Gadgetory

so it's finally time to get creative and take a look at the Sound Blaster a5 welcome back to take us city ladies and gentlemen this is brian coming back to you guys today with a review of the Sound Blaster Eve 5 from creative now it's been a little while since I've tried a product from creative and they definitely do know how to make some good features especially when it comes to gaming though I think with this product they're essentially taking a shot at the audiophile market so today we're going to have a look at the unit itself what it features how much it costs and then we're gonna run it through some benchmarks and I'm even going to do a mic test for you guys and also test out the internal mic which comes with this product so as soon as I got the product I noticed that it came boxed extremely well it also came with two bands to strap it to something like an android smartphone or an iPhone and also came with a Toslink cable and a red and black USB to micro USB cable as well as an international warranty card and a manual to get you started also included in the Box is a stand which will allow you to stand up your unit as well as the included thread there which will allow you to screw it into a microphone stand to use this sort of like a hybrid condenser microphone at your desk and as we test later the microphone isn't too bad so looking at the top of the unit it's got three microphone holes there which two of them will work at any given time it's also got the crystal voice branding there and the sound blaster which is branded over a sort of machined alloy there which gives it a nice antic touch to the product looking further down is this wireless signal there which lets you know that is a Bluetooth capable device so looking at the side of the unit it's got these assented edges as well with the indicator there for the battery which lights up white and let you know how charged the unit is now did take around eight hours to fully charge it so off that charge it lasted a long time I've still been using it for probably about 20 hours now and the batteries only gone down to two so interestingly enough it'll last you a long time off a single charge looking at the side there you've got your low and high gains there your high gain being for high impedance headphones low gain being for everything else you've also got these soundblaster button there which says sbx on it and it allows you to toggle on the audio processor which will allow you to get effects like crystal voice sound blaster surround and also bass though a little bit on that later when we look at the software it's also got the power button besides that if you press it for one second will turn the unit on press it for two seconds it'll enable bluetooth and then you press it for four seconds it'll turn the unit off so looking at the front of the unit it's got two headphone out ports here and as you guessed it that'll allow you to listen the two pairs of headphones at the same time so great if you're traveling with a partner or something like that and you're listening to the same music and to the middle of that you've got the volume knob there which is free rolling it doesn't have a start or finish there but when I thought about it that actually makes sense since you plug this into different computers the volume will be different set at different levels so and also when you're on the desktop it will have a nice little UI that will pop up there and let you know the volume level so that's built into the bass driver as well so as soon as you connect that to the computer it'll do everything for you now looking onto the bottom of the unit you've got a nice rubber base here with sound blaster there and this will allow the unit to stick on any surface without slipping so I really like that they've done that a nice touch to the unit so looking at the rear of the unit you've got the line mic and optical in so a three-way purpose prong here and this enables you to plug in say for instance a v-moda boom Pro which is my desktop mic that I use for sort of chatting to people casually and I'll allow you to put in a line in from a preamp so allowing you to use a professional desktop mic now I have tested this line in and it is pretty much noise free so it's a great mic but you'll have a live test on that later you can also use it as an optical in if you want to use a Toslink cable to get audio into the device and I'll actually talk about this one I'm talking about the sound itself looking at the line optical out here if you wish to use it as a pass through then you can do that with this unit to the side of that you've got the USB host there if you wish to use it as a USB out then you can you've also got the USB in there which is a micro USB and I'll talk a little bit about this later in the sound so ultimately it's a pretty solid unit I like what they've done with the design and let's go on now to how it sounds so let's talk about the actual specs on board this a5 for the DAC that's the digital to audio converter that's the signal outgoing to your headphones this unit uses the Cirrus Logic 4 3 9 8 which is an impressive DAC posting some numbers like 120 decibels of signal-to-noise ratio which means you're not going to hear any noise in your audio coming into your headphones also on that note you've got the Cirrus Logic 536 one on the ADC which is also a very good unit in itself so you're gonna have no noise going in no noise going out now for amplification this is the most impressive part of this unit you've got the TP a 6-1 to 0 a 2 from Texas Instruments there which will just amp pretty much any headphone in the market and do it really well so I all the headphones I have here I literally couldn't even turn this Beaulieu knob