HT OMEGA eClaro 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card

Pros: Sound Quality Versatility Drivers/Software

Cons: Installation of Drivers/Software No headphone Amp

Overall Review: Both the manufacturer and other reviewers suggest uninstalling any other sound drivers before installation of this card...DO IT! The fist thing I did with my new rig was disable onboard audio. This was before the OS or sound card were installed. No drivers were ever installed for the onboard audio. However...my Nvidia card put in some sound drivers. No big deal, I thought, GPU sound drivers are nothing like onboard drivers, I thought...NO! Do no let ANYTHING install ANY sound drivers, whatsoever! I spent the better part of 2 hours dealing with bizarre installation issues. Drivers would install and then end by telling me to plug in my HT Omega device...which was. I would then have to force quit the installer and audio was non functional. Reboot, have perfect audio, sans software. Try to manually install software via online download or disc...impossible. Other times it would tell me to plug in my device and not do anything. Super flaky. I finally just uninstalled my Nvidia sound drivers to see if it would help...BOOM! Perfect installation of drivers and software. The software is so bare bones I probably did not even need it - which is great! You get good hardware, don't muck with it via software, let it do its thing. On that note, sound is incredible. It was noticeably better than my Creative X-fi Titanium some lame gamer sound card (their flagship card before the current Recon) even with low bit rate content. Don't expect this card to drive any high power headphones. I knew it didn't have a dedicated amp but it's advertised in such a way that makes it sound like the jack can drive some decent cans and from what reading I did, it sounded legit. Wrong. This card couldn't hack my 300 Ohm Sennheiser 650s; couldn't drive the bass properly. I wasn't totally convinced that this card would handle the headphones, but it was a let down all the same. Side note: I have my card in a PCI-E x4 slot. Works fine. Bracket came warped a bit so that the card did not make good contact in the slot when tightened down. Just bent it slightly past straight in the other direction to ensure all the pins make good contact in the slot.

Pros: Best sounding audio card ever. Beats the $600 or $700 cards hands down. Period. I've been an audio professional since 1978. This baby is incredible. Just buy one, and try it. You will be amazed. My ears can hear distortion all it takes is about 3 to 5 minutes, and it's turn that crud off! With a quality sound system this baby is clean! The capacitors are big (a good thing) but it fits on my mother board, a little tight, but no problems. I had no trouble with the drivers and the card and software work well. I would never recommend something highly that I did not believe in. Try it this is great.

Cons: None, Wish I had stock in the company :)

Pros: My motherboard has what's supposed to be an excellent sound chip in it- and for stock, it is. See: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128545 - the Gigabyte ga-z77x-ud5. It uses the Realtek ALC898, which is about the best stock chip available. But....it isn't even a candle against the glory of a clear dawn when compared to this card. I had an old PCI Claro- one of the first efforts by this company- and when it finally died (after almost 8 years) just before this build, I was planning to use the Realtek ALC898 and call it good enough- and it wasn't. A lot of detail, depth of field, and sonic accuracy went missing- I actually thought my ears might be going out on me- but the wife backed me up when we sat down to do some critical listening to several "reference" pieces. I just installed the eClaro and it's all baaaaack. I'm using an LFO interconnect to one of the better Denon receivers. I'm running two Velodyne S-1200's, a Velodyne ULD-18, and five Velodyne DF-661's in my home theater/audio rig (yeah, all old stuff, but hellishly accurate). The rest of the computer isn't too exotic- a Corsair Gold rated 750 watt psu, an older GTX-470 for the video card (largely overkill for everything I do, including SkyRim) 16 gb of ram @1600, an Intel Cherryville solid state drive for the OS, and two WD Caviar Black 1 tb spinners in a mirrored raid for storage. But...this system drops jaws- and the sound card has a lot to do with that.

Cons: The software interface is, well, clunky. It inspires the suspicion that this company is slowly coasting into obsolescence on the glory of one great achievement. The dongle appears to be a hack- but it allows the use of the included low-profile bracket, so if you're building a high-end home theater in sometjing like one of Silverstone's low profile cases, you'll be gratefull- or you'll use the light fiber optics output and it won't matter. Be careful of the filter capacitors used on this board- they're tall, and the exposed metal surface could short out components on another board- like your video card. if you place this card close to another one, you can top them with plastic disks and a little silicone adhesive (my fix) or use little squares of electrical tape- but it's a potential disaster if you have a tight case and you don't use caution. The board also isn't in a faraday cage like some of the other audio boards out there- but this mother board and cpu produce less rfi than a lot of the older gear because it's more efficient- less power means smaller magnetic fields. That could pose a problem for people with an integral wifi; my wireless connection is on a USB cord and lives about 8 feet up a wall behind a curtain- so that's not an issue for me.

Overall Review: Cons notwithstanding- if you can afford this card and if you have aspirations of acquiring decent audio gear- buy this card or you'll never know what you're missing- because you'll never hear it. If you have no interest in good audio, if you think Blows Audeeyo is great gear, or if you believe MP3's are the be-all and end-all, stick with the onboard sound chip and save yourself two Franklins. You'll never hear the difference.

