Soundcards (especially external ones) have become a nieche market, since PC motherboards are coming preinstalled with good and solid soundcards nowadays. Thankfully, we dont have to talk a lot about specs anymore, since companies and manufactures are able to build high quality audio devices in small and affordable packages and the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD USB soundcard is one of those you can recommend.
If you are a livestreamer or a console gamer, who spends a lot of time at your PC you end up having a problem, where you have to find out how to get your sound from multiple devices into one source, so you dont have to buy a ton of headphones for every device or you simply want to listen to that podcast/YouTube video, while you play on your gaming console at the same time.
You either end up buying a DAC (Digital/Analog Converter), which are very expensive and you mostly able to listen to one source at a time, or you buy yourself a hardware mixer, which takes up a lot of space on your desk and also draws extra power from the wall.
The Sound Blaster X-Fi HD solves this problem by having multiple inputs, feeding the audio output via USB from your PC and also having an optical in via Toslink (for your gaming consoles for example) and a stereo chinch input where you can attatch your phone, iPod (or any other mp3 player), a vinyl record player (yes, it has a ground screw) or some other device you might like to listen to. There is also microphone input in the front, where you can put in your headset mic into. Fun fact, if you put in your headphones in the front, it automaticly deactives your Line-Out Chinch, so you dont have to turn off your speakers!
The great thing about this is that there is no recognizable latency while playing back your audio content from whatever source you feed it over the Stereo Chinch Line Outs or the 1/4 inch Headphone out.
Sadly, this comes with the price of having your PC running the whole time, since the Sound Blaster X-Fi is not an autonomous system, but if you are using your PC the whole time while you playing with your console, this should not be an issue.
To mix all of these inputs together, Creative provides their “Entertainment console” where you can mute, set the volume of the provided sources. They even provide an EQ with multiple presets, even though i think that EQing in the consumer level became obsolete a decade ago, but if you are still in need for an EQ, there you have it.
My biggest gripe about the Entertainment Console is that you can not change the line inupt into a phono input (and vice versa) through the program rather than to straight up deactivating one or the other through the Windows audio device settings, resulting in distored audio playback, since the soundcard can not decide on it’s own if the audio you feed into the chinch inputs needs to be amplified or not.
Honestly though, i was surprised what i was getting for just 70€ (amazon.com says its 89.99$ right now). Creative even managed to through some ASIO drivers in here as well, so if i need to review a project in my audio software real quick, i dont have to plug in my audio interface and do tons of recabling to listen to it on my smaller speakers. Pretty neat.
I only can recommend the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD for people like me, who have a lot of audio sources coming from various places and dont want to replug their headphones and speakers all the time.
