REALTEK ALC1150 VS SOUNDBLASTER Z PLUS

I have one as well, that I keep at the cottage. It was designed to be good and it delivers the goods at modest cost. The rare times Bose inadvertently comes up with almost good sound it's by accident. No idea how Creative managed to come up with this but it changed my opinion of that company being the Bose of computer audio like someone else mentioned in another thread.

REALTEK ALC1150 VS SOUNDBLASTER Z PLUS

You'll also find a city of modular op-amps in there, plus high-quality Japanese caps among other goodies. Its plain looks are deceiving the inside houses serious goodies I don't recall the chip it sported but I remember critics mentioning that it was neither made nor designed by Creative, but commissioned by them. At its original price point ($99) there was nothing that even came close in terms of SQ and impact, HPA's costing 3-4 times as much were only very marginally better than this plastic box. About the Creative Labs DAC mentioned above its official designation is SB1240 and AFAIK still in production, I have one that I keep stowed as a backup. You're better off plugging your phones to the amplifier you'll be using with the DAC.Д¬lick to expand.But it doesn't play very loud though. It comes with a dedicated headphone amp but being USB-powered don't expect it to drive phones very loud. That purchase was one of the best use of audio money I ever made. My wife uses hers to listen to Youtube on her stereo but when I had it I used it to listen to hi-res music files I played on the Foobar 2000 audio player and the sound quality was amazing (provided the source file was of good quality, such as FLAC files).

As the name implies it's primarily meant for music, not gaming. And it fits your budget.ДЄs you can see it looks like a regular DAC. It uses a power cord similar to a phone charger to connect it to a computer but is otherwise similar to any external DAC and allows you to use a computer as an AUX source on any receiver/amplifier you want to listen to. Its audio chipset is far better than anything found in even the best desktops. It's a USB-powered DAC that comes with both RCA and optical outputs/inputs so it's perfect for connecting a computer to an audio system while totally bypassing the computer's audio hardware.

Here's something from Creative Labs that will deliver a serious boost over on-board sound.

Realtek alc1150 vs soundblaster z