The Creative Soundblaster Play! 4

Despite the Play! in its name, this little dac isn’t meant for gamers! At least, according to the Creative website. No, it’s aimed more at the Zoom, Teams or Google Meet users. Just take a look at this happy chap using the automute functionality and you know what it’s target group is. Its main selling point is the latest iteration of the SmartComms Kit, but what does that mean? And could a gamer also appreciate these features? Let’s test the Creative Play! 4

[@sergiocvm8435]

ty for this video. It helps me a lot

[@AntonsHardware]

Thank you for leaving a comment! Glad it helped!

[@Qoobel]

best review on this product

[@rsvp9816]

they need to make one of these with a sabre chip and no xfi bs. this is a great product.

[@DestinyOfZero]

Incredible review

[@FrankBruce]

Thank you, Antons, I have a pair of Plantronics headset for my conference calls, but sometimes I leave them plugged to the docking station at home and when I go to the office, and I noted that when using my phone's IEMs, the other party struggles to hear me, I move the microphone near the mouth and they hear me but worse, so I found the Creative Play! 4 as an always in the bag solution and got mine back in 08/2022 and the problem was well solved, I did not longer need to move the microphone closer to the mouth, and they can hear me well, other function I like about it is the auto mute, and the voice boost, and today you confirmed it. Thank you!

[@MAbbas-vc5es]

Does it have side-tone? I'm in need of a small external dongle with decent audio and side-tone as I use iem's with a boom mic and need to hear myself. Thanks

[@Altamimi911]

Hello please I want to use this dongle with my iphone 15 pro max So all the settings i will change in the app on my pc will automatically saved in the dongle to be use with my iPhone? Or its just effective and working on the pc ?

[@aminbjt5843]

Hello Thank you for your good video Is this device suitable for high quality sound (Hi-End)?

[@WSS_the_OG]

When it comes to comms, I am the dumbest link in that chain, haha. What a delightful little surprise this tiny USB thingie is. Decent listening tests (according to your impressions), measures as well as one might expect for such a low-end device. Colour me impressed! One thing to comment amount is that while I lament the end of the era of Creative developing and using its own custom chips, their custom chips have always had one terrible thorn in their side: driver support as the products age. Because Realtek is so ubiquitous, and their chips are so "dumb" and featureless, this is probably the right move for Creative. Use off-the-shelf parts that don't need fancy drivers, and shove the heavy lifting on the host machine's CPU. Good strategy. Thanks for this insightful review. I can think of a laptop or two that might benefit from this nifty little gadget.

[@MasticinaAkicta]

DON"T remind me about the creative drivers...ugh. Sure realtek chips are... bare basic expected but at least you get drivers for it! For a damn long time! And under all kinds of operating systems and some even work with CONSOLES.

[@WSS_the_OG]

@@MasticinaAkicta It is a terrible thing to have good hardware let down by poor software and driver support isn't it. :(

[@MasticinaAkicta]

It is small and light enough, might improve the laptop a little bit. It's output is.. 24bits 48khz. And that is it. Yeah and a bit of noise too... not good news. THIS might just make life a little nicer.

[@wolfeadventures]

For strictly music via headphones on a desktop-for the money would you get this or an older SB internal card?

[@gianlucapx]

Hi, I watched several of your videos about sound cards and you did a great job reviewing them. Out of curiosity, what is your current pc setup on the audio side and what operative system are you using? I'm curious also about your portable audio solution. I'm still deciding if it's better to go with a dedicated internal audio card (like the Xonar AE) or with an external DAC+AMP solution (like the AIYIMA DAC-A2). The sound cards are all on their end of life cycle and the drivers don't even support Windows 11 in many cases. But they don't take space on the desk.

[@franciscoyarzun]

hello, could you review the creative x5 ? regards

[@ArturPL87]

Does anyone know if it works with an iPhone 15 Pro Max?

[@miguelalcaraz2554]

Me convenciste lo comprare para mi pc, que tiene un codec demasiado basico.

[@KingTairun]

dude have you ever even tested it in real conditions?? how can this be aimed for zoom meetings when the soundcard has such bad crosstalk, the audio is leaking straight in to the mic! and the entire zoom meeting is hearing your audio while you are unaware!

[@jlrockafella]

So is this better than the apple usb c dongle?

[@AntonsHardware]

Ohh absolutly not. The Apple is better.

[@cantowerdude_3045]

​@AntonsHardware I'm no Audio Wizard but when i compared the Right Mark results from the reviews that you've done on the play!4 and the Apple dongle, the play!4 did do better in some places. Is it just a matter of the price point that makes the Apple better or something else?