Creative Technology SB1550 Sound Blaster Audigy RX 7.1 Sound Card

If you have a integrated audio card make yourself a favour and download a free/buy an editor so you can record,or play with equalizers,or make music editings etc.. A very sad occurrence is happening to audio, its become empty!. Half the fun of audio is playing with the Its controls!. I can tell people like me who create Billions$$$ WORTH of editing(not cash) for fun will be smashed down by digital audio and integrated cards. They’ll have you believe audio is digital, but its really first analog. While everybody screams digital, You can’t find analog tape deck anymore(almost) to create my special effects. Digital is not an improvement!, i use analog to create effects! and sounds etc and digital to edit tracks to completion. They complement each other only!. Less future artist will be exposed to analog equipment and controls, and we will have less artists if we go only digital.

tl;dr: Nice sound quality, but speakers don’t cut out when using front port headphones.

I’ve had many Creative cards through the years, and they’ve always been excellent. Unfortunately this one appears to lack a very basic piece of functionality that’s possibly going to see it replaced very early on.

The device connected and was immediately recognised by Windows 10. The installation of the supplied software was quick and easy, but required a restart.

The card comes with a standard connector for front panel audio – headphone and microphone. On my motherboard’s on-board sound device, the speakers cut out when a headphone was connected (in fact, the output was configurable – you could switch between them with a few mouse clicks, which was brilliant). This is standard with Realtek, and allows a great deal of flexibility.

Unfortunately this card doesn’t appear to support headphones in this way. Not only is the output not configurable (annoying, but not a deal-breaker), the speaker output doesn’t cut out when a headphone is connected – it just continues playing through both outputs. There’s a speaker configuration for ‘headphones’ in the supplied control panel software, but this just appears to be a tone adjustment away from the default 2.1 speaker setting – it doesn’t cut the speakers.

I have a very busy desk space, and I can’t go leaping behind the PC every time I want to switch outputs. This is very disappointing for what’s otherwise a very nice product, out of what’s previously been a good stable. The Z series (with all the red metal) appears to support separate headphone/speaker outputs, but I’m loathe to potentially waste another £70-odd quid…

Adequate sound card if you’re not an audiophile. Sound is decent and easy to install. Just remember to download the newer driver from the manufacturer’s website if you’re using Windows 10. Without them the sound card will not function properly.

Not the card to buy if you want to plug your PC to a home cinema via optical cable with the hope of getting proper 5.1 surround sound. Something that is not explained clearly is that optical can only support one of these formats: uncompressed stereo or compressed DTS or compressed Dolby Digital. Windows doesn’t do encoding so the sound card needs to be able to encode on the fly to a compressed DTS or DD format, which requires some clever software called respectively DTS Connect and Dolby Digital Live. This card does NOT include these therefore was useless to me.
(Check out the Sound Blaster Z series instead)

A very good product, excellent even. It was extremely easy to fit (just remember to run the driver on the CD afterwards). My music sounds perfect through my soundbar and there are numerous settings you can play about with in the software on the CD. Even the default Windows sounds which test the left/right speakers are now different class.
So, excellent, as I said, but please be aware that there was no screwdriver nor a screw to fasten the soundcard securely to the back of the PC case included in the box.
Maybe Creative shouldnt be responsible for supplying either of these items and if the soundcard was replacing a previous one (for example) then you would have been able to reuse the screw already in place. If, like me, you had to push the rear panel out of the back of your PC, then there wasn’t a screw to use.
Fortunately I already had a very small screwdriver which came with a graphics card from last year and I had a packet of PC Case screws which I had bought from Amazon some time ago. One of these fit the hole at the back, so the experience remained a positive one.

I dislike that it was a waist of time and money without any reward like having my 500w 5.1 surround sound work. You see over a decade ago i had surround sound and seems to me it just worked. Did logitech or sound blaster f up ? Who cares im about to send the entire mess of over complicated and priced garbage back. Ready for the land fill right off the production line real classy. I just returned another speaker from logitech cause its 3.5 cable was weak and failed in a week. So im not taking any chances id rather use my bluetooth speaker that has worked no problems. Cause the bass is weak either way. But I have 500$ more to my name witch is favorable. I don’t care anymore. Cause my time is even more valuable than that 500 dollars. And I’m not bloody well amused.