over 40 otherwise I'd risk blowing up my eardrums I'll give you guys a quick noise test now so when I tested the soundblaster 85 the actual sound had started listening to it I noticed that the USB was not as good as the Toslink in for some reason so if I was listening to this device I would be definitely using the Toslink in and when I did some room EQ sweeps I noticed that the USB had some sort of interference going on there it was all over the place even the onboard audio was posting better results though when I posted the Toslink in there the results were pretty impressive though you will see there that does look like there's a little bit of color in the treble section there so it does have that boost to the trouble though for what it's worth this unit does sound really good so if you've got some warm headphones it will sound great with those headphones now let's talk about crosstalk now recently I tested the fatality properly with room EQ and that posted some really impressive crosstalk figures so did this so we're talking like 60 DB difference there pretty much the bars didn't even move when I was testing crosstalk which is very impressive it means that sound is not going to leak from your left channel to your right channel when you're playing music also onboard this unit is the sba xx1 sound processor which processes your things like surround sound in games and also the crystal voice effects in the crystal voice settings there so enough on that we're gonna move on to the software suite and see how this thing performs so let's take a look at the Sound Blaster e5 software suite not only that I'll be using my V mode of boom Pro plug directly into the e5 to test how good the mic in port sounds also later on I'll quickly change over and plug the mic out and we can test how good the internal mic sound though our further ado let's get in with the software here so you can download it just go to their website you can download the software very easy to navigate and then once you get it you install it and I must say when I first installed it I was impressed this is by far the best implementation of their software to date I mean I've tried some creative soundblaster software in the past and it's kind of been a bit buggy or it's been a bit ambiguous this is pretty much simple yet it's got all the options and features that I'd want from a sound last a software suite so we'll go through it and I'll explain everything that's included in this software suite and we'll have a look here first of all we got the SPX pro studio which you can actually turn on and off by pressing the device itself or you can turn it on and off via the software so it's your choice basically though what this will do is it can give you a cool surround effect which I do like to use in some RPGs it kind of gives you an artificial surround sound though for my fps I will actually turn this off and I will just use a good pair of headphones that have good 3d imaging so that's something that you guys may wish to think about though if you've got a bad pair of headphones this may give you a bit more of a sound or give you a bit more soundstage and maybe give you an advantage in FPS though next setting here is crystallizer this is the setting that I actually like here for sort of giving your rock a bit of a kick I definitely like it for some sorts of music and give you a different feel what it's worth I don't use it a whole lot but I do like it as opposed to the bass setting which I don't like where it's kind of in my opinion it inflates the bass and makes it blow d though if you've got a pair of headphones with weak base and you kind of just want more quantity then this may be an OK setting I just do not use this but setting personally I do however use a surrounding crystallizer from time to time let's move on now to the next setting here we've got crystal voice so you can hear you can choose between the external mic and the internal mic which I'm actually not going to change at the moment because I'm recording for you guys from the external mic here so we've got here 66 percent this for me seems to be the about the sweet spot where if you blast it all the way the 100 you will introduce some noise so if you keep it around this setting I find there's no noise being crowd well then no there's no noise it creeps in a crystal voice this is another interesting setting so if you turn this on this will allow you to get noise reduction so you've probably just heard that then there will be a change in my voice though personally I don't use noise reduction though if you have a bad microphone that introduces noise you may wish to play around with this setting personally I don't use it so I'm going to take noise reduction off though but here is a cool thing about the crystal voice panel you can press effects and then what you can do here is you can change your voice too neutral you can change it to a male-to-female I actually don't know if this will register in the program but hopefully it does so you guys will be able to hear if I sound like a female or not we can also change it to deep voice so I can sound like my balls have dropped too much or you can just turn it off so the settings are really good there you've also got some other settings there that you can EQ your mic if you want you can play around the volume there you can also do acoustic echo cancellation moving on now to the next Settings Scout mode this is essentially their setting I'm actually not going to turn this on because it may interrupt with my recording it actually did before so if you turn this on in fps it can essentially identify those footstep frequencies and give them a boost which is actually a handy tool to have I've actually tried this out in advanced