USB External Sound Card with SPDIF Digital Sound for 5.1 & 7.1 Surround Sound Systems, Aluminum Body

I've been fighting to get proper 5.1 to my soundbar from my PC for months and finally decided to give this a try - heck, less than twenty bucks. I had only one issue: the optical connection put out no sound. The driver disk that came within the box didn't work...my drive couldn't read it. It took me forever to find a proper download, but I located the proper driver on the Internet Archive, and after a reboot, it worked beautifully and sounds great. If you need the drivers, they can be found on the Internet Archive by searching for "CM 6206 1.09 WIN 10".

It was cheap and the USB looks like USB 3.0 but the end came off and only 4 wires are being used for USB 2.0. Plus the optical out did not work even after installing the drivers.

Need an audio line in for your laptop? I did & this worked great. I added one to a small Dell desktop as well.

It's a widely used CM106. It works and works well. Other reviews say the optical ports don't work, it's because they don't know what they're doing (Google). There other models that are in a small case those have the CM6206 , unless you have at least mid range equipment you'll notice some difference not a lot. Hopefully this helps.

Plug and play. My rear speakers i can finally hear them again.

I should really have known. This is the third different USB adapter I have tried. All of them look to be based on the 12 year old C-Media chip with 10 year old drivers. SPDIF output shows as "unconnected" in Windows. There is no such thing as output detection for SPDIF (and yes, I did check!!) Just crappy, half baked drivers. If you need SPDIF in/out then don't bother with this one.

Used for an older computer that had on-board sound. This was a great and easy upgrade. Plugged in and worked with Win 11, no issues.

Works fine. Keep in mind that this will be 16-bit audio only.