It definitely sounds better compared to my motherboard's audio, though my motherboard's audio certainly wasn't bad (Asus P6X58D) Pros: I wouldn't consider myself an audiophile, but I'm an electrical engineer who knows a lot more than your average person about audio stats, frequency response, and how these things work at a hardware level.
If they fixed those couple of annoyances this would be about perfect, but depending on your other equipment and how you hook it up they might not even effect you. Overall Review: For the price you're probably not going to find anything better, and the issues with it can be worked around. I was able to work around it by opening a second player and having it loop a blank audio file, but it shouldn't require that. Depending on the receiver (mine does) this means it might click and drop half a second of audio after each time there's no output. The SPDIF keepalive option in the config program doesn't work, so when nothing is playing it turns off the beam. I've had a lot of sound cards that always have a little buzz or static or can't handle high frequencies, but this one is perfectly clean.Ĭons: You can't have it pass along analog signals (line-in, microphone, etc) to the digital out without setting up a program to basically record it and immediately play it back.
If you want to make an interference-free connection between your computer and receiver, this works perfectly.