Review on 🔊 Sabrent USB-SBCV: Enhance Desktop or Notebook Audio with Driverless External Surround Sound Adapter by Marc Tufa

From my experience and reading other badly rated reviews, this product seems to have hit the mark a bit. On the one hand the sound quality is pretty good and even with a cheap mini mic I usually had a lot of hiss, the recording quality was great too. BUT and this is a big but, the device I received was defective. The right speaker was significantly quieter than the left. Most people would return it in a heartbeat but I've been looking for decent sound and voice quality for a while while still being cheap and this will be my 3rd return in the last 2 weeks. I decided to fix it myself and found that there was an extra resistor on the right channel. See image. I just removed that offending component and soldered the connectors together. And voila, perfectly clear and balanced sound. This is definitely NOT what the average user wants to do, hence 3 stars instead of 5. If it wasn't for the audio quality, which seriously surpasses anything I would expect from something this cheap. , that would be a zero rating. Other reviews mention left/right channels swapped or other issues. This can be due to a poor quality control process to weed out defective units. Other pros and cons besides the above shortcoming. + Second cheapest USB audio device with built-in volume control and mute. And the first one I found with pretty good sound and mic quality and decent output volume. + Has a nice fading effect when the sound is off. + Appears to be stronger than other models with similar characteristics. The plastic case feels thick, the parts don't wobble, and the case halves are held together with screws, unlike other models that are just glued, snapped, or the like. The light flashes during playback. I thought it would be distracting, but it really isn't. The LED is low intensity and not as noticeable when playing in a dark room. - The standard drivers in Windows 7 do not recognize the socket. ie it does not notify you that headphone/microphone is connected. Maybe this is a limitation of this class of USB devices? Or maybe a hardware limitation of the ports used? - Apparently there are no drivers for certain devices. At least not on the manufacturer's side. Was hoping there might be drivers that would make more features available. Other Thoughts: Other reviews claim it has a built-in microphone. It is not. It just doesn't report connecting/disconnecting, so it *appears* to be connected to something when actually it isn't. Just like old school sound cards.