Creative offers the SoundBlater X-Fi Surround 5.1 SB1090, an USB 2.0 external sound card. The new USB SoundBlaster features Creative’s Xtreme Fidelity(X-Fi) technology, which revitalize compressed music.
Simply connect the SoundBlater X-Fi Surround 5.1 to your PC or notebook via USB2.0 port, you can the turn downloaded music to personal concert; watch DVDs or downloaded videos with full cinematic surround sound and experience 3D audio and EAX effects in your games.
The device has a price tag of $59.99.
[Creative]
This card is a piece of crap. I paid dearly for it (eqivalent of 110 USD in europe) and it didn`t stop disappointing me since then. I use it under linux for 4.1 output. It has 96Mhz Cpu inside which is used by engineers of Creative for … nothing. When you start the PC it will send a loud spike to the amplifier which can damege your speakers, then again when the usb-audio driver loads. Mine sometimes turns itself off, causing another spike. Then i can`t turn it on unles I power cycle the laptop.
At least they could do something in hardware or software to ensure graceful power on/off/initialization. It could provide standard usb audio class interface for volume control. The volume knob doesn`t work unless you`re under windows with creative drivers installed. It`s a bad design idea. They could make it just work and notify the drivers about the volume user has selected. And why it turns off itself remains a mystery for me.