External Sound Card USB 6 Channel 5.1 Audio

Remarkably cheap for what it does. For some reason my on-board audio ceased to work on my general purpose machine (I have another machine which is dedicated to audio but it's useful to be able to play stuff on the machine connected to the net) and I bought this device as a quick fix.

Delivery (to Spain) was good and it turned up within a week, The unit is solidly built for the money, but I have to agree with most of the other reviewers, the 'support' is appalling. No instructions of any sort and the CD gives no indication of which (of several) drivers to install. That's why I give it 3 stars, otherwise it deserves at least a 4, if only on a price vs spec basis.

For anyone still struggling, the drivers you want are in the directory CM6206(XP,VISTA,WIN7), go there and then select your OS (I'm running XP) and then double click on 'install.exe' - and all should be good. You do need to reboot the computer after installation.

FWIW, when I plugged the unit in, Windows rushed off and automatically installed a set of Windows generic drivers - and they did work. However, although I didn't explore it further, I suspect they won't allow access to all the features.

Hi, first review on amazon after being a member a long time (Lazy!).

Bought this device as I invested in an Onkyo AV reciever and wanted to connect the PC up to the device with tru surround sound. As the AV reciever I bought is geared toward digital connection (HDMI, Optical etc) The older 5.1 card with analogue outs on my machine wasnt going to do the job.

I took a gamble on this unit as it was cheap and cheerful and I am very pleased.

I am using Windows 7 64bit, I plugged in the device while connected to the net and the drivers were puled doen automaticaly (the chiposet used in the box appears to be c-media). Conencted an optical (spdif) cable to the optical out on the box and into the amp then set up using all the standard windows tools. This is a good job as the supplied CD is basically useless. I havent marked down for this as it has not interefered with my use at all and the hardware is working flawlessly. I will be interested to see if I can have a play around with the other analogue outputs to use for DJ'ing but I cannot confirm this will work and the device probably isnt good enough quality to be honest.

In summary - Very cheap, plug and play on my WIN7 64 Bit (ultimate) OS. deliveres 5.1 over optical with no config needed to my av reciever via a simple USB connection from the PC. Solved a problem I made for myself.

I purchased this Sound Card in order to improve the quality of recordings made transferring LPs via a Hi-Fi Amplifier onto MP3 music on the PC. My internal sound card has some noise on one channel. Seemed like good value and unlike some of the other external sound cards this had a Line-In socket rather than just a Mic (which will be mono in many cases). I won't be using the 5.1 Audio yet but this looks like a good bonus.

Item was smaller than I expected, about the size of a pack of cards, and nicely finished with a smart metal case. It arrived promptly, with a mini-CD and no documentation. When I plugged it into the PC (running XP) Windows auto-installed a driver ("USB Sound Card"). Trying to update this off the supplied CD failed ("no drivers found" message). I could not get sound into the PC despite trying all the available settings.

On further investigation, the CD has several directories with zipped .rar files in them. I didn't have a way of unzipping them, so installed a freeware utility (google "RAR Extract Frog" - worked fine with no spamware side effects) and extracted the files in the directory "USB-106-081014-12.8.2111(Full-LO-01)_1016". Not the most obvious of Directory names! Having done this, I found a setup.exe utility (which I ran) and drivers which updated the card (to "USB Multi-channel Audio Device") and added an Icon to the System Tray, from which I can now open a Console Window to easily change the settings. Had to do this again on second use of the card, but these settings have now survived a re-boot so seem permanent now. So a bit of a struggle here for a few hours!

Once further change I had to make was to change the Sound Properties on the PC to take Audio Input from "Microsoft Sound Mapper" rather than the system default settings. Once I had done this, I could finally get incoming sound through the Line-In socket of the card into the PC, and make some recordings with Audacity. There is still a little noise on both channels but this is less than before and the quality of the MP3 recording is fine.

Only comment about the exterior of the unit is that all the mini-jack sockets are quite close together and cable plugs I had into the Line-In and Front-Out (can use for regular stereo speakers) were squeezed up against each other. If you have fatter cable plugs they may not all fit into the sockets concurrently.

So summary - neat unit, good value, works OK but it's hard to set up and some basic documentation should be provided. The drivers and install programs should be shipped uncompressed so that Windows can find them on first installation of the CD.