HT OMEGA Striker 7.1 Channel PCI Sound Card

While researching which card to go with my Astro A40s, I kept reading how good the Striker 7.1 was, but couldn't find one for sale. Finally, I saw one offered by Omega, and picked it up. Top notch functionality and sound quality.

The card itself can be a pain to install for win 7 users. The card often is not recognized as being installed in the PCI slot (this problem is recognized on the HT Omega forums). So make sure you have multiple PCI slots to fix that problem. Second, for anyone who has a case where the case's edge is where the bent side of the card is (sorry, its hard to describe), be warned that you will not be able to plug in the microphone jack due to it being placed to close to the edge of the card.However, if you manage to get past those problems, the drivers are easy to use, and the card works well, except for the lack of support for EAX (which was no surprise because its not a Creative card). Overall, I would only buy this card for a very old computer with only PCI slots.

Nice product, but analog jacks don't work if you're using digital, and then the SPDIF input produces a crackling sound sometimes so I gave up on using it.

I didn't find good reviews for this product, so I'll try to help new buyers.For windows users:If you plan to buy this card keep in mind that it is quiet old, it was released somewhere between 2002 and 2005. So don't expect to much from the drivers, they will work on windows 7 x64 if you start the installer with administrator privileges, if you don't the installer will take ages to complete and possibly hang at some point. Once the drivers are installed, you will get options to set how many channels your input has and how many speakers you have (this is not detected automatically like with other cards), for instance, if you have 5.1 speaker set up, then you'll have to set an output of 6 channels and an input of 2 channels to listen music and change the input to 6 channels if you're gonna watch a movie or play a game with 5.1 support, then change it back to listen music again... This can be kind of annoying after a while :/ I wish they change this, so the input/output can be detected automatically.For Linux users:I use Debian Squeeze, the card won't work fully with ALSA alone, so I had to install pulseaudio, and tweak it a little to make it work with flash (non free) and the multimedia keys of my keyboard. After that (around 2 hours of configuring), the card will work pretty good. It would detect the number of channels (input/output) and configure the sound automatically to the best user experience.Final word:The card it's pretty good overall, I'm giving it 4 stars because of the lack of automation in the drivers for windows, keep switching options in the drivers is terrible if you watch a lot of movies with 5.1 (like me)Note:I did not test the digital audio out, because my speakers are analog so I have no info about it. I did, however, test the digital audio in, and it works pretty good, just as expected.

Sounds amazing, drivers were a pain to install, but i got it after a few tries (If you want spdif, you need to set your default sound to only windows spdif, and not ht strikers's option (it will still come out of your sound cards spdif)

I bought it to work with a sound system i already owned except the audio optical doesn't work properly and their support wasn't helpful.

I have an Asus motherboard that has gone through numerous upgrades. The latest was the GPU and it covered the 2nd PCIe slot so I was not able to use my old sound card. The onboard audio doesn't support native DDL or DTS via S/PDIF so I needed to find a PCI card that provided this out of the box. The Striker was the perfect solution and after months of hunting I finally tracked one down.Installation is like any other card and I fortunately did not experience the PCI slot issue as one reviewer described. As previously stated this is an older card so I didn't bother with the drivers included on the disc and went straight to HT Omega's site and downloaded the latest version. Software installed without issue and after a reboot I was up and running. I connected the card to my receiver via digital coaxial and the cable slipped right on with just enough resistance for a secure connection.The software isn't very user friendly so it took a few trial and error runs to get everything running smoothly. The card also didn't auto-detect my setup so I had to configure my speaker setup in Windows to 5.1. Then I had to do the same in the HT Omega software but once I finally tweaked the card the way I wanted, it provided the exact solution I was looking for: crisp, clean DD and DTS. Far Cry 3 and Bioshock Infinite never sounded so good!A few things to point out:- the optical connection doesn't stay "awake" so there's a bit of delay when the audio kicks in. It's not a long delay but to amateur audiophiles, it can/will be annoying.- the card encodes everything in either DD in DTS depending on what you selected. So when you want to watch a movie with its normally encoded signal, the card will automatically re-encode it to whatever digital signal you chose. Not a deal breaker for me since this was strictly for my Steam Box but just something I noticed when testing out a movie. I prefer DTS over DD anyways.- like someone mentioned earlier this is an older card so you must download the software and drivers from HT Omega; Windows 7 will not recognize this on its own. RTFM doesn't always hurt either.Overall I'm very happy with the card. I can't make a specific comment on the sound quality because that's a bit amorphous; everyone's ears and setups are different. I will say however, that it definitely sounds better than my last card - Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional. The HT Omega drivers far exceed Creative Labs'. To my ears the difference is almost night and day and the output isn't as "tinny" sounding. I feel it's more full and warm especially once you configure the software according to your setup. I definitely will consider HT Omega again in future builds.

This card is great but the driver issues I've had with it make me reserved about giving it 5 stars.