Audio/Peripherals Reviews Soundcards

Creative Sound Blaster GC7 Review – The principle is good, the finish weakens

Optics, haptics and connections

The Sound Blaster GC7 comes as a console and that is convenient and good for operation. Space-saving is certainly different, but nobody wants that in a console. What is inspiring is the intuitive and manual switching and control of almost all functions even without software. This makes it all the easier in-game and while streaming. For each fart there is a button or control as well as a visual feedback. This is really fun and would be world class if the rest of the details were right too.

The reverse side presents one with almost no puzzles. The line out is clear, here you get a very usable analog signal, which also remains almost completely noise-free. The line-in, on the other hand, only works in somewhat limited mobile mode, for whatever reason. Pointless. The switch for the voltage amplification (gain), on the other hand, really makes sense, especially with high-impedance headphones. The optical inputs and outputs are certainly a nice accessory for most people, but they are always necessary if you want to drive a Dolby-capable setup in your home cinema. Then there is the USB-C socket for the connection to the PC or the power supply and the on/off switch.

The operation of all the heads and knobs is quickly internalized, and there’s no need to go over that in text. If you don’t understand that right away, you don’t need the part.

Three modes and many questions

Whereby I have to take another look at the practical usability of the three modes PC, console and mobile, because it is really curd with sauce in this form. Useless, confusing and in some cases even contradictory. I would have put up with a separation of PC and console content, but what this is all about, no one really understands. The fact that the GC7 logs into the system with two separate devices is actually quite smart. Separate DSP settings for your own audio and the stream are cleverly solved, but this strange switching of modes is not.

In PC mode you get separate devices for the headphones and the loudspeaker, whereby you can set the headphones up to a maximum of 24 bit and 48 KHz, the loudspeaker (line-out) at the rear then with up to 192 KHz. Find the error, because the incorruptible headphone is now once on the front socket. And then, of course, you wonder why no headphones appear as a device in console mode anymore, but you still get the identical signal at the respective jack.

 

Instead of many more words – The Quick Start Guide

How and where to connect the Sound Blaster GC7, the guide included in the box (here as PDF) still answers quite clearly, there is no need to produce kilometer-long text walls:

Sound Blaster GC7 - Quick Start Guide

Creative Sound Blaster GC7

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About the author

Igor Wallossek

Editor-in-chief and name-giver of igor'sLAB as the content successor of Tom's Hardware Germany, whose license was returned in June 2019 in order to better meet the qualitative demands of web content and challenges of new media such as YouTube with its own channel.

Computer nerd since 1983, audio freak since 1979 and pretty much open to anything with a plug or battery for over 50 years.

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