to noise ratio unless it is in your amp.
We all have USB headphones, or S/PDIF optical, or HDMI to our receivers these days, so why bother? And now on-board audio is more than good enough for all but the pickiest of audiophiles. And even for them there are much better sound card companies to go with.
They had great sound cards until Vista/7 rendered them useless. They had several iPod killers that had superb audio quality in the Zen players that never got off the ground because of a crap advertising department. They have good on board chips, but they overcharge for them so nobody wants them. They have very clean audio inputs, but have never pursued breaking into the pro recording industry. They could easily license their DAC and ADC tech to receiver makers, but they don't.
They are in such a great position as far as technology goes that they could take over the audio industry... if only they would hire an 8 year old to take over and run the business end correctly...

"6-channel 24-bit 102dB DACs, 4-channel 24-bit 101dB analog-to-digital (ADC) converters...

hardware-accelerated THX TruStudio Pro and select CrystalVoice audio technologies including Acoustic Noise Cancellation, Smart Volume and more."

This is like buying a decent preamp for your computer and is closer to true audiophile sound quality, but you better wait for professional reviews. And to really appreciate the sound quality provided by these devices you are going to need a good sound system, not a cheap gaming one.

So unless you already have decent speakers and AV receiver or amp you better save this money and buy better speakers. Not to mention your other PC components.

"New Sound Blaster Recon3D Fits Mac, PC, Consoles"

Hello Steves hardware ohh forgott steve is about to be rip soon - what was the new wanna be steve name? Ohh yeah Tim's hardware! List the by far least used machine first explains where this site gets its money from. Cheers for neutral writing!

Finally a new Creative card. I have been waiting for some new tech from them, its been 6 years afterall.

I just don't see a need to buy a sound card anymore... I use my motherboards s/pdif output to my receiver and everything sounds great... what could this card do that I don't already have?

I'm really not sure but this might push Developers to do much more with sound, who knows.

Had a guy at work say the same but I can hear a major difference between my onboard and my SB X-Fi. Games sound better and music does too. Most addon sound cards support more ranges and give more depth.

At least from what I have experienced, a sound card is for those who want the best quality sound available. Plus it pulls the audio from the CPU while onboard uses the CPU to process the sound.

took them long enough to come out with a new card. i had to stray away from them years ago and got a HT omega striker which is better than the X-Fi. but really why would a sound card need a quad core processor

I bet if you heard the sound from a HT omega or asus sound card you would think you're on board realtek HD sound chip is crap. even with just the analog inputs connected

i like creative products, but the sound card was fade out slowly, what creative got to do was sell the sound blaster chipset to the mobo manufacture and let it intergrate on the mobo, i'll buy it if there is a sound blaster onboard on the mobo

Motherboard integrated sound can never be as good as an separate sound apparatus. But yeah, you need good speakers or headphones to tell the difference.
(The mobo causes allkind of electronic distorsion to the sound...)

I may buy & install it one of these days when I have some spare time. I'm off tonight,but I've been working twelve hour shifts lately,so I guess that I won't have much time to do anything at all in the next 5 months or so.

I have seen "8 year old korean boy" playing a lot of TF2, I believe he is unemployed and may well look for a job at Creative. I will tell him next time I see him.

I think you guys missed something in his post, he's outputting the sound to a receiver which would do the processing. A dedicated sound card will do better than onboard, but a decent receiver will give you much better sound than a dedicated sound card.

People who are really that concerned about their sound will use a good receiver with good speakers. Good speakers use direct wiring while sound cards tend to only use only RCA type jacks or digital passthroughs. At best you're already limited to using "computer" speaker sets. You also won't be able to input many other devices like you could with a receiver. I haven't seen the I/O box for this but I assume it's similar to the old ones used for Fatal1ty products. (Seriously how long did they get his endorsement for anyway?) This product won't appeal to audiophiles, and most other people can settle with decent quality onboard sound. If there's a market for this, maybe it's people with lousy computer speakers who want Creative's enhancement technology to make their system sound better than it is. That's something they tend to do well at.

Heck I remember when you needed one of these to have sound at all because the computers did not come with audio cards and the internal speaker only did simple beeps. Plus the games had to support your audio card so the soundblaster 16 was a great bet. As for video cards brands did not even matter. An elite card was one that could produce millions of colors. Although most games maxed out at 256 colors.

Though I remember computers farther back then that sound cards were not very prevalent in the 80's. The simple beeps of the internal speakers were fine. Except for some musicians and enthusiasts.

Onboard sound can't even compare with addon sound cards,so this will be a bonus to the market.

