Pristine Sound and a Slew of Features

For the three years that I've owned my Thinkpad, I was desperate to improve the horrible sound quality of my laptop's built in sound-card. When Creative finally released a PCMCIA sound card, I was sold before I read a single review. Thankfully, the card is all I could have hoped for.

First, the pertinent features: the card has 192khz 24bit digital-to-analogue converters, which means the sound is very clean. It decodes Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES (both 6.1) in addition to having its own 7.1 modes. This is great, as the sound quality and surround positioning is vastly superior to software-based solutions (it also means that your CPU usage while watching DVDs will be lower). It can even serve as a decoder for a dvd player if you have a set of 5/6/7.1 speakers but no receiver. It can upmix a stereo source to 7.1. Naturally, you can record, but I can't comment on that as I never use the feature. The card also supports DVD-Audio which, although not widespread, does sound noticely better than CD - it even comes with a demo disc to show you what you're missing. Naturally, it supports EAX 3.0 and DirectSound 3d, though I don't play games (but only because my laptop is too slow!). The card has an optical (but not coaxial) output and and input and a dongle to support 2/4/5/6/7.1 outputs.

In terms of software, the card comes with the excellent Mediasource player which, beyond its many features (burning, organising your music library, evening out changes in volumes, removing hiss and scratches from old recordings etc.) sounds better and cleaner than Winamp and Windows Media Player. There are a variety of utilities - a THX set-up console, an equaliser, a wave editor, a surround mixer - if you like to fiddle until you get your sound just right, you'll love this card.

Most importantly to me, however, is performance and here the card also shines. Listening through quite an old set of Boston Acoustic speakers (through the analogue out) I was astounded at how great my MP3s sounded (all encoded at 320kbs). The difference in how warm, present and clean the sound was was truly amazing. Movies also sounded much better than my laptop audio, even in a 2.1 setup. Surround separation was good. When I switched to Grado headphones, the difference was even more pronounced. Bass and mid-range were clean and punchy and the high-end had no sizzle or hiss (other than that caused by MP3 encoding, so no fault of the card). If you, like me, are sick of poor laptop sound, invest in this card.

As for the bad news - the drivers can be buggy. Be sure to download the latest drivers as soon as you get the card. Until I did, I couldn't watch a movie in DTS without major stuttering and crackling. The dongle attachment is potentially sketchy - if you are moving around *a lot* then be very careful with it. Also, there is no coaxial out, which is the more common form of digital input, especially in computer speakers. The feature set is a little overwhelming - there's so much, it can take you a while to figure it all out.

I would suggest, however, that the pros far outweigh the cons. Upon installing the card, I went back listened to a number of albums and movies, just to hear how great they sound through this card. Invest in a decent set of headphones and enjoy. This is the ultimate audio addition to your laptop.