Home > Consumer Reviews > Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Go!

It's an easy to use and great sounding device. I was looking for something that sounds great but in a small form factor for portability. The portability and sound quality cannot be matched. It almost sounds as good as the desktop Fatality version I own. It also carries with it 1GB of storage and the software installed on my Toshiba Vista laptop and was ready to go in seconds. I don't need more channels than the two stereo ones because I bought it for listening to music and watch TV shows so I am quite happy. It includes a USB extension cable preventing breakage in the USB socket when you accidentally tilt your laptop. It also comes with not bad sounding earbud headset with a mic.

2 Main reasons for buying this portable soundcard from Creative.

1.) My laptop's headphone jack is weirdly placed on the front, in line with the touch pad. Inconvenient to say the least! With the massive connector of the HD 595 from Sennheiser it was extremely uncomfortable.

2.) The "Realtek High Definition Audio" sound card sounded dreadful and crackled all the time.

Anyway, the device is very small and functions perfectly, producing high quality sound whether it be YouTube, MP3s or Movies. Software included allows you to toy about with the settings and add effects etc. It has 1GB of storage and the software set up only actually takes 136MB, leaving you the rest to store whatever you desire. A handy lock switch to prevent files from being deleted is located on the right hand of the device.

Looks are excellent as well, a small white X Fi light springs into life when the device is in use, and flashes when you mute the soundcard.

Included Software:

Creative Alchemy: Research this online, it's mainly for games and has apparently won awards.

Creative Audio Control Panel: Clue is in the title, allows you play with the settings pretty easily, as does Creative Console Launcher but with a much more pleasant interface.

Creative Software Update: Updates for drivers/firmware and additional software such as Creative MediaSource 5 Player/Organizer.

Creative System Information: Basically sends all sorts of info to Creative to help with you whatever problems you may he having.

Product Registration - Again, clue is in the title, send as little or as much info as you which.

Buy it, NOW!

I initially bought this because my voice recognition software refused to recognise the onboard sound card on my computer, but it turns out I can't use it for that purpose because recognition is not good enough, the test dictation I did came out as "in in in in in in he in in in..."! But I completely understand that voice recognition software has very specific mic requirements, and this product is not designed for that purpose anyway, so that's definitely not a criticism of the X-Fi Go. However I have found another good use for it; my skype phone stopped working when I got a new PC running Vista (no driver, mutter mutter) but the X-Fi Go provides extremely good sound quality. I have also found it very useful for listening to my foreign language learning materials on ITunes, I pick up words I would previously have missed. It could not be more easy to install and use, the headphones are effective and comfortable, and the sound is just brilliant.

I bought this to improve upon the poor sound quality from my Compaq mini netbook. Have had the device for all of 15 minutes and it has in my opinion already justified the cost. The sound is CD quality through both headphones (Sennheiser HD 465 headphones) and through stereo amplifier (bass and treble at neutral), where before the sound was flat and dull sounding. Haven't yet tried the virtual surround sound in a game, but the test was promising.

All drivers installed easily from the inbuilt memory, software interface pretty self explanatory.

See my Amazon review of the LINDY-USB-2-0-Audio-Adapter before committing to buying this. Nice piece of kit but at a quarter the price, I thought the Lindy was a better general purpose usb sound device which is just as well built and better-sounding on three platforms: Windows, Mac Os and Linux (Mint) (no drivers needed for any)