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First impressions:
The device is suitably small, smaller than a CD case (although thicker) and seems to be well built, it's made in Taiwan.
The driver is a simple enough affair, it seems to be a fairly generic driver (as the device identifies itself as just "USB Audio" in device manager, and a fairly simple mixer applet comes with it, with various volume controls for playback and recording and an option to set Stereo, Quadro or 5.1
I tested each of these modes with my headphones on a 500MHz and CPU usage was no different from playing the same MP3 in Media Player Classic on the onboard PCI sound (ESS Audiodrive), it may have been slightly higher in 5.1 mode but only by a few percent (bearing in mind this laptop is slow, even the onboard hardware accelerated sound was using 20% CPU!)
There is no surround sound processing going on here, the output on the rear channel is identical to the front channel, and plugging the headphones into the centre/sub jack gets you what sounds to be mono in one ear and bass in the other. Exactly what you'd expect in other words. I dont think the lack of a 4.1 option will be an issue here as you can just use 5.1 and not hook up the centre channel.
I couldn't detect any bass being cut from the mains when 5.1 is enabled, but given that my headphones could barely render the LFE channel anyway, this is not suprising. If you're using this thing in a car your amp should have a hi pass / lo pass filter anyway.
Unfortunately, it's not all wonderful though, there are a couple of niggles.
You cannot control the rear channel in CentraFuse. Despite them using a generic driver, it's obviously not generic enough for CF. This may be due to the fact that rather than use front+rear volume controls and then a balance control, it uses one master volume control, and then you set the gain in dB on each speaker individually. This could actually be quite useful in a car, especially since the app supports loading and saving presets, so you could create settings optimal for one, two or four passengers, unfortunately this facility is somewhat negated by the fact that the application doesn't save your speaker gain options, just the mixer settings!
In any case, the mixer application cannot be embedded properly in CF. When it tries, the application always draws itself right at the top of the screen, then gets obliterated by CFs title bar. This means you cannot access the tabs at the top of the app to change to the speaker configuration tab. You are stuck at the mixer tab which contains all the sliders that CF can control!
The last thing, and it isn't really a problem. If you unplug the soundcard while the mixer application is running, then said app crashes and tries to send an error report to microsoft.
In conclusion, so long as your happy to set up your rear speakers just once and then not try to adjust them while driving, then this is a good card to get, if you need the rear speaker adjustment to work then find another card. Are there any USB cards that actually work properly in CF?!
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