Head-Fi username: Location (City/Country): Kepller, Singapore
Do you own any similar products? If yes, which: No, but I do own 2 Creative 5.1 Surround Sound system. T6300 and one more which is slightly higher than T6300 but am unable to find the model at the creative website. Could it be out of phase?
Link(s) to a previous review(s):
http://www.head-fi.org/t/698644/westone-signature-w-series-w50-w60/255#post_10542819
How would you help us to evangelize the product?
I would love to write a review focusing on it's sound quality.
As I'm a fan of creative (ever since I build my desktop workstation back in 2012 and specifically chose a motherboard that has the creative recon 3di soundblaster chip in it) YES Just for the chip i chose this motherboard over the other gaming motherboard.
(was blown away by how it manages to process my stereo sound files and convert them on the fly to 5.1 surround which in turn worked perfectly with my creative 5.1 surround system.) I can't believe that I've actually wasted money on an asus sound card for my older system which was lacking in dynamics (and even wasn't capable of fully immersing me with the surround sound experience) compared to the recon 3di chip in my new motherboard a.k.a G1 Sniper 3.
Comparing the Creative Recon 3Di to the Asus sound card (not sure of the exact model but it was the lower tier model costing around 100sgd)
All this was tested using the same creative 5.1 T6700 surround speakers setup
Asus Sound Card:
Sound signature was dry, nothing seem to stand out. Bass was underwhelming and muddy. Treble was almost non-existence. Mids were average.
Also on the box it states that it has support for dolby surround sound and that it is capable of upscaling stereo 2.0 sound file to 5.1 surround on the fly. It worked as stated but the experience was sub-par at best and there's no way to further tweak the settings not even an equalizer.
Creative Recon 3Di:
After building my new system and installing all necessary apps, i plugged in my creative speakers from earlier. (Before this point was initially planning to replace them for the logitech z906 surround speakers as I initially thought that the dull sound quality experience was due to the speaker and not the sound card itself.)
I was greeted with an aesthetically pleasing looking creative app "Sound Blaster Recon3Di Control Panel". And was even more delighted to see the amount of customization options which were available for me to tweak the sound experience. So I played a couple of tracks (with all settings in the control panel set to its default), and boy was i blown away by the immediate difference of how the creative inspire speakers sounded like. It felt like i was listening to a brand new speakers. The Bass was strong and had character (although slightly boomy especially in the upper low end frequency) and the mids were now thick and rich. The treble also had more presence now. But the most significant difference of them all was how the sound was presented. The treble felt lively and has more character to it such as flying from the left channel to the right channel. And my 2 rear speakers now gets to show it's full potential. While playing Taylor Swift's Fearless, I'm fully immerse with sound from front to back. The rear drivers mainly handle the ochestra and string instruments while the center driver handles vocals and left/right channels handle treble. After testing the default settings, I stumbled upon the bass management settings. It had 2 checkbox in it. a) Redirection and b) Subwoofer Gain. After enabling both settings, a scroll bar was available for tweaking the Cross Over Frequency which allowed customization from 10hz to 1000hz. After settling for the 200hz crossover frequency, i played the same Taylor Swift Fearless song, and was blown away yet again by how the bass changed for the better. The bass was now more toward the clean and aggressive side. It has more speed now and was less boomy in the upper mid bass and now sounded like thunder! The sub woofer now offloads everything from the bottom end to 200hz frequency range. The 5 speakers now sounded more light and had more "air" to it. Finally to fine tune the sound signature to my preference, i played with the 10 band equalizer and now my speakers has a similar sound signature as my 3BA iem westone um 30 pro.
Ever since then, i have been recommending my friends and any strangers i met along the way to creative sound cards as my go-to card and strongly urge them to carefully consider the sound card they choose for their system as it plays a significant part in sound quality especially for surround setup. If the creative iRoar Go produces exceptional sound for a Bluetooth speaker and is capable of producing a good strong but clean low-end non-muddy frequency and non-fatiguing highs I will have nothing but praises for it and will definitely share the info to others.
