Review: Razer Barracuda AC-1 Gaming Audio Card

[Nenso]

I went ahead and bought the worse possible sound card ever with the Razer brand name smeared all over it instead of the Asus Xonar or the Azuretech Prelude, which are supposedly much better for their price and actually designed correctly.

I mean... how bad could it be?

Reason? Nothing really, it costs $199.99CAD here and jumped on it when saw it go for $89.99CAD in one of the Sunday special savings ad for my local computer shop.

Impressions:
I just installed this card into my computer less than an hour ago and I already have many complaints about it. The main reason I bought it, apart from the relatively cheap price, was because it could upsample S/PDIF out to 192 KHz and to take a load off my E6420 Core 2 Duo 2.13GHz (overclocked to 3.2GHz.)

Razer's factory's quality control is horrible because my card's metal bracket crooked, which made it screwing it to my computer case because it wasn't straight. After spending ten minutes figuring things out, I was finally done and decided to dig out my AT-HA25D DAC/amp that has been replaced by my Pico to try out the card's S/PDIF out later.

Installing the drivers were easy and the interface was pretty straightforward. I didn't use any of the settings or the Dolby Digital/DTS effects, for it completely destroyed the music, despite sounding alright on computer multimedia speakers. I went ahead and changed the output sample rate to 192 KHz to try it out.

What happened next really shocked me. The LED on my DAC/amp blinked like a flickering candle and the sound comming out of my ATH-W1000 was all distortion and jitter. I thought that my soundcard was defected and its S/PDIF out was corrupted. After lowering the sample rate to 96 KHz, the music played normally, if not better than the S/PDIF output on my motherboard. There goes one of the funcations of the card I purchased it for.

Conclusion:
Stay away from the Razer Barracuda. It is not worth it at all. I think I might go ahead and return it to NCIX, because not only does the quality of the card suck, but it cannot even upsample to 192 KHz. Now I know first-hand why everyone, apart from rabid Razer cultists, have given this card a thumbs down and woot.com has it on their site every month.

[aegid]

I got one early in the year through woot when it was $70. Mine has the same problem as yours with the bent bracket. I've since gotten a D2 Boa so I don't even use it anymore except for the microphone jack. It was definitely better than the integrated sound through the motherboard, but then again, it'd probably take effort to be worse. To a general consumer I might recommend it for the price I got it at (and solely for that), but this being head fi, there's a lot better options for sound.

[Nocturnal310]

I dont even expect anything from Razer in Audio equipment..

thats why i recommended HD555 to my friend for Gaming over Razer Barracuda headphones.

[Jimothy]

Well, my experience has been completely different from yours. I got mine from the last time it was on woot because I was annoyed with the drivers for my old AV-710 on Linux. The AC-1 came in perfect condition and I have had no problems whatsoever using it as a transport to my Zhaolu.