The thing with bundling hardware together and selling it for a fairly high price is that you really need to make sure every part of the bundle is equally good, more so when a piece of your bundle is something everyone already has - I'm referring to the sound card here - and another is a simple headphone/headset stand, which is something not everyone will need or want to use. ADATA set the price of their EMIX H30 + SOLOX F30 bundle to $200. That amount of money will get you some of the best gaming headsets on the market, including USB ones. When you think about it, a USB headset is in fact a headset that comes with its own sound card, and therein is the problem with the ADATA's bundle. The EMIX H30 headset is quite decent - it's comfortable, comes with an excellent microphone, and can be fun to listen to as well, as long as you're not bothered by excessive amounts of bass. It's not $200 or even $100 good, but that is not what makes me reluctant to recommend the bundle. The metal headset stand is nice as well - stable, sturdy, and potentially very useful. However, the SOLOX F30 sound card simply isn't carefully thought out. It needs be taken back to the drawing board. We can't have a sound card that offers no means of letting connected devices sound as good as they can. Regardless of what you do and how you use it, the SOLOX F30 will enforce one of its four built-in equalizer presets, which changes the sound of your speakers or headphones for the worse.

Because of that, none of my headphones sounded as good as I knew they could. Sure, you could argue that you wouldn't buy the EMIX H30 + SOLOX F30 bundle to then connect a pair of $400 hi-fi headphones to it. The funny thing is, even the bundled EMIX H30 headset sounds better when connected to any sound card other than the SOLOX F30.

As it currently stands, the ADATA EMIX H30 + SOLOX F30 bundle is too expensive for what it is. Should you at some point run into it at around half of its current price, it could pose an interesting proposition as you can then use the headset and stand and not feel bad for leaving the sound card in its box.