The Sennheiser GSX 1000 is a great sound card with one or two quirks that you should be aware of before getting it. Its sound quality is excellent, both in stereo mode (remember to set it to 24-bit/96 kHz in the Control Panel), where it offers a rich and warm sound signature, and 7.1 surround mode. It's equipped with the so-called 7.1 Sennheiser Binaural Rendering Engine, by far the best headphone surround sound system I've ever had the pleasure of hearing. It successfully achieves a sense of three-dimensional space, which feels as though the sounds are coming from all around you without things falling victim to excessive reverb and an utter lack of bass, or anything else most other virtual surround systems suffer from.

It allows us to quickly switch the output between our headsets and active speakers. It comes with a very useful and lag-free microphone-monitoring feature - great news for anyone using a closed-back gaming headset - as well as a very useful dial that lets us adjust the volume ratio between the game we're playing and our voice communication software of choice. There are a couple of built-in equalizer profiles, and it's smart enough to remember four different user profiles without any drivers or additional software.

Using it is a joy as well - the touch controls are responsive and easy to understand, and the built-in proximity sensor will detect when your hand comes close to the sound card, which has it light up automatically. The massive aluminum volume dial is as refined and smooth as it could possibly be.

Its only drawback is that it lacks a couple of additional features. Namely, advanced users (that's mostly who's going to be buying a $230 sound card, no?) should be able to configure their own equalizer presets. More importantly, there should be a way to deactivate the noise cancellation processing of the microphone input. Since it's permanently active, you won't be able to fully utilize a higher quality microphone - the GSX 1000 will compress the sound, and there's nothing you can do about it. Your microphone will still sound decent, but not everyone will be able to settle for that.

In every other sense, this is an excellent external sound card, one of the best and most innovative ones your money can buy.