Product Description

Based on the award-winning Sound Blaster 16 technology, the Sound Blaster 16 PCI delivers the same high-quality audio with the performance increase of the PCI bus. Sound Blaster 16 PCI provides CD-quality stereo sound with low CPU utilization and great wave-table music that is ideal for home, business, and Internet applications. Sound Blaster 16 PCI allows you to hear the difference, with better sounding music and multimedia in your Windows applications. Full Plug-and-Play support is built-in, so setup is hassle free for any PC setup. Every signal is processed and mixed with a 16-bit digital audio engine for high-quality. Sound Blaster 16 PCI provides support for positional 3D sound technology to provide spacious sound on headphones or 2 speaker configurations. The included bundled software allows you to play and record your own sounds and music and experience streaming Internet audio in real-time. All of this is backed by the industry standard Sound Blaster compatibility, quality and support. The Sound Blaster 16 PCI is the most affordable Sound Blaster PCI product to date. Get a Sound Blaster 16 PCI and hear the difference for yourself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48184 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Creative Labs
• Model: 3000473000003
• Dimensions: .80" h x 5.10" w x 4.60" l, 2.00 pounds

Features

• Device Type - Sound card
• Interface Type - PCI
• Localization - English / United States

Customer Reviews

Good Audio, better than on-board sound....Ideal for running DOS-games.
I bought this for a older computer, to run older DOS games with Sound Blaster. It works excellently in that regard, it runs all my older games(like Descent, Duke Nukem 2 ect.)it also has more crisp sound than my on-board motherboard sound. It also is excellent for using a MIDI keyboard, as the waveset sounds very cool.

Its quite aged now though, so obviously its not as good has some of Creative's newer models. But overall it works pretty well for a basic computer setup. I have it currently installed in my new P4, still way better than that of my motherboard.

If you want a good card for newer gaming though, buy a Sound Blaster X-FI.

Garbage.
Product came with no documentation whatsoever, no installation CD. Attempted to install this on 2 computers. "plug and play" install did not work. downloaded the appropriate drivers from Soundblaster and informed me that NO soundblaster card was found on my PC. attempted to contact vendor,no email was available, only a long distance phone number. Threw it in the trash.

Bare Bones
The drivers for this card are indeed hard to find and install. Creative has so many different variants of their drivers that it took many different attempts to locate the right ones. Windows XP Professional did not install this card as plug-and-play, so my only option was to hunt down the drivers. In the end I found the right ones, but it was a lot of work. For those not driver savvy avoid this card for sure.

The most disappointing part of this story is the performance. It does fine for most basic sound generation on my 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 system (YouTube clips, system sounds, etc), but I suspect that it is a weak link in MP3/AAC playback in iTunes. Music played back in iTunes skips and stumbles frequently making it unbearable to listen to. Upgrading to the latest Windows XP service pack, iTunes version, and Quicktime along with DirectX 10 did not alleviate the problem. I have never experienced this problem on any system with XP installed, including systems with far lower processor and memory specs. This leads me to conclude that the sound card is not keeping up (maybe its still a driver issue).

In the end the cheap price will only be a true bargin if you are really willing to spend the time to hunt down the drivers, and you only need basic sound on your computer. You get what you pay for here for sure.