HDE USB 2.0 External Sound Card 6 Channel 5.1 Surround Sound Optical Audio Output Adapter for PC and Mac

I ordered this from Electronic4sale and as such it took a month to get to me. I was eager to get this to see how it weights up against my tiny FiiO E06 and the difference is huge...unfortunately not in favor of this HDE device. The E06 has three presets for an equalizer...bass-y, no eq, and moderate eq. This unit comes with the unit itself, a cable, and a cd with driver/software. Like most sound card software the equalizer and many other settings are only available in the software. You have presets that are common in many equalizers (rock, dance, classical, etc...), environments (normal, large room, dance hall, etc...), technical settings for the various ports of the card (frequencies in kHz, gain, etc...), and volume. No matter what I did with the equalizer it seemed to be high pitched regardless. Music didn't sound right at all regardless of type and even movies had no depth in the audio using this thing...it was a total let down or more notably pointed out how good FiiO is at what it does with music in a small package. I ended up using the FiiO on the line out of this device and happiness was returned. I do wish I had a recommendation to fix this units high tone, but with the software they have one is limited.

FOR THOSE WHO NEED THE DRIVER FOR WINDOWS 7 "http://www.drivers-download.com/en/downloadlist.php?p=2&id=161"It took me a very long time to find the right drivers, so I wanted to make sure everyone who needs them knows where to get them. The ones that came included with the device plain old did not work. You can get it to work with the stereo output this way, but if you want to use it to power a 2.1/5.1/7.1 system, you need these drivers. Once you get the drivers working, this little box sounds great. I had an issue with interference on my motherboard audio that caused annoying noises, so I needed something external that could do 5.1 on separate front/sub outputs. This product was cheap and exactly what I needed. There is something loose inside of the unit making a rattling noise, but so far has not caused any problems of note.

First off, the thing that shocked me most was that there was no real brand tied to this product. The CD that came with it didn't work, and I ended up just using windows update to install the drivers for it. Worked about 97% of the time, with a few bugs and glitches, but has been perfect for the past few months. Love playing games with this and turning around at that last moment to shoot the guy sneaking up on me. :]

This is the cheapest and easiest way to set up a surround sound system with a Home Theater PC. It works with UBUNTU Linux without needing any extra drivers or anything being required. I have used it with both Optical SPDIF output and discrete 6 channel analog, and with my Yamaha amp, I liked the sound quality better with the analog using 3 stereo cables. My HTPC in the living room had built in surround sound jacks, but the sound quality was horrible, so I tried one of these. It worked so great I ordered a second one to add surround sound to the system in my bedroom.

I bought this item just for the optical SPDIF connection. Long story short is I had to replace the Motherboard in my Home Theater PC with one I already had, but it did not have an optical out for 5.1 surround sound or available PCIE slots for adding an internal sound card. I found this HDE product on Amazon and figured that 12 bucks wasn't much of a gamble. The sound quality for the price really supprised me. A true audiophile will probably not be satisfied, but I certianly was.

*BEWARE* Im sure it works fine, unless you have Windows 10. Description says it works for WINDOWS 10, but it is no longer suported by this company. Even says so on their site. (Located from included driver disk). There are no drivers, no patches, it will absolutely not work with Windows 10.

This external sound card is excellent! The Only problem that I had was figuring out which part of the software to activate to get it going, i.e., no instructions came with it. Other than that, it allowed me to go from stereo to 5.1 and, I couldn't be happier because, the sound system that I have for my home computer has Really come to life!! To whomever (that makes this purchase), just be patient with the setup, e.g, take your time with what part of the software to activate, after you find the right one, look in your menu bar tray for the icon that goes with the software and that's where you'll set up your speakers After you activate it. It's Great!

Nice cheap chip from some non-USA country. Works well enough for the price. Autoplay opened the Win XP installer for Windows 7, which failed, but other than that, setup was easy. Works fine with my Logitech 5.1 surround sound speakers. Adjustable virtual and actual audio levels for each speaker and the sub is nice. Effects are cute, but I never really use them. Just having the ability to lower my bass in the SW is worth it alone.

