Sound Blaster Z installed, Small review mostly in comparison to the Xonar.
The Sound Blaster does a lot better with 2 channel audio tracks and putting them out a on 5.1. The sounds don't sound too flat or lose positional accuracy nearly as bad as the same feature did on the Xonar.
Both sound equally good in limited testing in games (without all the above features). I'll have to break out a shooter to really test it.
The Xonar's software had a much more intuitive feature for dragging and placing speaker locations, in the SB you just enter numbers.
The Xonar did not have automatic detection of headphone connections on the front panel. I suspect most people like this feature, the SBZ has it. But I generally don't like it since I usually leave them plugged in and switched between them as desired. Maybe there's a way to do this in the settings, I'll have to dig for it. I only see a way to do it for the back panel headphone jack.
+No stupid floppy power connector.
+SBZ has many more options in the settings to mess with microphone configurations. With the Xonar I was more application dependent.
I'm probably going to have to do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8TLmokNjuU
Since the red LEDs are messing with the feng shui of my blue LEDs