Installation, Testing and Comparison Continued:

Also included are a few cool programs, the first is a helicopter flying around to let you hear an example of the surround sound, you can change the options to make the helicopter fly around and you can manually control the view as well to hear the differences.

A fully functional Media Rack is also included as well to take full advantage of the HT Claro soundcard in your music and movies.

The last little program is on that allows you to test the various surround sound environments to experiment with them to see what you like the best.

Ok, that’s enough of that, I’ve had the HT Claro installed for about two weeks now in my main system and it’s never coming out, I love it that much. It has truly changed my mind about onboard sound on a motherboard. The Bluegears b-enspirer soundcard is nice, but not quite as good as the HT Claro, sound    wise there wasn’t that much of a noticeable difference at all really, at least not to my ears.

The main glaring difference between the cards is the addition of the Front Panel connector, or Front Panel Audio Express as HT Omega calls it, this really adds a new dimension to your headphones, even a cheap pair will sound better!  I have a Bluetake and a Logitech BlueTooth set of headphones and a corded set of Labtec headphones that I use regularly. Obviously the Bluetooth sets would not be able to be enhanced by the HT Claro as they are running off the USB dongle, so I used my Labtec set for testing and I have to say that the HT Claro actually made a large difference in the sounds I heard, they seemed crisper and more alive, the surround sound through the headphones wasn’t amazing but it was noticeable, I think a better pair of headphones would really benefit from the HT Claro.

I have various sets of speakers floating around and hooked them all up for this review, it was fun to have the 7.1 surround for a few days anyway… Normally I use an Altec Lansing set of speakers with subwoofer for my everyday general use, they have made me very happy for quite some time. Si I hooked up my Protons, and my Boston Acoustics as well to get the full 7.1 surround setup going with my computer. I decided to pop in the same movies I used for the Bluegears review, Star Wars ep1 and ep2,  just because those movies are full of great sound effects and music. I found the experience to be awe inspiring to say the least, the sound was amazing, it was clear and no distortions were heard. Of course I had to play with all the settings to get it just right but it sounded very good overall, a lot better than the standard onboard audio of my EVGA motherboard.

I played around with the various different sound effects, and some are goofy, but some really do add another ‘dimension’ of sound to the overall experience. The 7.1 sound was excellent as is to be expected, but I unhooked everything I just used my Altec Lansing speakers to really see what the HT Claro could do with just two speakers, and I found the DTS NEO:PC to be very good at creating  a virtual surround sound environment. As I mentioned I normally just use the two speaker setup so I really wanted to focus on that as that is what I will be using all the time, and I found it to be excellent, not true 7.1 surround but close, it does an excellent job or creating a virtual sound environment and I just love it.

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I even got to do a bit of gaming and found the HT Claro handles gaming just as well as any other sound, I’ve been really get back into BF2142 which uses EAX, I could hear everything in the environment it was like I was right there on the battlefield, with sounds coming from all directions, a truly immersive experience. I also used the headphones while playing as well, and found it to be much more enjoyable than just standard stereo, it wasn’t quite surround but after playing for a while it felt like it was surround, almost anyway, like I said I need to get a better pair of headphones to really enjoy it.

Well that’s about it really, the HT Omega Claro is an excellent choice for a soundcard.

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