Creative SoundBlaster MP3+ Review

Creative's SoundBlaster MP3+

While the Mac has long offered a fine audio experience, the PC was for many years limited to bleeps and warbles issued from its single built-in speaker. The work of sound card companies, in particular Creative, helped redress the balance, and desktop PC users have now come to take good sound quality for granted, first through bundled SoundBlaster cards and more recently thanks to multi-channel sound built into the chipset.

Integrated sound systems are finally making their way into notebooks too, but that still leaves plenty of machines out there that are incapable of providing a sophisticated, modern sonic environment for games, movie and music playback. In any case, it's only relatively recently that notebooks have come to be considered capable multimedia and gaming machines, and thus used by the kind of folk who spend money on upgrades like sound cards.

Clearly notebooks offer limited scope for expansion - PC Cards are pretty much all they can accept - so how can portable computers being used for multimedia be given a good sound system?

Creative's answer is the SoundBlaster MP3+ - essentially a 16-bit sound card in a box. The small 2 x 4in module hooks up to one the host computer's spare USB ports - from which it draws its power - routing audio data through its processor and out to a set of analog and digital output ports: gold-plated RCA jacks, an S/P DIF for digital audio and a standard 3.5mm socket for headphones. Next to the headphone port is a handy volume dial. The unit comes with velcro strips to attach it to your notebook's cover, or there's a clip-on hook so you can slip it onto the display.

It also channels sound into the notebook, again using standard inputs: microphone, RCA and S/P DIF.

As its name suggests, the SoundBlaster MP3+ is perhaps aimed at more at music fans than gamers. The main components of the software bundled with the device are all designed to enhance music playback and to an extent recording too.

Unlike the higher-end products Creative is known for, the MP3+ is a 16-bit stereo device, pure and simple. It doesn't provide Dolby 5.1 or higher sound bit resolutions and sample frequencies, so you're not going to get an all-singing, all-dancing DVD experience, for example.

Creative's Media Source app provides the front end for the device, a music manager, player, recorder and CD burner. You can call up any of Creative's suite of set-up utilities from Media Source, or from a slide-down control panel that's installed at the top of your screen. The panel's buttons call up Media Source, a graphic equaliser, speaker set-up, sound mixer, EAX set-up and the Wave Studio sound editing app.

Read the full source review here.