Review on 🎧 StarTech.com 7.1 USB Sound Card - External Sound Card for Laptop with SPDIF Digital Audio - PC Sound Card Silver (ICUSBAUDIO7D) by Nick Howard

my laptop does not have a stereo microphone input. And this USB audio adapter was advertised as supporting stereo microphones. Spring. it supports stereo IN but I'm not sure if it supports microphones. I tried getting an unamplified stereo microphone to work with it, but the sound was barely good enough to record with an audio program. It definitely wasn't enough to use with any video chat software. This is where, in my opinion, StarTech failed in their design. Curious as to what this thing was made of, I hacked the device and removed the plastic casing. This device consists almost entirely of a C-Media chip (specifically model CN6533) and a dual op amp to amplify the headphone output. And all! The C-Media CM6533 chip actually has both an analogue and a digital amplifier. on board (according to the specification), but I think the driver for this USB device only allows control of one USB device. (In fact, I believe StarTech relies on the standard Windows Audio Endpoint driver to do its job.) This is unfortunate, as some microphones require more gain than others. In particular, some microphone drivers under Windows have "digital microphone amplification" which, however, must be explicitly enabled by the manufacturer. StarTech doesn't. They just called in and let the standard Windows Audio EndPoint driver do its job. When you go to the C-Media website, you are prompted to contact the manufacturer for a driver. Well, it's not on the StarTech website. As for the audio output, everything is fine. It has a switch on the back that gives you bass boost without changing the EQ or boosting the treble. The switch works and you really get a good bass boost (or treble boost). Although the amplification of the sound is ok. The sound is kind of flat. And if you listen closely in a quiet room, you can hear a very slight hiss/noise coming from the op amp. Designed for headphones. Low voltage/high power. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. It's not the worst device for the price, but it's not outstanding either. In comparison, the built-in Realtek audio chip in my laptop is way better than this thing. .