[hans030390]

If any of you live close to a Fry's, mine has a sale on the Creative X-Fi HD USB external sound cards for $50 (after $20 MIR). I haven't been able to find out exactly what hardware is inside it, but for $50, it should be a great deal if it has some (or most) of the same components from the X-Fi Titanium HD internal sound card. Has a built-in headphone amp, phono line in (with RIAA equalization), optical in/out, mic in, etc. I picked one up, and it sounds good to me! 

 

[CardasHD650]

Bloody hell that’s a brilliant deal! ...about £25 in our money, over here in the UK these go for around £100/$200 ish. Ain’t too sure they’ll have most of the components however. Although I’d safely say there’s a few. The Titanium goes for around £200/$400 here (got mine from Amazon for £150), when you compare the $400 to $50 I really cant see the components being anywhere close (only ‘coz I’ll start crying if they are lol). Luckily I bought the Titanium HD last night just before the VAT buff-up from 17% - 20% – PM. David Cameron at his best ey?

 
Cheers for the post mate, hopefully someone will grab a bargain here.

 

[hans030390]

I found out this uses an AKM AK4396VF for the DAC, Cirrus Logic CS5361-KZZ for the ADC, and it seems to be using the JRC4556 opamp for the headphone out. SNR is rated at 114dB for the headphone out, THD+N is rated at 0.02%. Build quality seems good, the internal parts used seem to be of at least decent quality (I could be completely wrong, though, as I'm only going off looks compared to lower and higher end sound cards and such). As I said, it sounds good to me (out of my D2000s).
 
The opamp for the headphones could be better, but I'm still thinking this is a good deal at $50.