Creative 70SB109500000 5.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz USB Interface X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro

Pros: Excellent product, does everything as advertised without any headaches associated with traditional Creative sound cards. I highly recommend this unit when connecting to a surround sound receiver via toslink optical cable. Dolby and DTS signals pass through with ease for properly encoded content. For general music listening and gaming, the Crystalizer and Surround features really make soundtracks shine. The included remote control works with Windows Media Center and XBMC which is a nice bonus!

Cons: none.

Other Thoughts: Don't waste your time with traditional internal sound cards. Just buy this, plug it in and install the driver with Creative control panel. Don't bother with any of the other useless software.

Pros: - VERY easy install
- Does not take up space in my case
- Remote
- Great sound
- 24 bit 96k recording

Cons: - Default settings make the sound fuzzy

Other Thoughts: I had previously bought an Asus Xonar PCI card, and it malfunctioned. I decided to get a USB card since it didn't require an additional power cord, and Man, this thing is great!

This is FAR better than my built in sound card. I can hear things in songs I never knew were there.

This sounded awful with the default settings. After I turned all the effects off, I wondered how I ever managed with my on board sound for so many years. I think a lot of those who gave bad reviews are not very tech savy.

Pros: What are you guys doing giving this USB device a poor rating?! No offense, this is an awesome device! Please stop giving this a bad review. THIS IS, the best USB device for Windows. I've been using it for over a year now and it is just rocks! You will not have a single problem if your hardware is setup properly on your pc. All these errors -I attribute to lack of competence on behalf of the users improperly configuring or designing a computer! Lets face it, some people shouldn't even be making a custom pc.

Cons: Absolutely none!

Pros: Convienant, reliable, some useful effects and settings, remote is nice.

Cons: Price, delay in response time for high end applications(i.e. audio production) since its external

Other Thoughts: Bought this for a build I was doing for my brother. He wanted it instead of using a RCA/mini converter so I ended up with this. It works great and he's only had a few problems that have been temporary. The sound quality is great and the little remote is certainly handy. The software/drivers included have some sort of equalizer that seems to work pretty well. However any of these gains are negligible when you look at the price. You'd be much better off with dropping this kind of money on a premium soundcard that actually goes into a PCI slot. I use various music production software like Reason and given the weird setup this requires I would not recommend it if you have to hook up other devices and cant afford a 80ms delay.
If you need a way to connect your home stereo reciever that has RCA(component) cables, get a female rca to male 1/8" mini converter.
If you need a premium input for music production or high quality sound get a soundcard you actually have to connect to your motherboard.
If you see this for sale for <$25 then get this.

Pros: None.

Cons: BSOD. Need I say more? Installation seemed to go fine up until the end and the system had a BSOD and had to be forcefully shut down. Eh..must have been a coincidence. Nope. Turned PC back on, instant BSOD. Unplugged USB adapter and it booted with no issues. Plugged back in and restarted, BSOD again. What a waste of time. Did not buy from Newegg, got it in the bargain bin at the local electronics store due to it being an inactive item, good thing too! Waste of plastic and materials.

Pros: This is a fantastic sounding card!
I originally bought it to use with my laptop (Lenovo T61), and it absolutely blows away the onboard audio. The sound is much deeper and fuller, and little things in music and voice that the Realteck chipset hides are brought out.
I've since gotten a desktop machine, and this little card still blows away the onboard audio of my Gigabyte motherboard!
It drives my Grado SR125 headphones with no issues at all.. no pre-amp required.
Recordings made with the line in sound fantastic too.
Lovely blue LED! I have it right next to my hand normally so I've never used the remote, but I played with it when I first got it, it seemed to work fine.
Windows 7 had OK support for it out of the box. Downloaded and installed just the basic driver for the volume knob to work.

Cons: X-Fi. It sounds like complete and utter garbage. The full driver package lets you turn it off, the basic driver package doesn't enable it to begin with. Without this, its fantastic.

Other Thoughts: I bought this at another store a couple years back when it was like $75. Using it with some $150 headphones though.
It also drives a Behringer XENEX502 mini-mixer for my speakers and takes an input from the same board for my mic (I like using a condenser mic that needs XLR)

Pros: -Cool volume knob

Cons: So I've had a lot of sound cards in the past, but mostly ones just handed down to me or built in to the motherboards. Since I was a kid, I always looked at Creative's sound cards dreaming of how much better they were. Now that I have some money to dump on my computer, I see this fancy product and figure, "Hey! It's USB! NOTHING could be easier than that!" Boy, was I wrong.
-You can't install this USB Device with setup software from the Creative website because it doesn't detect a creative device that has been setup already
-All the software that comes on the CD is old and has to be updated through the web, and Creative has some of the slowest servers on earth
-Halfway through installing some of the software it just kind of hangs and never finishes installing. After a reboot, the updater disappears.
-I would contact Creative but I searched through forums and I'm not alone. Other people have been dealing with the unimpressive software since 2009.

Other Thoughts: Had I foreseen all of the Cons above, I would not think twice about buying this.

I don't give up easily, so I'm going to uninstall all the software, even though I just did this all on a fresh Windows installation. I'll try installing it again, with less of the bloatware that Creative has infested this thing with. I really don't need a wonky on-screen volume knob. There's a giant one sitting on the desk, one on my keyboard, and one on my amplifier. I'm sure I'll manage. And if I want to sing Karaoke, I'll go to the corner bar. Creative calls their Karaoke player a 'Critical' update for this product.

*For anyone interested, I'm using Windows 7 64-bit. I'm guessing that causes a lot of problems for this product, but I'm really not willing to part with this OS.

Pros: Had to find a replacement for Titanium sound card not fitting in the PCI-E slot due to dual SLI cards.

Connected all wires and installed using setup disc, then used the auto-updater for updates and everything has been running fine.

Comes with a nice little remote.

Cons: No cons so far!

Other Thoughts: Bought a red/white Y-wire cable to hook up the X-box 360 to the mic output and now all the speakers are working fine with 5.1 surround sound.

Pros: I bought this for one reason... 5.1 audio in Skyrim and it works great. Setup was simple and Creative even has up to date drivers on their site. It sounds great and just works.

Cons: Bright blue LED is annoying.

Other Thoughts: Make sure to disable onboard sound and uninstall old drivers.

Pros: The instructions claim that the card itself can work without the disc's software, and it does, although without the software you don't get the full benefit of a dedicated sound card.
The software is intuitive enough, nice to look at and not intimidating to a non-audiophile, but still has plenty of tweakable options for the enthusiast.
The remote control is incredibly handy, since my laptop only has a Fn+ play/pause button. It is a far simpler task to click the vol-up button on the remote than to hit Fn+, double-check that I'm about to hit the F6 key and hold that for a few seconds to achieve the same result. Oh, and vol-down, Fn+F5 is right next to the "sleep" Fn+ key. Looooove the remote.
Oh yeah, and everything sounds loads better, but that's to be expected. Much like the first time you see a big action movie or video game in HD, you never quite know what you're missing out on until you drop the extra dollars to experience it.

Cons: In order to make the computer play music through the card I had to go into the computer's main sound control center and choose the sound card as the primary audio device.
Sounds obvious enough, except it wasn't. The setup instructions didn't mention this very important bit of information, causing me to stumble around on my PC and the Internet for a while before I was told the solution.

Other Thoughts: I won't lie, most modern laptops have sound chips that provide good sound, especially when paired with high-speed headphones or speakers.
However, if you are either at least a music enthusiast (true audiophiles would buy this without thinking) or if you can tell that your computer is delivering inferior-quality sound through what you know are high-speed headphones/speakers, buy this card.