HT | OMEGA Claro Halo XT PCI Interface Sound Card w/ a built-in HI-FI Headphone Amplifier

Pros: Excellent overall quality
Clearly made by people who understand true audio quality, geared for stereo
No frills and no flashy nonsense
interchangeable amps (Havent tried yet but I love the option)

Cons: Price for some but its worth the money if you have a system to match it
Software is a bit dusty but not worth taking an egg at all

Other Thoughts: This wont make your little logitech speakers or your turtlebeaches sound good, this is for high quality receivers and amplifiers. I currently have 2 Polk Rti A7s and a Polk DSW Pro 660wi running through a Yamaha R-S700 receiver and the sound quality is like no other, absolutely incredible. If you want high fidelity quality from your computer this is the way to go. Its like ive never listened to music before this.

Pros: As it pertains to sound quality; everything

Cons: Add in card for the other 5 channels does not have nuts to secure jacks like the left and right channel on the main card; be careful.

Other Thoughts: I have owned this card for over a year now and I have acquired better equipment such as an Onkyo 5009 receiver, Polk RTi A9 fronts, CSi A6 center, Infinity Entra Bass, Oppo 95 disc player. My original equipment was good, this is better. I have run comparisons between the sound card and the oppo 95. The oppo's analog with SACD is great but you cant play SACD on a computer. Blue Ray DTS HD and Dolby HD are incredible on the Oppo. Mp3 through the sound card is superior to the Oppo. Blue ray sound through the sound card is extremely good but the Oppo has an edge. In the final analysis, a 250 dollar runs head to head with a 1000 dollar disc player! In the case of CD and Mp3, the sound card is superior! One must understand that different platforms have their own strengths as weaknesses. If you have to pick, I'd go with the sound card as it offers more versatility and better value for what it does. The card does a very good job with every format have tried so far. In the last week I added Windows 8. The card seems to like that OS better than Win7. I am trying to not like Windows 8 but I simply cant. I am dual booting between 7 and 8 and there is a difference. HT Omega's customer service is second to none. I had the drivers before I had the OS; Jason is knowledgeable and very quick to respond.

Pros: I've had this card for more than a year, I have replaced my AVR (Onkyo 708) with an Onkyo 5009. I purchased Polk RTi A9 fronts with a CSi A6 center and an Infinity Entra Sub. I aslo now have an Oppo 95 (up from a Samsung C6500 BDP)). The Bose 701's are now being used as rears. This sound card seems to have improved as I upgrade. Guess where the bottle necks were. This and Windows Media Center do as good a job with downloaded CD's or MP3's (256Kbs) as does the Oppo 95 or the 5009. Blu Ray audio such as DTS Master or Dolby HD do sound better on the Oppo 95 than the Halo card, however, the sound is very decent.

Cons: There is nothing bad about this card

Other Thoughts: A diamond can only shine as brightly as the light its reflecting. Don't judge this card based on the sound it produces on a lesser quality system.

Pros: Backstory:
For many years I was a user and consumer of Creative Audio Products, then finally one day I just said enough, - I basically gave up on consumer pc audio and was about to move to a professional RayDAT when I saw this product and decided to give it a shot.

Unboxing/Install: Out of the box you are greeted with simple packaging and the card with its expansion in sealed anti static plastic. From there you open it and install it into the PCI slot,the expansion plugs into the bottom of the card with a cable. Then once that happens you get to open the manual and be greeted for once with instructions that make sense. For the drivers you have to navigate to there site as the disk drivers provided are out of date, no problem as the card is clearly listed and the package downloads and installs with out incident on windows 7 X64.

Cons: 1. Out Of Date Drivers on Disk
2. While I don't mind PCI- some new motherboards are starting to phase it out completely, be sure to check you have a slot for the card and a room for the expansion in your case

Other Thoughts: Some have complained about this device being PCI- If your not processing banks of 7.1 for studio use the card system will provide plenty of signal processing for analog or digital for your receiver or general use music processing deck.

If you are wanting direct drive this card can do that but remember is not a receiver don't plan on direct driving anything more than a really nice pair of 5.1 headphones or 2 channel desk speakers.

For my setup this card feeds digital output to a Onkyo receiver that powers 5.1,
Use is for gaming and general AV stuff

This card is one of last cards of its class before you start getting into items like RayDAT and HDSPe for any one not wanting to drop $1000 and cant stand Creative any longer HT Omega is the way to go.