Pros: Easy setup - installation on my ASUS M5A99FX/Win7 system couldn't have been more hassle-free. Downloaded the latest drivers from the website, disabled the onboard ALC892 in Windows, shut down and installed the card. Booted up and ran the driver setup (which only took a few seconds). After a reboot it simply works perfect. No 20 minute B-S driver install like a Creative card. The entire process literally took all of 5 minutes. Truthfully, the analog out on the ASUS board really isn't half bad - IMHO onboard always blew until the short-lived Soundstorm 2. However, I was instantly floored by the incredible difference of the eClaro. I listen to jazz, and I can't believe how natural the instruments sound. This is before tweaking anything... *Most* of the capacitors look high quality, Elna, Sanyo, Panasonic, etc. Overall it looks very well made. No problems with the bracket fitment or breakout cable. Looks cool through a side window.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: Someone below mentioned that the card only works in a x1 slot. Mine is blocked by my graphics card, so I popped it in one of the motherboard's 2 x4 limited slots, and it works fine.

Pros: - This card's audio quality output is phenominal, it makes a huge difference when switching to it coming from onboard auidio. Really makes use of those high quality speaker systems. - 24-bit @ 192 KHz - DSP for 7.1 -> 5.1 emulation - Software has some great functionality; mixer, equilizer, "FlexBass". - Swappable OPAmp. - Output -> input loopback "device", allows for easy recording of anything output to your speakers, also useful for things such as soundboards when you're trolling people on audio chat services. - Smaller than I expected, too used to only having a enormous graphics card as my only PCI-Express device.

Cons: - The case audio connectors I have, AC'97 and HD audio, are both 9-pin. The eClaro has a 10-pin connection. Had to bend one of the pins to plug it in, but it works just fine. - Like some other reviewers have stated, 5.1 is certainly quirky. When windows is set to output 5.1 at first, works great. Using the included software however screws it up, I figured out that you should read the labels on the connectors and not assume the colors match. The orange connector on my speakers was supposed to go to the yellow cable on the d-sub breakout adapter, not the red/orange cable on the d-sub.

Overall Review: Aside from the very weird channel color mismatch on the break out adapter, this card is fantastic.

Pros: One of the best computer upgrades I've purchased in awhile. I had been wondering if it was time (post-Vista) to get back into a real sound card. Wonder no more! This card is fanastic. I built two identical computers, one for me and one for the wife. I wasn't sure about the sound card, so I only ordered one. That allowed me to directly compare the sound, same songs, between the Realtek ALC889 on the Asus P8P67 Deluxe and this HT|Omega eClaro card. The difference is night and day. Individual notes on a piano are vibrant and sharp. Horns are brassy and warm. Guitar strings are resonant and trail off slowly. Solo instruments, in particular, are just dazzling. The Realtek onboard sound, now that I had something to compare it to, sounded like it was muffled, muted, like it was being played through a blanket. Great in games. Great in voice chat. From roaring dragons to low rumbling caverns to the sound pure silence and dripping water. Awesome.

Cons: Probably need to buy one for the wife now. Making me seriously consider taking the time to rerip my whole music collection to lossless WMA. Might even need to upgrade my old Klipsch speakers. Now we're talkin' money. And I guess it's worth mentioning that it costs about as much as a good motherboard. There's a reason it sounds this much better that the "free" sound. One Egg... had to install drivers twice on Windows 7 64-bit to get it fully installed. Couldn't find any way to make 2-channel music play through all four of my quadrophonic speakers, just the front two. Software drivers a little obscure in general.

Overall Review: Brand new computer and I found I spent my first Saturday morning just listening to my music collection again and upgrading songs to 5 stars. Hearing things I never heard before. Yes, it's time to treat yourself to a real sound card again and this PCIE card from HT Omega will impress you.

Pros: Excellent sound quality much MUCH better than on board or **atives cards.Its an almost mindblowing experience as to just how much a difference a better card really makes. This card made me listen to everything i had and then some. Swappable Op amp dip socket for those more daring about there audio. Oh and it has a VERY capable headphone amp section and low noise floor, hiss free even with IEMs. Did i say its stable and easy to set up? Well because its also that too.

Cons: you must use the D-sub cable if you want to use speakers and if you loose it its not exactly an off the shelf part however HT Omega will send you one if you do. The included heaphone extension cable seems low quality but not really a con persay but a grip. Will make you buy more music and will make you buy expensive headphones/speakers to use it. Wont make you a better at life but it will make you believe it does. If you actually bothered to read the cons in this review you yourself are not experiencing to amazingness of this sound card. It will make you realize that good audio gear is worth it which could lead to you spending more money of stuff you havent thought of before. Oh and other reviews posting negative comments with ABSOLUTELY no true knowledge on the matter of soundcards or audio at all leading common good customers of newegg astray.

Overall Review: This was a night and day difference from on board audio or my phone even (galaxy S4). I watch alot of movies and game often with warframe, black light retribution ,battle field 3 just to name a few and its haunting how real everything sounds now. I also listen to everything from heavy metal to rap to classical to psytrance to country and use FLAC or mp3 and this card makes my music so pure to listen to. Ive used good heaphones before but upgraded to some JVC MX10-B studio monitors and they dont play music with this card they sing!

Pros: Hardware support for Dolby Digital Live and DTS:Interactive Swappable opamp

Cons: Setup was a touch quirky, the S/PDIF out is merely a passthrough device, which was never mentioned in the manual. Software looks like it's from the late 90's...

Overall Review: You need some serious speakers to take advantage of this card. Personally I'm running a full set of Bowers & Wilkins CM-series speakers and the difference between the eClaro and my motherboard's built-in audio chip is night and day.