Pros: Amazing sound!!! Powerful software with many interesting and useful features!
Cons: Sound card looks "fragile", it creates an impression to be easily broken
The bottom line: I highly recommend this sound card for laptop owners who like to listen music with amazing quality
I have never had experience with advanced sound PC hardware and was a bit skeptical about performance of sound cards such as Creative sound blaster. At the same time every time listening something from my broad music collection was always disappointing due to lack of quality even with use of very nice headphones (Sennheiser PX150) or home theater system. So I have been thinking of upgrading my laptop sound since long time but couldn't find a good deal. Finally, when I saw Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS available for $53 (after $40 rebate), I decided to give it a try. When it arrives, the first thing I had to do was to go through quite a bit of software installation using CD it came with. Here I have to note the first minor thing I didn't like. Namely, that after installation of creative bundle I found four or five processes running on my laptop. So I had to tune my laptop so that don't let them to appear at start up. Well, now about the sound. I decided to start with connecting my headphones to this PCMCIA card. First thing I noticed after connection and before launching of winamp was ABSLOLUTE SILENCE with no any static noise! I was even thought that I haven't inserted it well or smth wrong. But after launching music playback I was simply AMAZED by sound quality!!! Frankly, it overexceeded all my expectations. The same amazing sound I got with it when connecting to my home theater system. Lows and highs were very clear and I had to decrease subwoofer output to minimum since lows were so strong that I was afraid to disturb my neighbours even with no high volume. I should also mention a lot of tunable features in software you can use, such as karaoke, sound effects etc. The card has one combined "Microphone In/Line In/Optical In" input and two outputs: combined "Headphone/Optical Out" and "Speaker Docking Cable Connector" to use supplied cable in order to get upto 7.1 speakers connection. It can be also used to record an MP3/WMA/WAV audio from an external source! I am very glad that I've got this sound card.
A minor "problem" is that after listening my music with this card I became much more critical to my other sound devices: mp3 player and home stereo, i.e. what a point to use them if I can get now orders of magnitude better sound with Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS?...