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

Highly recommended. This USB adapter works very well as an interface for recording musical instruments with a battery powered 3.5mm STEREO microphone such as the AT2022 or AT822 (a type of stereo microphone commonly used for audio video and portable audio recording applications) . This is a worthy replacement for the old Griffin iMic that only recorded in 16-bit. Stereo microphones combined with this sound card and laptop create a very light, compact and portable package for fast, great sounding recordings. It records excellent 24/44.1 audio, which I find optimal for digital recording. The delay, input and output levels on the sound card were very pleasant and optimal. I use it to record electric guitar, which is a relatively loud sound source, so I can't go into detail about the sound card's noise floor. But in preliminary spoken word tests, the noise level was surprisingly good for a consumer device and will likely be more than adequate for most recordings. StarTech's hardware volume control is a nice bonus and very handy. The StarTech sound card installed easily in seconds into Windows 10, which automatically installed the necessary driver. You may need to make some changes in the Windows Control Panel/Sound Settings to optimize the StarTech USA sound card output and input for your computer - here you can also change the bit depth and sample rate for this sound card. I use Cubase as my DAW for recording and this sound card worked great both when recording via the microphone input and when monitoring via the headphone output. Cubase had no trouble detecting and connecting StarTech's inputs and outputs. My pre-sales contact with StarTech was impressive. The live chat staff answered my technical questions quickly. I have no idea how durable this will be over time. But if it offers a reasonable lifespan, I'd happily take it again.