warfare and it actually works a little bit like it's actually a good little boost though it's nothing that you can't do with an equaliser anyway so it just saves you time I guess so it's actually pretty cool moving down though is speakers and headphones now if you press direct mode it'll essentially cancel out the SPX chip on board which processes the audio tip through the software so if you want direct mode you can do that for just a pure audiophile listening experience and I'm gonna say that it does give a good listening experience you've also got the other setting there your s/pdif out direct as well so great feet great functionality there moving down a mixer you can mix all your settings here this is basically like your windows control panel in the bottom right corner there this is kind of like the same thing just through the actual sound blaster software moving down now to equalizer something that I like and then you can play around with the EQs here you've got many different settings to choose from the presets are all pretty cool Rock actually does a good job on rock which I'm pleased to say but personally I do like to leave EQ off and play around with different headphones for the best experience now all that after you've configured your profile so this is my profile for instance and I'm just gonna go down here I can then save this profile and I can call it main well whatever I want and then that is now the profile that I'm playing with so this is really cool that you can have different profiles set up for instance you can have RPG and you can change to that profile and then you can have it with surround settings on and whatnot so very good job there so what we'll do now those will quickly turn over to the internal mic and you can see how that sounds and then we'll move on to a conclusion with this product so we'll just quickly do a test on the internal mic on the Sound Blaster e5 this time that's the mics that actually come included in the unit now there are three microphones on this device with only two of them working at a time for a stereo config and it will change depending on how the device is orientated so if I go up close it will sound probably a little bit better though if I move farther away it will sound maybe not as strong so it's a good solution if you don't have a microphone and you just want to play games and you want people to hear you so it might be a good choice anyway that being said let's get on to that conclusion in conclusion what can I say about the Sound Blaster a5 while I'm left here pretty impressed with this unit it posted some good figures especially over the Toslink cable though I was a little bit concerned about the USB figures there they were sort of a little bit sort of over the place there and one thing I did notice about the Toslink it's sort of like when I look at the figures closely it did sort of relate to what my ears were hearing and that was a little bit of color and there's a little bit of a boost in the treble there though for what it's worth there was no crosstalk the crosstalk was so low which is a great thing and I would expect it though from a product that costs around $200 though with that being said everything else on this unit was impressive it's like the first unit USB DAC amp ADC combo that I've seen that doesn't introduce delay when I was playing a game like Call of Duty advanced warfare I noticed that there was no delay when I've tried other USB DAC amps in the past I've noticed that they've introduced some delay which is typically why I've kept to using my onboard audio when I've been competitively playing games another thing that I forgot to mention was I tried to hook it up to the PlayStation 4 and to my surprise it worked and it worked a lot better than the controller did that had on or there so if you guys are looking and you got a PlayStation 4 and you're looking for better audio you're looking for a better mic in option then this thing will serve you well with that being said I'm guessing it's going to work on the Xbox one as well and not only that you can plug it into a smartphone a Mac so it's very versatile and I will say that the drivers and software are really good as well not only that's got some cool novelty effects there and the surround feature will work well in games so all in all I'm pretty impressed with this unit it's the first USB DAC amp combo that I've had come through that's a legitimate replacement for competitive gaming not only that you've got an ADC onboard and I kind of wonder why they don't advertise the low crosstalk as well as the ADC on the box because there are two big things that I'm sure a lot of people will appreciate and the ADC is not only just the normal mic in it's a really good noise free mic in port which will allow you to do professional recordings if you've got a condenser through a preamp in the line in there so kudos to creative for making a good solution there's some little negatives I will point out there is this kind of little rattle going on there so I don't know what's going on with that but otherwise and that the build quality is very good and also I will say there's a little bit of color so if you've already got treble heavy headphones and with that little bit of coloring over the Toslink it will give it a little bit more treble so they've treble heavy headphones will just go super treble though with that being said nice unit good job from creative and if you guys liked this review then please give it a thumbs up if you have any questions or comments about the Sound Blaster 85 then be sure to drop a comment in the comment section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can and I'll catch you in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye