Creative releases Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus Gaming Sound Card

How are these still viable? For that price. You get an external USB DAC that probably outperforms it by at least a bit.. I'm rocking a Topping D50s (or you can get a Khadas Toneboard for even way less) from an external power supply avoiding the messy power delivery from inside the PC and not wasting a PCI-E slot which are sparse on some boards to begin with.

I have no idea why Creative refuses to evolve.. If they would put their knowledge and research capacity into USB DACs instead of chasing the dead PCIE format they could still be a viable company... Change my mind.

 

They have Sound Blaster G5 / G6 USB DAC/AMP, which are pretty good deal.

Soundcard is more of a professional tool these days, with different inputs and outputs for mixing and other features. AE5 is being soldvery well, so they thought, why not go full retard and advertise soundcard for gamers ( the least smart audio consumers ).

 

I have a DAC headphone amplifier, needed for decent headphones. I connected it via optical, though, not usb, because I wanted to avoid the ground loop with the PC. Probably not an issue at all, but it eases my mind. In that sense the sound goes through the mobo audio circuits. But at the end of the day, the PC needs to decode the audio anyway, unless it's straight PCM. It's just computation, so it makes zero difference, unless there's a bug or other source of errors, since nothing of it is analog before the final output from the DAC-Amp. When you go all the way to analog, you should keep it out of the PC case.

 

Its 5.1 surround and has surround encoding for headphones.
As pointed out, they do external and break out soundcards.

 

Seems kinda pointless to release a soundcard in this day and age which doesn't support Dolby Atmos or DTS-HD and doesn't have a HDMI ARC/eARC connection. So many modern soundbars and AV Receivers use ARC/eARC now for lossless hi-def audio. Even Creative's own high end soundbars use eARC now: https://us.creative.com/p/speakers/creative-sxfi-carrier

 

oops double post.

 

Use HDMI out from your gfx card for Atmos and DTS-HD.
And ARC/eARC.
You dont need a sound card when using an external DAC.

 

Also i do not want to sound rude or start an endless fight over high quality audio, but going lossless and output from a soundbar feels like an overkill.
I do not have great sophisticated ears, i cannot catch all the small differences in the output of expensive equipment, but how high end can a soundbar sound?, it can sound way better than a plain TV speajer i presume, but i m worried it stops there.

 

You pretty much nailed it.
Its possible there are high quality soundbars where you can tell some difference but they would cost a lot.
However, object based sound (ie Atmos) can have better clarity due to better placement of sound sources in the sound field.

 

The reason I listen to Spotify or mp3 in my car.

At which point you'll probably have a plethora of speaker options that sound better. But, to be honest, I'm not so in touch with current soundbars. I've always seen them as a ok solution for generic use, never as high end solutions.

 

put me to hear 128kbps mp and 320 kbps mp3 ... i can not tell the difference ....at all ..the only time i was able to understand audiophile difference was with an electric guitar a friend had he had an amplifier one digital and one vacuum lamp based that he brought used 3 or 4k euros i do not remember and he was talking like he brought it .. for "Free" so when i asked what's the difference ? and he played a small part on both yeah i could really tell the difference the lamp one was sweeter sound ... better ? i do not know ... but different for sure i think it was better ,but yeah my ears ...are , well they just get the job done nothing delicate or fancy i guess XD .

 

Yep but they are a different target market.
ie people with plenty of cash that dont want speakers spoiling their room, or have a lack of space in a particular room.

I'm with you, I couldnt live with a sound bar, high end stereo / surround is my cake.
I even removed my centre speaker because it is better without when using ribbon tweeters. (centre sound redirected to both fronts).
Confirmed on 3 different set ups with ribbon tweeters ranging from low to high qualilty amp/dacs.
Its strange how well it works.

 

Soundcards are still relevant for some users, external USB soundcards still have way higher latency than internal pci/pci-e cards or onboard.

Anyway, creative would be the last place to look for a soundcard, they mess with the sound and remove it from the original sound. Last time i compared a soundblaster Z to Asus STX, the soundblaster was pure trash compared to the STX. Id rather use onboard soundcard than any card from creative.

 

True but it’s always nicer to have a separate dedicated cable just for sound that isn’t attached to the graphics card. The reason being, if you plug your DisplayPort cable from your GPU into your monitor then plug a HDMI cable from your GPU to your AV Receiver or soundbar, Windows thinks that you’ve plugged in 2 monitors. So when you Alt tab between apps, you get a black screen for about 3 seconds while Windows jerks around until it realises you have no second monitor then reverts back to the main screen.

If you plug your DisplayPort cable from GPU to monitor then an Optical cable from soundcard to soundbar or receiver, alt tabbing works fine and Windows only sees one monitor connected. But... you lose Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD because an Optical cable lacks the bandwidth to carry such lossless audio signals.

A soundcard with a HDMI ARC/eARC connection would alleviate such problems.

 

It isn't clear to me if this does hardware or software processing. Creative has a knack for ruining perfectly good products by not releasing driver updates, but if this uses relatively generic drivers (by Creative's standards) and does all the fancy processing through hardware, this could be appealing. As a Linux user with a 5.1 surround setup, hardware DTS through SPDIF is very desirable.

I'd rather sacrifice a negligible amount of audio quality (for my setup) than latency. No additional space taken up with a PCIe card either. However, because of Creative's poor driver support (on any OS), I won't ever shop them.

 

It depends on the headphones. Some higher end audiophile headphones has higher resistance and less sensitivity, making them harder to drive.

For example I have DT1990. It's not really hard to drive headphones, but if I use it with iPhone, bass won't be as clear and just sounds blur.
Once I connect DT1990 to my Topping A30, sounds get more stable and "faster". There no mud in bass and I can hear it more clearly and there more punch.

There lots of placebo in audiophile hobby, since there no measurement that can tell how actually good the sound is. And your ears are the only 1 thing that decides what is good and what is bad.
Measurements can tell sound signature, and that doesn't really tell much, since all people have difference preference in sound signature ("neutral", "warm", "balanced", "bright", "dark", etc....).

So yeah, there is difference if you have right headphones and ears. Obliviously there steep diminishing returns, so $2000 headphones doesn't sound $1000 better than $1000 ones.

 

a sound card on 2020 without an hdmi port ? how to get dts x and dolby athmos natively ? thanks to the integrated gpu it resolve the probleme and offer to me a second display to my yamaha av rciever with dolby athmos and 7.1 pcm

 

Another really cheap gfx card would work.
Or use the CPUs onboard gfx.

 

Still using an X7 here never ever i am going back to pci-e bs.