StarTech USB Sound Card, SPDIF Output (ICUSBAUDIO2D)

Got this because the headphone socket on my Toshiba laptop had intermittent sound due to a loose connection or similar. Read that a repair would have cost as much as a new laptop, so took this route instead. Checked a few things by ringing up Startech.com first, then bought sound card here on amazon as it was a lot cheaper. Dead easy to install, just plugged in to USB port, waited two minutes, then plugged in headphones after turning down the volume control on sound card which had been factory-set to maximum (then I turned it back up to max), then went on youtube and listened to Celibidache conducting Bruckner's 6th symphony and could not believe how much better the sound was compared to my onboard sound card; much more balanced, spacious, static-free. Then I tried the bass and treble boosts, both of which were far more subtle than I had expected; sounded great on direct too. How on earth do Startech produce such a great product at such little cost? This little gem gets the ultimate recommendation from me

I was looking for a way to get SPDIF Digital out of my laptop & saw this. Absolutely delighted with this tiny box - sound quality when streaming FLACS matches or surpasses my £2000 Marantz CD transport - Incredible ! And really does work up to 96Khz. Buying another as backup.

Does what is says on the tin. I needed a cheap external device to plug my headphones into as I was getting lots of static and interference from my computers onboard headphone sockets. Using windows ten I was able to simply plug this in and it worked with no setup or drivers to install (this may be different on older versions of windows). Sound quality is far improved with no trace of interference and music on my computer (especially 320kbs files) sound far better. A nice plus is the spdif output on the rear in case I want to add surround sound in the future. Great product so far.

I bought this for use with the Raspberry Pi 3b+ and experienced occasional issues with playback (muted/crackling sounds for some tracks). After experimenting, I figured out that this only occurred for a 96khz input, and when I forced input at 48khz the distortion(s) went away. Testing similar outputs on a £6 usb product showed that this issue did not exist there. Startech support states that the device is not supported for Linux even though almost all USB audio card nowadays are driver-free. I did not test this exhaustively on a windows PC as this error might only be reproducible on resampling. Caveat emptor - if you are buying this for a raspberry pi/linux kit! Additionally, sound output is muted on the linux/pi, compared to the £6 kit, or the on-board 3.5mm output. I couldn't be bothered spending a few weekends debugging the thing and have returned it (If I wanted a DIY kit I wouldn't be going for a USB solution!).

A fantastic little gadget, if only it supported multichannel/ 5.1 output on my M1 Mac Mini. I looked it up on the StarTech website, and it clearly states "5.1 Surround Sound supported (Windows® only)". Oh well, my search for 5.1 gadgets that work with Mac OS continues.

I don’t like it because of unclear sound

My on board sound card failed on my PC. Saw this and thought might as well try it, given its pretty cheap. It turned out to be a good bet. Good sound quality with some equaliser capability and a volume knob on the front. Volume pretty good usually the source that is the problem. Its loud enough with a good recording to stop me turning it up full blast even at my age BTW this is very small device so not going to swallow up lots of space on your desk..

This thing is great! I wanted to plug surround headphones into my PC, but didn't have toslink/spdif output. This plugs in via USB and takes care of that. Physical volume settings are nice. The drivers are a bit weird and I can only get them to install by running the old-fashioned setup.exe installer, but once I do it works fine on Windows 10. Only downside, if I change the USB plug then the computer forgets that it knows this device and I have to reinstall drivers.

I am very happy with my purchase especially for the dolby surround 5.1. Everything works fine on Windows 11.

Stereo Audioeingang funktioniert!

Cette carte son externe est un petit boitier comme on peut le voir sur l'image. Je l'utilise pour sa sortie S/PDIF uniquement, en conséquence la molette de volume et le bouton arrière concernant les basses sont désactivés. Cette carte fonctionne parfaitement et semble partie pour durer. Le son qu'elle envoie à mon système audio 5.1 Logitech Z5500 est identique à celui que j'aurais avec une carte son intégrée. Le son produit est bien en 5.1, car lorsque le fichier lu est en dts, l'écran de mon système audio affiche bien "dts audio". Idem avec un son dolby où ça affiche "dolby digital". La fréquence d’échantillonnage peut aller jusqu'à 96 khz. Vous pouvez tester avec l'utilitaire windows si vous voulez pour vérifier qu'il y a bien une indépendance des 5 canaux. Le rendu est donc excellent, et regarder un film avec cette carte son est génial. Si vous utilisez le lecteur lecteur multimédia VLC, et que vous ne comprenez pas pourquoi le son n'est pas en dts ou en dolby digital, comme c'était mon cas, c'est parce que dans VLC il faut faire le réglage suivant : outils --> préférences --> audio --> module de sortie : sélectionnez "Sortie audio DirectX" et cocher la case qui vient d'apparaître "Utiliser S/PDIF si disponible".

Highly recommended. This USB adapter works really well as an interface for recording musical instruments with a STEREO 3.5 mm battery-powered microphone like the AT2022 or AT822 (the kind of stereo mics often used with audio-for-video and portable audio recorder applications). It is a worthy replacement for the old Griffin iMic, which only recorded at 16 bit. The stereo mics, combined with this soundcard and a laptop, make for a really light, compact and portable kit for quick, great-sounding recordings. It captures excellent sound at 24/44.1, which I find to be the sweet spot for digital recordings. The latency, input and output levels on the soundcard were very user friendly and pretty optimal. I use it to record electric guitar, which is a relatively loud sound source, so I cannot report in detail on the noise floor of the soundcard. But in preliminary testing with spoken word, the noise level seemed surprisingly good for a consumer-level device, and would likely be more than adequate for most recordings. The hardware volume control on the StarTech is a nice bonus, and very convenient. The StarTech soundcard installed effortlessly in seconds on Windows 10, which automatically installed the right driver. You may need to make some tweaks in the Windows Control Panel/Sound settings to optimize the output and input of the StarTech USA Sound Card for your computer--that is also the place you can change the bit depth and sample rate for this soundcard. I use Cubase as my recording DAW, and this soundcard gave excellent results, both recording via the mic input and monitoring via the headphone output. And Cubase had no problem recognizing and connecting with the StarTech's inputs and outputs. My pre-sales contact with StarTech was impressive. The online chat representatives gave fast responses to my technical questions. I have no idea how durable this will be in the long run. But if it delivers a reasonable service life, I would gladly get this again.

Since Apple decided to discontinue to build-in optical outputs in their MacBook Pro's and my TV didn't passthrough DTS signals due to licensing, I needed to look for an alternative to connect my MacBook to my old AV-Receiver (without HDMI). This handy little USB SoundCard is doing the job pretty awesome. As usually no driver installation necessary under MacOS and in combination with VLC Player the DTS and AC3 Passthrough is working great. Very quick processing and posting too. Excellent deal.