Creative Technology Ltd. (known as Creative Labs in the United States) is well-known for manufacturing and distributing audio units with high-quality audio playback & recording. In this review, we’ll talk about one of their products, the Creative Sound Blaster K3+. If you’re a streamer or a podcaster and you’re looking to improve your microphone audio, our Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review will make sure you achieve your desired audio quality.
The Creative Sound Blaster K3+ allows you to plug in any microphone that has extra features in which you can adjust to your liking. External mixers are essential if you want to squeeze better audio, especially with your microphone. Professional singers adapt their tone to match the music so that it would sound like it’s from a studio.
The Sound Blaster line of their products proved to be excellent ever since they first released. Throughout the decade, USB sound mixers are becoming more mainstream, and they’ve made one that would fit your budget just right. Let’s discuss more details with this Creative Sound Blaster K3+ review.
Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Packaging
In our Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review, let’s talk about the packaging first.
The packaging is simple, you get the nice-looking Sound Blaster logo on the upper-left portion of the front side, and the Creative Logo on the lower right.
Ordering this product online is very safe; the package will arrive at you without any damages.
Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review – Design and Functionality
Moving on to the next part of our Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review, we’ll describe the product’s design and functions.
The design is compact and easy to bring anywhere. It’s a simple black design with a brushed aluminium finish on top, and overall the product is made out of hard plastic and metal. The height and width are 160mm, and 50mm in depth.
At the front side, you’ll find 2 XLR or TRS combo inputs, a ¼ inch Hi-Z guitar input, and two ¼ headphone outputs.
At the backside, you’ll find an RCA Line Out with Left and Right Channels, an RCA Line In with Left and Right Channels, 4-pole mobile input and output, a grounding for lessening the noise, and a MicroUSB port.
For the main interface which is on top, the K3+ offers independent volume control for two XLR microphones, and the second one shares with a guitar input.
You can also tweak a two-pass equalizer, which is the bass & treble for better tunes. If you’d like to use their effects or FX, look into the lower-right portion, and you’ll be able to identify the presets.
Key Features of the Creative Sound Blaster K3+
This part of our Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review shows the key features of the sound mixer.
Unlike any other external mixers, the Creative Sound Blaster K3+ depends only on a MicroUSB Cable. With this setup, the noise levels are quite low, and it does an excellent job of making it sound more precise. Streamers with mic that picks up noise will enjoy using this mixer. Instead of using audio filters on their streaming software, they can use hardware like this to preserve CPU performance.
If you’re just a laptop user and you’re looking forward to going live without many pieces of equipment, then this mixer will save your day.
The Creative Sound Blaster K3+ will only output the microphone without FX in your computer by default. But if you hit the Monitor FX button, it will include the soundboard and EQ. If you’d also like to add the line in, you’ll also need to turn on the Mixing button.
The Monitor buttons to the right determine which device you’d like to hear by yourself, and it’s excellent for closed-back headphones and in loud environments.
It’s handy for commentary, so you’ll be able to hear everything you’re saying.
Packed with Special Features
The Creative Sound Blaster K3+ is a 2-channel mixer with dual-support XLR. You can plug two microphones if you want to cast with someone else.
Voice over feature is available and cancels out noise background, although you’ll find it useless when using a condenser mic. We recommend buying a dynamic microphone if you’re utilizing this feature.
Mobile in jack’s volume is also adjustable, so you can avoid the hassle of decreasing it through your mobile phone.
Each output also has its separate volume control, which is very convenient.
For effects or FX, there’s reverb, in which you can adjust with the Reverb Amount slider and reverb delay slider. The Reverb slider also utilizes the soundboard when you toggle the Soundboard button on. It has six different soundboards, and you can use them on-the-go just by sliding the slider and pressing it to play. Currently, there’s no way to put custom effects of your own.
The Reverb Delay slider utilizes the auto-tune feature, with all sorts of settings you need. You can also switch between minor or major.
The performance overall when turning on all the effects is excellent, and it can be handy mostly for musicians.
Finally, the most convenient feature of this sound mixer is the +48V Phantom Power. You can connect any microphone on this mixer with just the power of USB 5V. We recommend you to disable the phantom power before plugging any XLR microphones.
Specifications
We’re now going to dive deep into the specifications of our Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review.
The Creative Sound Blaster K3+ lets you record Hi-Res audio at 24-bit and 48KHz. With this small setup, you can already make your room a small studio.
The mixer is a stereo audio interface that has decent preamps on the front, and there’s also the 48V phantom power to make your condenser microphones pick up higher frequencies.
Having a condenser microphone plugged into this mixer with 48V phantom power, you can speak even when you’re not close to the mic.
Since it plugs directly to your PC with a USB cable, it consumes only 5V 500 milliamps.
Hands-on with the Creative Sound Blaster K3+
In this section of our Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review, we’ll do a quick demonstration of how to utilize this mixer. Let’s plug in a condenser microphone and check how excellent it sounds.
So far, it picks up my voice pretty loud & clear. Setting this up outside will include the noise of the place’s ambience, so be sure to hit the voice-over button if you only want it to focus on your voice. Condenser microphones don’t do an excellent job of lowering the background noise, so a Dynamic microphone is advisable.
If you’d like to use it on your smartphone, make sure your phone supports OTG, and you have the right cable to connect both of them. Lastly, you’ll need a 4-pole 3.5mm auxiliary cable to transmit all the signals through your phone. An android phone with a Type-C connector may be able to power this mixer.
Comparing the Creative Sound Blaster K3+ to a more expensive mixer, the only significant difference is that you’ll have to press a lot of buttons to utilize the features entirely. It takes a lot of practice if you’re used to more expensive mixers. For beginners, this is an excellent option for streaming or podcasting.
The auto-tune feature works reasonably, as it automatically sets your voice to the right pitch.
Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review Summary
If you’re looking to go live, whether it be a smartphone, laptop, or PC, this small kit will make your audio better. They designed this for live streamers and people who like to record on the go into their mobile devices. The USB connectivity makes it hassle-free to set up. Make sure to bring a high capacity power bank with you.
They designed it not just for people who record on their computers; they also designed it for people who travel a lot. Vloggers can also take advantage of this product, and improve their voices just in case the built-in microphone on the camera isn’t as good.
Musicians will also benefit if they travel a lot, and they compose their songs. Bringing this along is very convenient because you can also plug in a guitar or probably other instruments while doing voice overs.
For conferences, this is also an excellent choice. It makes your dynamic microphone easily adjustable with the voice-over feature. You can toggle it to switch on the go, whether there are a lot of people who want to speak with you, or only you.
Creative packed a lot of features at this price point, and this is a bang for the buck. If you’d like to know more about this product and their other products, visit their official website here.
I hope our Creative Sound Blaster K3+ Review gave you an idea to consider buying one of these, as it’s a single device that has a lot of useful features. Thank you for reading this review!
