Recon3D Pro

So I've been in the market for a while for a new sound card. Honestly I wasn't sure what I was after. I have Sennheiser PC 350 headphones and my current setup which was connecting them to my Bose Companion 3 speakers and then to onboard sound just wasn't really cutting it.

The bose speakers couldn't really drive the headphones well, though sound out of the speakers was ok. However most of the time I just go with headphones anyway. So originally my plan was to pick up the Asus Xonar STX card, but with no sound acceleration I was still trying to decide between that card and a X-FI card from creative.

Then yesterday I notice that creative have a new range called Recon3D and while their external board didn't get a great review, I was temped for the internal card. The problem is right now, there are next to no reviews yet on the card, or at least from a source that can really discuss the card in the detail I was hoping for.

So originally I ordered from Amazon, but noticed that Best Buy had the pro card listed at $115. The only difference I can see between the one with the red color chip vs the one with the blue color chip is that there is no shielding on the blue chipped card. And the shielding isn't even advertised as a feature and with a perspex window to see the chip, I doubt the shield does much anyway.

This particular card also doesn't have sockets to plug in the external creative controls panels, so it's different from the champion one, but honestly I don't really want another thing sticking out my computer front.

The reason why I stayed away from the X-Fi cards was that they don't have support for speaker output and headphone output at the same time without using a front panel connector. Though I think the $180 Titanium card may have had support.

So at $120 I decided on the Recon3d Pro card.

After an hour of trying to install the Recon3d drivers in Windows 8 I figured out what the problem was, don't install the extra applications and the driver and control panel will install ok. There is a separate installer for installing the extra's if you need them.

So my Sennheiser PC 350 headphones finally sound great. I've owned expensive Sennheiser headphones in the past hooked up to thousand dollar amplifiers and was hugely disappointed when I got the PC 350 headphones and knew it had to have something to do with my system.

There doesn't appear to be a setting to control the speaker Ohms of the current headphones, but the card supports upto 600 ohms and the PC 350s are 150 Ohms. Finally for those tracks that need a little more oomph there is room in the volume control! Great stuff.

Everything sounds better than with the on board sound. I'm finally hearing sounds I've never heard before, it's great stuff. Almost tempted to pick up a second card to use on my work computer :-)

The only issue I've found, is that swapping between headphones and speakers in the creative control panel breaks the currently playing sound output and in most part I'm required to restart the application that I was using to hear the sound again.

In summary, I don't know how this card compares to others on the market, but it's awesome for what I need it for, which is running my headphones. Next set is to test the game performance.