Review on Creative Sound Blaster X4 Game Amplifier/External Sound Card by Adam Kotowski ᠌

More detailed subjective feedback: Bought for headphones DT 990 Pro 250 Ohm. The purpose of use is mainly games, much less often music + additional connection of 7.1 acoustics, but in stereo mode. Before I came to buy this device, I considered the DAC + amplifier separately. In such a bundle, the sound in these headphones approaches the most balanced quality. But even a relatively budget bundle on the Trooper comes out under 30tr. I didn’t want to spend that kind of money right now, so I managed with an external sound card with a headphone amp. At the moment I'm happy with my choice. I'll add a DAC later. Of all the declared functions, I really liked Direct mode (all games through it. Sound processing is completely absent). If you want to try to the maximum out of the sound of the game at the expense of a comfortable sound, then the functions in the Acoustic Engine cope with this task: Crystallization (really makes the sound cleaner, mainly by raising the treble) and b (you just need to turn it on and set the cutoff at the frequency 250Hz This is how we remove the b from the steps and leave well-defined sounds). Unfortunately, the entire Enginering is software and if the application is closed, it stops working. The same goes for the Audio Balance feature between the spoken chat and the game. It is also implemented only at the software level and stops working after the utility is closed. At the hardware level, Direct mode and 3 equalizer modes are supported. Most likely, the X-FI, DD sound processors are the same - but I did not check, the functions are not interesting to me. Further comments are very subjective, as they depend on your headphones. The volume margin is impressive. The sound quality itself is without pretensions. 24bit/192kHz seems to sound more interesting than 44.1. Tested on flac 24/192 - everything is clear here. And the usual tracks from spotify (there is like 16/44.1. Most likely this is self-hypnosis, because they write that upsampling cannot improve the sound quality). There are no questions about games. Everything sounds great.