Hi! I’ve been looking around for External USB Sound devices, there are many of these things but some are overkill for the sort of work I’m doing. I chose the Sound Blaster omni which sells for $100. I wanted a USB Sound Device given the amount of Laptops, Notebooks and Tablets I’m working with these days. Whilst many of the devices I work with ave excellent internal speaker systems for speech they’re not up to it when it comes to playing music and that’s perfectly understandable. Further to this I wanted the ability to connect my machines to digital inputs and the Omni offers me a digital output to do just that. The Omni is small enough to carry in a laptop case and has some reasonable output choices. I’ve already mentioned the toslink Digital output which can be selected independently of the standard RCA line output. The headphone amp in this device is excellent and has a very loud volume which - in my opinion - makes the Omni worth its price without everything else on offer here. Given the Omni is a 5.1 surround-sound card you are also presented with outputs for rear and centre speakers. The inputs here are very standard, just a 3.5MM line in socket, and a Mic socket, surprisingly no digital input. Volume is controlled by a large jog dial on the top of the device and when the dial is pressed in the audio is muted. The Omni comes with a whole CD full of software though I didn’t need any software to have the Omni up and running on my Mac machine, I’ve not yet tried the omni on any PC machines. As I understand it much of the CD’S contents are given over to control panels for the Omni and demos, something I’m not too fussed about. Sampling specs aren’t the highest but will do for most people, the highest sampling rate supported is 48KHZ.
********** “For the gardener nothing is more handier than bulbs, I mean the 1’s you put in the ground and not the electric light 1’s.”
