Creative Sound Blaster X7 announced

Nice one,can't wait for a review.

 

Not keen on the design, would like to see a review though.

 

hmpf 50 Watt Class D@ 4 ohm... i dont expect something on that output. Maybe with Headphone it rocks.

 

I'm interested. At $400 US [higher in Canada] it better be worth it.

 

I currently use the JDLabs C5D b/c I like having an all-in-one portable. The specs on this are really nice, but it's so ugly. No other audio equipment looks that hideous. The shape alone looks ridiculous. I've owned Schiit and a few other specialty amps & dacs - they all looked exponentially nicer in terms of shape, contour, finish, etc.

 

It's definitely an unfortunate design from a visual perspective.

 

I saw this earlier, and was seriously interested by it, and then i saw the price.

For that money, i'll buy an AMP with HDMI inputs and Outputs, that does DTS-HD and TrueHD as well.
(Didn't see any mention of those formats, which is a deal-killer for me, in this day and age )

 

Yep, while it is nice, it's too expensive for my taste. I'm not much of an audiophile, but I certainly dislike my onboard sound, yet I don't want to use up a pcie slot, so an external solution is what I'm looking for.

 

High end and again only 5.1 ? Nope, Creative have lost it, next card will be Asus. And I've been exclusively using Creative cards erver since 1993.

 

When I started getting away from onboard, I had a Fatal1ty card. Eventually made the swap to a Xonar and haven't looked back since. Granted, I've changed my setup a few times, but I don't even consider Creative anymore other than looking at their latest attempts.

 

I've been very pleasantly surprised by the SPDIF/Optical out on onboard sound cards.
AFAIK, the signal is just passed to the AMP untouched, and the amp does the rest.

I personally went optical so i didnt have to route 3/6 cables to my amp.
And no buzzing or hum when there is nothing playing.

 

This is an external amp soundcard system? but damn that is one spicy meatball and by that i mean expensive. for that price i could get me a new i7 4790k+MB+ 16 GB ram.

Does creative labs still have crappy driver support.

One day i will stop using the realtek onboard sound cards the MB i get use. then again i still using 20 year old altec lansing AC54 speakers which still sound great and if i connect the realtek to my receiver SonyAD55ES via Optical it just amazing. only thing i have issue with is headphones at anything past 60% volume i hear buzzing/feedback in the headphones.

 

You can find Sound blaster omni cheap if you look around amazon and ebay which would be a good option for you.

 

Damn for $400 bucks you can get a pretty good sound card plus a great set of speakers plus a decent amp.

 

If you want a truly great external card,consider this..http://www.asus.com/Sound_Cards/Xonar_U7/ I have one and I'm amazed at how good it really is.

 

Thanks for your suggestions guys, I will check them out, but I will also wait a bit in case I'm upgrading to X99 as I'm sure some of the higher end mobos will have something better than Realtek, but if not I will definitely consider those. I had internal Creative Fatality (pci) and Asus Xonar D2X (pcie) in the past and loved both.

 

Yea the Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5 does have Core3D chip on it so you be all set with that. But with it price you be better off with Omni or the U7 unless the total is cheaper with the motherboard.

 

At that price you are better off with Audiophile DACs like Parasound Zdac. Cambridge Audio Magic Dac Plus.
They serve much better sound quality and bug free drivers

 

I think creative had enough of asus with their Essence III one to the point that they made this, maybe to counter it. $399 is kind of much, same amount as the normal Bifrost which some times can be found cheaper. If I had $399 and needed something, it wouldn't go into the X7. Instead It would go into the bi-frost ubber if of course I didn't already have it.