Out of the box the Claro is all business.  No space is wasted in the design bringing the Claro in nearly a half inch shorter than our last C-Media based card; the X-Meridian.  The sound processing is handled by four LM 833 OPAMP control circuits.  Worth mentioning is the inclusion of front panel support, 2 on board audio ports and a 2 pin digital S-PDIF input on the card.

     The back of the Claro is much simpler and features the same trademarks shown on the packaging.  The Claro also reprints the port assignments right on the card to help with installation.  In our windowed installations it is almost always easier to see these labels that those printed next to the actual ports.

     The Claro has a nice mix of the traditional 7.1 ports (gold plated of course) and the optical and Coaxial ports more often fount in your home theater components.  From the left: Mic in, Line in, Front, Side/Surround, Center/sub woofer, Back surround, S-PDIF Optical input, S-PDIF Optical output and Coaxial Output.

     The Coaxial + Optic ports are used to connect your external digital devices.  S/PDIF can be used to connect standard devices like a DVD player, video game console or a digital TV.  High quality CO-AXIAL and TOSLINK Optical S/PDIF  can receive and send a pure, unconverted, PCM digital audio signal at resolutions of 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 96 kHz and 192 kHz sampling rates.  The output also allows pass through of Non-PCM Dolby Digital and DTS streams to your external DD/DTS decoder and A/V receiver.  The result is the best possible sound is passed on to your home theater system or up to a 7.1 component system for your PC.  Most other high end cards, including the much adored X-Fi must up convert or down convert resulting in significant sound quality loss.  All of that technical jargon boils down to an astonishing sound clarity when using the included optical output with a high-end receiver/pre-amp.

     The Claro ships with a minimal amount of extras including the User Manual, a drivers CD (Version 1.1) and a 6 foot TOSLINK cable.  The inclusion of a nice TOSLINK cable is a nice plus as these cables can be quite expensive.

The Install:

     I installed the Claro into my new Antec Nine Hundred case.  The system was powered by the Ultra X-Finity 800W power supply.  The rest of the build includes an Intel Pentium Core Duo 2 6600 cooled by a CoolIT Eliminator, a Connect3D X1900 XT video card and a 2x 1 GB kit of Crucial Ballistix DDR2-8000 mounted on an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe.  Storage was provided by 2 x WD 74 GB Raptors in a RAID0, a Seagate 750 GB storage drive and a Plextor PX-755SA 16x DVD burner.