This is very cheap. I can't say how good the analogue output is. I bought it because I needed an optical out from my HTPC to my Surround system so I could play DTS from blu-ray and DVD. For next to no money, this does a great job of that. It is very small and unobtrusive too. Great value.Update - It stopped working after a Windows 10 update. However, after much determined experimentation I have it working again.Well, the time I’ve put into this probably makes it five times as expensive for me as the original cost of the part! I've dropped it one star for the unhelpful software.But I have the satisfaction of it working again– and sounding really good. So I may as well put another half hour in writing a set of instructions…(This is what you need to do until CMedia put out proper Windows 10 drivers for this device).1. Download the most recent driver. Ideally don’t use the CMedia website, because it’s incredibly slow – 2 hours for a 15MB download. I went to [...] and used the link to the backup driver there, not the one that goes to the slow official server. Anyway, the driver you need is version 1.04. Its full name is CM6206-1.04(CR).zip2. If you have already tried and failed to install the device, make sure you completely uninstall it. Here’s how…Start with the device connected to your computer.(a) using control panel add/remove programs get rid of any installed CMedia software;(b) right-click the Windows button and select ‘Device Manager’ then find the USB sound card and choose ‘uninstall’. If it asks you whether you want to remove software, say yes.3. I then ran CCleaner registry sweeper three times to make sure there were no rogue entries left in the registry.4. Now unplug your soundcard device from the PC - and restart your computer for good measure.5. Unzip the driver folder you downloaded (nb it needs to be on your hard drive, not on a memory stick or similar or it won’t install properly)6. Run the exe installation file. It will ask you to plug in the USB sound card. Do so and hit OK.Then just follow instructions until it tells you to restart.7. Now you’ll have sound via your SPDIF, but no 5.1, just a stereo downmix.8. If you look in your system tray there will be an icon for the USB sound device. This brings up an ugly-looking configuration menu. Don’t worry about it – you won’t be using this, and it will only mislead you! The way to set this thing up is via Windows Control Panel9. Go to your system search (next to the Windows button) and type in ‘audio’ – this will take you directly to ‘manage audio devices’ on your control panel.10. There will be (at least) two sound devices there. One will be called ‘Speakers – USB sound device’ another will be called ‘Digital Output – USB sound device’. You need to disable all devices except for ‘Digital Output – USB sound device.’11. That should fix you up. To test it out, double-click the ‘Digital Output’ icon. On the window that pops up, hit the tab called ‘supported formats’. There you will have the opportunity to test DTS and Dolby Digital (you need the SPDIF plugged into a surround system decoder for this bit).12. You might then need to update the audio settings in any video software you have (if it’s PowerDVD you definitely will) to make it output 5.1. DTS.Hope that helps someone.

There are several of these units offered on Amazon, and there are reviews from "dreadful" to "brilliant". Reading them all is useful, and one particular point which is frequently made is the poor disc/software and information. My purchase is relatively recent, and I think the disc is a bit more up-to-date, although there is a load of rubbish on it which is nothing to do with the soundcard. The drivers are not listed as such - you need to install the "program" appropriate to your OS. There is no information about how to use the soundcard.The board is reasonably well made, although one or two of the sockets could be a bit straighter. The box is a neat aluminium extrusion but the end-plates have rather flimsy tabs into which self-tap screws locate. I repaired a couple of these tabs, and then took care not to tighten the screws too much.The chip is not a CM6202 as widely reported, but a CM6206-LX, which according to C-media's website has a 6 channel output, not an 8 channel one. I cannot confirm this as nowhere can I locate a -LX datasheet. (If anyone has one I would be most interested). The two microphone channels are commoned, so you can only have monaural mic. input, unless you are prepared to do a bit of interesting soldering. The line in is stereo, which is important to me as that is what I wanted the soundcard for - to record music using a lap-top. There is supposed to be a headphone output, which I assume is low impedance, but if the pin-out of the -LX is similar to the 6202, it is not used.Window 7, and probably Win 8 would too, found a generic driver which provided a two channel output, line and mic input and apparently (I could not check) digital input and output. This does not give full control of the chip and you need to install the correct program from C-media (various sources are given in other reviews - I used the mini CD supplied).The only real criticism I have is that the line input is too sensitive; if you feed a signal in at "line" voltage - somewhere around 700 mV - you need to turn the input so far down (I was using Audacity) that you have very poor control over the recording level. You need to attenuate a line level signal externally to a fifth or even a tenth so that you can turn the record level control up to about 50 (%?) to get accurate control. This does seem a poor feature of the 6202-LX chip. Also, there appears to be significant noise on the line input (compared with a soundcard in my desktop) according to Audacity, and I suspect this is due to all the power coming from the USB 5 volt lines. Perhaps if the unit was powered from a separate, smooth, 5 volt power supply the noise would be better, but for a tenner or so (8$ according to the shipping note) this is a great litle device.

For the money, this is OK. I needed something to provide line in / out one a new laptop. This does the job.It is not a high performance audio device. One of the previous reviewers lists the chip-set used in this device. I'm fortunate enough to have a dScopeIII audio test set on my bench so decided to do a few quick measurements while making sure that the device functioned.I only had time to test line in and line out.Performance at 48KHz sampling is significantly worse than 44.1KHz which makes me suspect that all is not well with the clock in the sample that I have.At 44.1KHz sample rate:-The DAC noise floor is around -70dB. Distortion near full scale O/P is around 0.03%.The ADC full scale is +3dBu. Noise is around -75dBu. Distortion 0.06%.

The Sound Card worked for almost 2 weeks before developing a fault and failing to work all together, tried on several different computers and different install configurations "USB device not recognised". On closer inspection I discovered the item is actually different than the one in the picture, much cheaper/poorer quality. Also all of the ports show severe cosmetic damage. Tried contacting seller with no response :/

The playback quality through this unit is superb. The underlying noise is very low ('A' weighted, it's -110dB) and distortion is low. There is one small "fly in the ointment" - it's intolerant of over levels on its inputs. Over-level leads to really nasty distortion, so if you're going to use this as a high quality audio input device, you're going to have to feed it via a fast limiter.