Hi Casey Yes, you can get the ZX today for £99 but I just realised that mine is the ZXR which unfortunately Creative are selling for £199, but I think you can get it elsewhere much cheaper.
The difference is that the ZX is really for gaming and uses a pretty good Cirrus Logic DAC for all channels. However, the ZXR uses the same DAC rear and centre but for front stereo it uses a high end Burr-Brown DAC. Also as it is aimed at audiophiles and those interested in studio level recording it has a daughter board (which sports another set of audio inputs/outputs) that takes up an additional slot in the PC. It also has a small module with audio cable that allows it to be placed round the front of the PC with a volume control, built-in mike, a couple of headphone jacks and microphone jacks. So you get a lot of hardware for your bucks and it's debatable if you would use it all if you simply want to listen to music which to be honest is what I mostly do with it. There is no question that for outputting surround sound from a PC using analogue connections it is very good indeed. It can also drive headphones of up to 600 ohm. You could probably get away with something much cheaper if all you want to do is digital pass through. As for the other part of your query, the software control panel is mostly accessible - at least for the parts I use with Jaws. There are a couple of unlabelled controls and buttons but all of the audio processing effects and DSP effects can be adjusted. A separate app for setting up speaker configuration is tricky but not impossible. I tend to use the Windows set up wizard when I want to, say, change from 5.1 to 2.0 speaker configuration. Regards John -----Original Message----- From: Pc-audio [mailto:pc-audio-boun...@pc-audio.org] On Behalf Of Casey Sent: 20 August 2016 17:27 To: PC Audio Discussion List Subject: Re: Desktop computer speakers Hi you talk3d about the sound blaster ZX internal card. Now can you use the control panel that is with this card to adjust any of its settings with your screen reader? Also can you still get one of thees sound blaster ZX cards today and for what price roughly? -- Casey
