I got the Bravura yesterday; unused; a replacement for onboard ALC888 and a trusty SB Live! Value.
First off, the installation was anything but easy -- because of the way my Asrock A780GXE motherboard is designed. It's got an integrated video chip, and the chip's heatsink is sat right behind the PCI-E 1x slot; there's about one inch between the slot and the heatsink. The Bravura's butt extends a couple of inches from the slot, so there was absolutely no way of having both the heatsink and the sound card in at the same time. Prying the heatsink off the motherboard took about half an hour, it had those white plastic screw replacing things that snap into place when you push them into the screw hole. I had no idea how to get them out properly, but did manage to get it done eventually. After this, the Bravura went in. The downside is that if the BIOS ever defaults to the integrated video chip, like if I do a BIOS reset, the motherboard will probably fry since the chip has no cooling now.
Apart from my motherboard acting up, there were a few things that seemed off about the Bravura, physically. It's a bit too tall for the PCI-E slot; the front panel where you screw the card into the case was hovering about a millimeter above the grill of the case, so the whole card was a bit wobbly and I didn't dare screw it in fully in fear of breaking something. This may just be a bad 1x slot on my motherboard, though; I didn't see any other obstructions. The second thing I noticed was that some of the opamps seemed to have been put in a bit carelessly, as two of them were clearly listing to one side. I tried carefully to push them properly into their sockets, but they wouldn't go so I left them as they were. I'm not sure if this affects the sound, I only ever use headphones and the opamp for that was put in right.
No problem installing the Bravura drivers on 32-bit XP, no software troubles at all.
As far as sound goes, well....... it's not bad. My first and main impression is that the soundstage is wider than what onboard or the Live could give. It has more clarity; but also feels a bit thin, a bit harsh -- not warm, you could say. Granted, my phones aren't top-shelf science: AKG 271S, AKG 314P earbuds and Senn MX460 earbuds, but with these three the Bravura did feel a bit cold (I'm using Mode 3 with all the phones). Maybe it will settle, and I'll probably try some different opamps along the road anyways. In any case, the card sounds very clean and has mad amounts of volume to give.
But something that's really embarrassing, I think, for a card in this price range is that as soon as I load up a Youtube video and go fullscreen, the sound starts to crackle. It may or may not be a grounding issue; running Prime95 to stress the CPU's cores to 100 % doesn't affect the sound at all. I haven't gotten around to switching the grounding pin on the card yet, but I'll do that a bit later and see if it fixes things. (Another thing that causes crackling is just scrolling this Head-Fi page up an down really fast. I occasionally get a pop when switching tracks in foobar, too.)
Not a bad card overall, the sound is very crisp (apart from what I said above) and I'm sure there's a way to get it to sound a bit warmer with a new opamp; but it does come off a bit cheap with its bent chips and interference problems. Also, I don't think the manual or their website said anything about how the insulator thing should be installed or what it does, which is a bit unfortunate, but then again I may just have missed it.
