Creative Sound Blaster Z SE Sound Card

Pros: Cheap,
High quality,
Better than my mobos audio interface Cons: Software is not perfect,
The card is almost 10 years old in making Overall Review: If the card is on sale, I would definitely buy again.

Overall Review: Kind of thought sound cards were a meme before this, but when I setup my PC the built-in sound card was atrocious. This is so much better and the software is pretty decent.

Pros: I love this card, I just got it and started fiddling with it.
It comes with the obvious stuff, such as an equalizer, but what sets it apart from my onboard video is the crystallizer and Dolby Audio encoder. The crystallizer makes it so sounds are more distinct and all of their elements are more distinguishable, especially if you have a 5.1 speaker setup. It just sounds better.
With onboard audio my biggest complaint was that while I have a 5.1 speaker setup, if listening to music I only heard sound on the 2 front speakers.
but with this card and a bit of fiddling I was able to get sound on all speakers, here’s what I did:
-Activate the Dolby Audio Encoder
-Under Playback, set speaker config to 5.1 ; under full range speakers, check both front left and right, as well as surround speakers. Bass redirection and subwoofer gain also sound good.
-Under the SBX profile, create a new profile and activate the surround value, I hear all speakers when it’s set to 40. Also recommend, crystallizer sounds best at 50.
Once you adjust your speaker volumes as described below, keep cranking up the surround value until you can hear sound on all speakers.
-Back under playback, you must calibrate your speakers, for the rear and center front speakers, keep increasing their volume output until you can hear them. Reducing their distance is good too, high distance makes them sound a bit mushy, setting them closer makes them crisper. just mess with that part until you have something you like.
What’s nice about this setup is that different sound elements from a song or video are split between all speakers, which just makes it sound nice and fancy, and sounds right if all your speakers are close, and in front of you; which is my setup. The above configuration might sound weird or different if your speakers are all around you, and if some are further away from you.
Also it comes with scout mode, making footsteps more audible, useful if you want to be a total try hard at CSGO. I haven’t tried it so can’t comment much more Cons: You can have different SBX Profiles, to change the crystallizer, Smart Volume, and surround strength. But you don’t have profiles for your speaker configuration, as seen above I mess with my individual speaker volume and distance, there are no profiles for this, so games that use rear speakers play sound extremely loudly, I have to manually make the speakers 2.1, otherwise I have to undo all volume settings. This will only be a problem if you mess with the settings as described above.
The crystallizer, while it is good, it makes all the various sounds of music more distinct, sometimes it makes the wrong sounds louder, music with loud drums for example, makes the drums louder. Overall Review: I like this card, but it really needs to have a profile for your speaker setup too, and make it easier to switch between your profiles on the fly

Pros: Honestly, the product is built very well. I was satisfied with the installation. It fit properly, and connected well. It’s a great product, and I’m sure it works great with Microsoft applications….. Cons: So, here’s the deal……I had a very questionable feeling going into this after the purchase, knowing that it’s difficult with trying to find a very good audio card that would work very well with the Linux infrastructure that doesn’t cost a tremendous amound of money. But, I did a little research before the purchase to see what kind of knowledge I could obtain, so I could make this great product do what it is supposed to do.
All I needed this for, was to do microphone voice processing, and that’s it. I needed more richer
tones, crisp clear sounds, and just an all around great audio processor sound instead of using the intregrated onboard audio, but it didn’t work out like I would have thought. But, like I said, I kind of knew this going in, and thought that I could use what knowledge that I researched to apply to this installation to try to make it work for what I needed it for.
After many trials and errors, and spending many hours, I just couldn’t have it perform to do what I was looking for, so honestly, I just left it in the board. It provides good overall sound for videos and whatever I’m listening to, but that’s about it. I couldn’t even download the software for it, as there is none available for Linux, which I found, truely a let down.
So, it sits on the board just doing what it’s doing, and that’s fine. Not worth returning and going through the hassle for what it cost me. But, I gave it a try….. Overall Review: Yes, I would recommend this audio card as long as your running anything other than Linux. The support and downloadable software is more readily available than for what I have.
It’s too bad that there aren’t more available sound cards that support the Linux architecture that don’t cost an arm and a leg. I know that there are a lot of Linux people out there who have great successes, and have greater knowledge than I do with this sort of thing, not that I am new to Linux, but with this type of hardware, I’m kind of stumped…
It would be a great thing to have a sound card that would work with Linux as well as with other operating systems. Or just have a Linux card specifically made for Linux that doesn’t break the bank.