Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A great USB sound card for the price. By default, this card has microphone monitoring/sidechannel. That means that if you use a headset with this sound card, you'll hear the microphone input. This feature is very useful if you use close-back headsets. However, this also results in a low hiss that is audible at all volume levels. Without sidechannel, the sound card will still hiss if you have very low impedance headphones. I only found the hiss noticeable with the volume slider on my headset set to 90-100%. To turn off microphone monitoring/sidechannel: 1. Install the Sound Blaster software that comes with the sound card 2. In the Sound Blaster Play! 3 Control Panel, go to the [Mixer] tab. 3. Under Playback -> Speakers -> Monitoring -> Microphone, either move the slider to 0, or click the mute button on the right of the volume slider.