Gadgetory

today on my video blog we're gonna unbox the awesome tech x5 home theater HD so this is the very first sound card or well I think there's one other one but this is the first one to do it correctly for support for Dolby true HD and DTS HD master audio so what that means is when you're playing back a blu-ray movie there's absolutely no down sampling you are getting the audio exactly as it is recorded most sound parts are not able to do that so let's get this unboxing going on another thing it's not listed on the front is that it's important scott support for hdmi 1.3 HD audio pass-through so here we go this is an x5 card so that means that it's using the creative x5 chip and let's get it started here so on the side this is even labeled for us check that out so we've got the bundle pack and then we have the x5 home-theater HD so why don't we do the bundle pack first yeah we'll do that okay so let's find out just exactly what comes with this sound card it's a very expensive sound card so it better come with some good quality audio and some good accessories here so first of all we have our breakout cable so this is where you're gonna get all of your standard analog connections so you got your side front rear sub line in and mic ports and those all come out of kind of a serial looking jack on the sound card okay so then we have an optical cable this is kind of a sweet-looking optical audio cable because yeah it's clear that's that's pretty neat actually okay next we have a DVI to HDMI adapter okay so comes ready with one of those that's pretty awesome and then we have an HDMI cable this looks like it's about a six foot cable 6 foot HDMI cable and then we have oh this is interesting ok so sorry that was a Toslink fiber-optic digital cable and then this is the adapter for it so there we go now now we've clarified that okay so what else do we find in here here's your installation CD so that's got your drivers on it probably gonna want to download the latest drivers for something like this anyway then you've got a little pamphlet including a 10% discount at CyberLink comm so you can grab power DVD 9 which you will need for blu-ray playback it's not done natively in Windows Vista or Windows 7 and then we will find a quick installation guide so wow that doesn't seem all that quick but it's in multiple languages so let's focus down on what we're actually going to be using here which is English for me anyway so that just shows you where to plug in all the stuff to the back of the card that's very interesting let's get the far down Oh alright so here we are pulling out careful the sound you are about to hear is extremely real that is an awesome warning and I love it ok here is the sound card itself the home theater HD quality assurance seal tape that right off quality is no longer shirt not fitting that's not how it works ok there is the back of the card so the first thing you notice about this is that it is a PCI Express 1x card now you can use a PCI Express One X card in any PCI Express slot whether it's 1 X 4 X 8 X 16 X so that's really good flexibility there here is the analog i/o so that's where we plug in that breakout cable we saw before this is the do to do headphone out it's right there so does this card actually have an amplified headphone jack is the question that I should be asking myself yes it does this has an onboard headphone amplifier so that's terrific if you're using headphones that have the high impedance ok so digital out is right here then we've got our HDMI out and our HDMI in so what that means is from your video card you're gonna go DVI out into the HDMI in here and then it's going to add the audio so that's where you're getting the lossless audio algorithms and added basically it's it's it's an encryption device basically so you can't do it with any previous sound card because that's where it's all done is right on the sound card then HDMI out will carry the video from the DVI the audio that's been added by the processor on the sound car out to your receiver so let's have a look at the front of the card here so here's where you're gonna find your front plugins so if you were to plug in any I believe creative has like a front bay that you can plug in to that right here we've got a spit of in so if you have to plug one of those in that'll go there at the top there's a few little fingers and to be perfectly honest I'm not sure what those are for and then right here this is one of the features that AHS and text cards are very famous for so this is a swappable stop socket for your op-amp so what that means is that you can actually take this out if you prefer a different one to put in there so a lot of guys are doing that with these cards anyway that's pretty much it for the x5m theater HD thank you for checking out my video blog