Creative Sound Blaster X5 Hi-res 32bit/384kHz External USB DAC with Fully Balanced Xamp Headphone Bi-amp, Bluetooth Receiver, RCA in/-Out, TOSLINK Optical in/-Out, Mic-in, Headset-in for Audiophiles

I love this creative piece, the Software quality is great as they have ported the x7 software, its has more than enough audio jacks, with digital and optical links. I like how it sits on my desk and the dial is great. definitely high value piece

Absolutely the most versatile sound card I have ever had (many) over a few decades.

I regret buying this. I have had nothing but problems with it.The cons:1. It disconnects regularly and the USB cable needs to be pulled and reinserted. It has disconnected while I was using it too. This is not a USB power setting...it's bad design.2. It "loses" its driver a couple times a week. It will prompt you over and over and over to install the driver that's already installed. Connecting it to another USB port is the only thing that fixes this.3. It has a bug where it sets the mic volume to zero after a boot. It happens every time for me. Lots of people complain about it, but apparently Creative isn't concerned enough to fix it.4. There's a USB host port on this where you can supposedly plug in a Bluetooth device to use wireless headphones. I've tried both Creative's own BT-W3 and BT-W5 and neither worked.5. I occasionally get a massive ground loop through this. I don't hear it on other sound cards, just this one. Of course there's no ground screw on this thing either.The pro:1. It sounds great when it works.This is my final Creative Labs purchase.

The Sound Blaster X5 seemed to have everything I was looking for, balanced headphone output, EQ support, RCA and optical inputs and outputs and Bluetooth support. The ability to mix across inputs was a welcome bonus too. My plan was to use it with my PC as well as a PS4 and occasionally Bluetooth receiver, tough to find an all in one that can do all of that with audiophile level hardware.From the get go there were problems. The device was not recognized by windows and could not load default drivers. I was planning to use the creative software anyway so all good. However it took 5 installation attempts and restarts before windows picked it up, and even then only after messing around in the device manager.Once I was finally up and running, issues with the volume control started cropping up. This isn’t necessarily a bug but design decisions around how the volume levels are controlled, especially when mixing inputs, leaves a lot to be desired. I would’ve preferred if it was simply controlling hardware volume and I can control the windows volume independently. If I wanted to play some background music from windows while using the PlayStation on the optical input I had to lower the volume all the way in Spotify just to have reasonable levels.All of this was acceptable since I recognized this was a pretty custom / specific setup but after just 2 days the device randomly dropped the Bluetooth connection while playing music from my phone and started loudly hissing, I had to throw the headphones off my head it was so loud. It continued hissing and loudly cracking, to the point I was concerned it would break my expensive headphones. I tried to reconnect, restart, reset to factory, perform the diagnostic tool on the app, etc etc. but the hissing never went away and I was never able to get it to play anything from any source. Spent two hours messing around with it with no progress.Overall, I think creative is on to something with this type of device but the X5 simply isn’t ‘finished’. Even though I was willing to give it a pass on some things I will be returning it and looking elsewhere, will likely need a combination of devices to achieve what I’m after.

Awesome device! Has with amazing clarity and bass. Great flexibility. I don't use it for the gaming functions or DSP at all, only direct mode. I use it as a DAC, balanced head phone amp and pre-amp to my amp for bookcase speakers. Fabulous sound quality on headphones and speakers in direct mode.I did not have any of the issues the previous reviewer had. The device function and app has been flawless.

This for my use is a do it all device. I have multiple dac/amps and I wanted something for headsets if I want to use one. This works fantastic for my use