Agreed, I'm pissed I had to pay to ship mine back to Creative as well. Luckily, I live quite close to them, so I think it only cost me six bucks, but it's still a drag. I wish I'd bought from Amazon, but when I purchased my G5 there was a pretty big coupon code available from Creative and Amazon...

I don't see why it should be, though, the way Windows handles sound devices. I didn't have to remove the ASUS Xonar DG I had to use my FiiO E10K. For that matter, I never disabled onboard sound either (until last month, when I was troubleshooting the G5). Hell, everyone with a modern video card...

Have you tried it on another PC or anything?

Should be fine. I believe the K7XXX is pretty darn similar to Q701s/K702s, which need 1.76V for 110dB SPL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xkq6BwmbBU_67cLCpiMlWgm2OFmNKfpplmhoKiAk1mk/edit#gid=0   If you do the math, that means you need an output power of 50mW at 62 ohms to reach peaks...

Unfortunately, I RMA'd the G5 with Creative and got another, brand new one back. Still having the problem, so it must be something with my setup. I guess the next thing to try is removing my internal soundcard.   On the plus side, the new G5 I got is better-built. The "press volume button to...

Sound quality-wise, for pure stereo listening, the E10K and the G5 sound identical to my ears.

Yeah. I think used stand-alone there's no way to change any settings at all. So it'd be a PC-only feature.

I could've sworn it had mic monitoring in the software options. I'm at work right now and don't have the G5 with me, though.

Dude, the G5 is completely unnecessary for speaker surround sound. You just run HDMI from your GPU to your receiver, boom, surround sound. You should be able to get 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound from any modern GPU with HDMI. The only "Creative stuff" you'd be missing would be like, the Crystallizer...

Not trying to have a conversation with myself here or anything, I just want to document this for future generations to avoid this situation. So, here I am at work, installed all the drivers, thing is working fine. At work, prior to this I was using onboard sound, and then last week I got a FiiO...

I bought one of these a few weeks ago but am having a really weird problem with it. Sound basically cuts out and makes a little blip every few seconds. It sounds like a CD skipping unbelievably badly, I guess. I have to switch to another sound device (such as my FiiO E10K) and back to the G5, or...