SABRENT USB-SND8 8-Channel 3D USB 2.0 External 7.1 Surround Sound Box w/Digital Output

Pros: Price, Works as advertized

Cons: Comparability issue(see other thoughts), no instruction to be found anywhere. output jacks are delicate

Other Thoughts: For the price this device is a bargain I must say and the one I received looks different then the one pictured here and at Sabrents website. If's all black and the L & R sides of the case are radius round like a half circle top to bottom so much more sleek looking. I assume it's a newer version. I had a compatability issue where there was a high pitch 1K twst tone type sound way in the background. Couldn't hear it when playing music or gaming but when not it could be faintly heard just loud enough to drive me nuts. I contacted Sabrent CS after hours and was gotten back to the next morning. The tech and I through the website exchanged ideas to what migh be wrong including right off the bat the unit may be defective. It went on all day so I must say he surely did try to solve the issue. What it ended up being is the powered studio monitors I have Mackie has three inputs XLR, RCA and 1/4" TRS. I was using the RCA input which is a unbalances input and the card and it didn't like each other. I had swapped all cables and no go until I tried the 1/4" input with another det of cables that will also accept a TS unbalanced line and the noise went away and all functions work. I'm only running 2.1 stereo but while checking out things to get rid of the noise I tried the rest of the output options and they worked but was still using RCA inputs so the noise was still present. Now for twenty bucks I would have given it five stars but taking one off not for the noise but the output jacks are a but on the weak side. When on if the cable to the speakers gets jiggled or the unit itself gets bumped or moved the crackling noise that happens out of the speakers is way too loud for comfort. But all that really means is it has to be set up someplace out of the way of any accidental movement.
If in a do over situation yeah I'd buy it again for my purposes. If I was going to be using it with like a 7.1 sound speaker config and 56" Plasma TV home entertainment computer set up I probably would go for something a bit more sophisticated but then allot more costly too. But as mentioned it is a great price for all the features it has.

Pros: Installed quickly on XP.
Includes common controls on the unit itself (volume up/down, play mute, record mute), plus indicator lights for mute functions.
Has some entertaining effects you can apply to the microphone.

Cons: No instructions included.
Provided software is from the chipset OEM and not Sabrent.
I've heard that support is non-existent for this product, so return ASAP it if it doesn't work for you.

Other Thoughts: Although XP has a native driver for this device, I found that the microphone didn't work reliably with some games until I installed the provided software + driver.

Pros: Physical build quality.

Cons: Could not get the software working. Probably compatibility issues with Windows 7. I could put more effort into fixing it, but based on reviews from other websites, I'm not about to try to succeed where so many others have failed.

Other Thoughts: I bought this hoping to get surround sound from my PS3 onto my PC 7.1 speakers. Too bad I'll never know if it works, since I couldn't even get it working with the computer itself. I installed the software and restarted. After that, an icon should have appeared in the system tray where I would be able to configure the sound box. There was no icon, so I decided to get more up to date drivers from the website. The ZIP file I downloaded appeared only to contain XP and Vista drivers. However, there was a Setup.exe that was the same software as on the CD. Maybe this software would be improved over the one I just installed. Well, there must be an incompatibility with Windows 7, since installing installing the software from the .exe file immediately crashed my computer. This is quite annoying considering the box this device came in said "Windows 7 Compatible."

I'll be returning this thing pronto.