They haven't even gotten the drivers right for the X-Fi series... this will be a mess if they don't try harder on the software side of things. The brand new drivers, and the older drivers, for my two X-Fi (PCI and PCI-e) still sometimes forget they are installed, or change my settings to default, or stop allowing me to even change my settings forcing a re-install... I am intrigued however and I may try creative one last time before jumping ship to ASUS, M-Audio, or HT Omega...

With HDMI offering superior quality, whats the point. Even my old Asus Xonar D2 had better specs than this, now I just use it for it's high quality line in and mic. It's > 104 SNR. But seriously, once you try HDMI on even a cheapy sony receiver, it's like day and night. Plus bluray and dvd's just work better when you decode those suckers via native DTS HD etc... It's also louder because there's no DAC/ADC doubling. There's just one, the receiver. Not like 4 conversions + a wire that looses power and quality.

You obviously don't know shit about audio.

How can you sit there and say everything is digital now and then talk about licensing ADC and DAC technology? You DO understand that all digital audio signals HAVE to be converted to analog at some point... right? If your card doesn't do it, your headphones, speakers, etc will, and they probably don't have high quality DACs. In fact, I doubt any set of USB headphones have decent DACs.

I don't disagree that Creative is going about this all wrong. They are. But, not for any of the reasons you mentioned.

If they were smart, they'd make contracts with motherboard manufacturers to incorporate their technology on their boards. This would capitalize on people like you who apparently can't tell the difference between cheap DACs and quality DACs and those who don't want to spend extra money or can't fit another card due to their graphics cards.
Also, if they really want to provide a worthwhile product for gamers, they'd design a sound card that allows developers to create their own effects and use the sound card to offload processing. I'm not talking EAX effects where you're constrained to a specific set of effects, I'm talking about a universal audio processing unit (like PhysX did for physics).

Apart from that, I'd like to see front-audio connectors that aren't proprietary and FAR better ASIO performance. Why even have an "Audio Creation" mode if you can't even get the buffer below 256 without clicks and pops? My MOTU 828MK3 does it at 64 and my crappy Mackie Onyx Satellite does it at 128. That's just sad...

I love how you put Mac first instead of the order said by Sim Wong Hoo, Chairman and CEO of Creative Technology Ltd. I see someone prefers Macs.

This is mostly true. Having all that circuitry next to your audio causes lots of EMI. That's why it's good to have either a card to process audio or buy a motherboard with on-board audio standing off the main board.

bla never buying creative again not worth the bother

Agree, I used my onboard sound until I noticed it was dropping sounds in some games with allot of channels running at once. Put in my older Audigy2 and no problems since.

I have used Creative sound cards for many many years, probably since the original Sound Blaster, and most recently an X-Fi Platinum... and I really couldn't disagree more with most of what you've said!

Onboard sound is rubbish, both in terms of audio quality and CPU overhead. The exact same problem goes for the majority of USB headsets/speakers.

Creative's hardware acceleration of audio processing tasks and delivery of 3D audio positioning is absolutely excellent as anyone who has tried CMSS 3D with headphones will attest to. The music enhancements and upmixing to 5.1 is also very good and certainly better than most low/mid-range Hi-Fi seperate systems (my own $1000 custom-picked setup included).

Creative are not the first company delivering a superior product hardware-wise to lose out to Apple's brand power and they won't be the last, so it is unfair to pick on them for that.

And they have are involved in the recording market - try googling E-Mu. There are just other companies that specialise in professional audio that are already entrenched there, so it has never been a primary market focus for Creative.

Did I miss anything?

You missed the random BSOD's, drop-outs, lack of driver support, general crappyness of there products.

Onboard is bland but it atleast is consistent at being there and producing sound.

It's consistently noisy, due to it's onboard nature.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a Creative card, but I think it behooves any user to get their audio circuitry away from their motherboards circuitry. Apart from the reduction in EMI, you'll also acquire much better converters and, in many cases, increase the number of voices your computer can handle before dropouts occur.

Again, since most AAA developers have moved away from EAX in favor of more customizable software solutions, I think it's most important to improve the quality of sound than it is to have a game-centric sound card.

However, I do agree with your list of Creative's performance issues. I bought the original Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music when it came out (the one with extra RAM didn't seem to be worth it, and I turned out to be correct). It's worked flawlessly on XP, but as soon as Vista/Win7 came out, it hasn't been the same.nThe drivers are an embarrassment. I'm sure any benefits of having hardware audio are offset by the bloated drivers and software that come with the card.

sorry dude but with my realtek onboard sound I can hear the feedback as the mouse moves over menus( IDK why ). The sound is dire compared with my creative £20 oem pci card. I wish mobo manufactures would stop using realtek sound. It's just the pits.