Pros: - Looks good

Cons: - I listened to my music collection using my SHURE SRH-840 headphone, and honestly I could not feel any difference with on-board soundcard (motherboard: ASROCK Z68 Extreme 4).

- Expensive... Very expensive.

- Software looks outdated.

Other Thoughts: Although I am not an audiophile, I was expecting music would sound different.

Pros: -Amazing sound with a variety of setups.

Cons: -Setup: Can't secure the card with a screw meant for the expansion slot; if I do, it becomes unseated. Windows will detect it, but the driver won't completely detect it. This causes some not so fun problems actually getting my system to boot. In the end though, it just means that I have to deal with a little extra dust clean up (case is set for intake)

Other Thoughts: -Latest driver is not listed on the site. I got it through support trying to figure out the problem I listed under Cons.

Pros: * Sound quality high enough to compete with consumer preamp processors.
* High physical build quality
decent DSP features if that matters to you
* Uses PCI slot thereby saving precious PCIe slots.
* No annoying/potentially damaging sonic pops during system boot up or shutdown.

Cons: * Using JRiver Media Center as software media player, ASIO driver would not pass sub channel and improperly leaked two channel sound to one surround speaker (was able to fix by using WASAPI exclusive in lieu of ASIO within JRMC).
* Not sure if room size DSP can be bypassed. Had to be very careful to ensure all other Claro DSP was bypassed to get "clean" digital signal to JRMC.
*Would prefer single physical card with dongle instead of two piece system used for 7.1 RCA output.

Other Thoughts: The sound of this card easily exceeded my expectations for sound quality for music and movie playback (using J River Media Center as media player). My plan was to use the Claro Halo XT as a stop-gap solution until prepros from Outlaw Audio or Emotiva were released, but the Claro is so good I've decided to forsake these prepros and use the Claro as a audiophile grade replacement. I currently characterize myself as a "lightweight" audiophile, meaning I want better than average sound quality for music (but does not have to be as good as Theta, Mark Levinson, Krell, etc.-I've owned all of these brands previously). The Claro delivered far beyond expectations. The sound for music (CD ripped to FLAC) was very detailed and transparent. Subjectively, I'd say the sound quality is 90% as good as the aforementioned audiophile brands at a fraction of their cost. Audio components used for test:
* Rotel RMB-1077 7 channel class-D amp (underrated)
* Kef 3005se Sat-Sub speaker system

Pros: Decided to build the best computer I could. AMD hex core, best motherboard, 8TB hard drives, 16GB ram, dual video card, dual TV tuner, usb cards (total of 21 usbs) and wanted the best i could find for audio for my 5.1's. Fired this puppy up and the first song was Indigo Children by Puscifer. Everything on my desk shook. Air blowing out of the bass unit could be felt 3 feet away. I squealed like a school girl.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: If you've never splurged on a good sound card and surround sound speakers you have never heard sound like this before.

Pros: I was undecided for a month or so to get this card or not, read and researched every article and evaluation of all sound cards (mid$) on the market. Finally i given in and shelled out the 250$. No remorse. After my on board Creative X-fi what a different. I am blown away. The sound quality, the loudness is a bomb. No doubt i made a great decision. The X-fi maybe a great chip but the Halo just superior. Running a 4.1 today tomorrow i will change to a 6.1 system with the big speakers using the second card what came with the system.

Cons: I made a mistake to install Win8 Beta a few days ago. Halo's software is not compatible wit the win8 yet. It is not as easy to switch back to the 7 as i that would be. The drivers are more than fine, everything works perfectly..but the software what comes with it will not install. Well many people didn't liked it anyway..so i have to wait for the win8 compatibility software (the interface) , hopefully a newer and better design. Still i have no regret for the purchase. Still a keeper.

Other Thoughts: The card was very easy to install. The drivers were instantly working. Absolute no problems after installation. I am not positive if the PCIe interface would make so much difference. That was one of the other issue what was holding me off on the buy...I dont think anyone would really notice the sound difference after it installed...

Pros: This card is well built. High quality parts. The best audio clarity i have heard. Comes with less software than some other brands.

Cons: Cant think of any.

Other Thoughts: I would recommend this card to other people.