Customer Reviews

Sound Blaster Audigy Se Varpak

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've held on to my Live! card for years, and it was time for an upgrade. I bought the Logitech 5300e speakers to go with this card, and what an improvement! I'm not an audiophile, just a PC Gamer. And this card made a night and day difference in all of my games. The sound quality and the improved 5.1 and EAX is just awesome. Very cheap in price, very good in it's performance.

My first review was deleted ... probably because I told the truth. This is a great sound card and I'm glad I purchased it. However, "Varpak" is apparently Amazon's way of saying, "we will ship this product to you in a plastic bag."

That's right, I received my sound card (delicate electronics that could easily be broken) in a plastic shipping bag with no box or other protective material. The CD-ROM with drivers that came with the sound card was cracked during shipping but it was easy to download drivers from the web. I really recommend this sound card but I don't recommend purchasing it from this website.

This is great product. Buy one ... but buy somewhere else.

For those not willing to settle for low quality, this card is among the many to choose from. I use it for recording and it works great. Works great in all situations, games, movies, music, etc.

The card it's just good for the price really doesn't make a very very big difference with my old sound blaster 5.1, but it's cheap and works well

For the price you can do a lot worse than a Audigy SE. It does support EAX, kind of and it sounds a notch or two better than your typical onboard audio. However, it has a lot of issues as well. First off, it disables the treble/bass option under the tone control in the control panel. This causes a muffled sound since treble controls the clarity to some degree. The card does come with its own software but the software is merely to beef up the bass, no treble options whatsoever.

Even games suffer greatly because of the fact that the treble can't be adjusted. I really don't know what creative was thinking by creating a card that dismisses this option. Maybe they assumed most speakers have a treble adjustment, don't know. Either way, this card is going back and its being replaced with the audigy 4 SE, which better re-enable the treble option.

In short, like it says on the box, this is a great upgrade from onboard sound. But that isn't saying much. Did I mention even games sound muffled on this thing? I played a few games and the gun shot effect on all of them sounded like the guns had silencers. This is a result of to much bass and not enough treble but that can't be adjusted thanks to the fact that that option isn't enabled on this piss poor card. The soundblaster live was actually a better card, it had those options enabled. This card is actually worse than a card from 6 years ago which is kind of pathetic.

This sound card works and helped me to finally get sound out of my Black Ops Call of Duty game.
I updated the drivers and restarted my PC; then all was well and my game played with sound. Good enough for what I need it for and no issues to date.

As most people do these days, I'd been getting my audio off the motherboard for a while. That failed, and I bought this card as a replacement.

The good: Sound quality is noticeably and genuinely better, especially for games using atmospheric effects (tunnels etc).

The bad:

1) No AC97 or High Definition Audio headers on the card. My case's front-panel headphone and microphone jacks aren't useful. These are well-established and venerable standards that pretty much any motherboard supports without fuss - - can we do that here, guys?

2) Bad driver packaging. OK, guys? Maybe this marks me as old-fashioned, BUT...Windows 7 doesn't recognize the card and install drivers. Fine, I download and install the 44MB driver-and-random-other-crap package. Then I reboot, and Windows 7 goes and updates the drivers anyway. I ended up with something that worked, but why should I download and install a 44MB package to make it work, just to have it immediately updated? Why can't you just supply a working (and reasonably-sized) WHQL driver package so the installation is seamless and we can just all move along?

You've been at it for 22 years. Your drivers don't have to suck anymore.

The bottom line: It's a fine-sounding and reasonably-priced card which will give you a 1998-esque driver installation experience. Don't let that scare you off, just put on some *NSYNC and get to work.

Great card, makes playing Crysis and Call of Duty a pleasure! Amazing value for what I paid for it. Compatible with all Windows and Linux.

Installing the Sound Blaster was a significant improvement over the on board sound. I'm not a techie and my son had to help me complete the installation...well worth the time, effort and money.
CMA

Can't adjust Treble or Bass, way worse than the sound blaster 16 that I had 10 years ago. Even worse than onboard audio! Not even worth 1 star but that's the only option.