Review on 🔊 Vantec NBA-200U USB External 7.1 Channel Audio Adapter (Black) - Enhanced Sound Experience with USB Convenience by Charlie Wilson

I bought this to work around the buggy sound my motherboard's SP/DIF output is making and so far it hasn't produced any noticeable artifacts in the audio output so it does the job its purpose. However, I noticed a couple of issues: When connected to my Win10 system, it immediately presented an audio interface ("speakers") with the appropriate inputs, but selecting them produced no sound. It wasn't until I installed the drivers from the Vantec website and rebooted that I got another option that actually played sound. There's no reason I need to reboot to install a USB device, or even install the manufacturer's drivers to get basic functionality like audio output. As you can see in the image, the devices to be installed have a bunch of extra spaces in their names. It also contains a broken "unknown" device. None of them cause any problems, it just shows that the firmware/driver development was "not detail oriented" to say the least. According to the Windows management tools, this unit supports only one sample rate output (48kHz, DVD quality), where my base motherboard's support ranged from 44.1kHz (CD) to 96kHz (studio). And it supports DTS/Dolby for my sound system but not WMA. Again, not really a problem, just not very well. Volume controls are just system volume shortcuts, they don't seem to do anything on the device itself. So you can hide it somewhere under the table without losing anything. I didn't use the microphone or SP/DIF inputs, so I can't comment on their quality.