Creative Sound BlasterX Kratos S5 Not Detected...

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Joined
13 Jul 2019
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3
Recently purchased a set of these speakers off eBay, knowing they were faulty but not sure to what extent. Seller said he couldn't connect to his PC but it did have the USB cable, so figured it might just be a driver issue.... it was not.

I plugged the speakers in to my PC and Win10 installed the drivers immediately. I thought "well, that was easy" ...however I noticed that although the speakers were listed in Devices in the Control Panel, it was under Other Devices, not Audio and it's listed as "SBX Kratos S5 Upgrade" .... why does it say Upgrade at the end?

On top of that, I can't for the life of me find the speakers in the Device Manager, it just doesn't exist, not under USB Controllers, Audio Inputs, Sound etc... it's just nowhere to be seen.

I tried installing the Creative Sound Blaster Connect software, but said it couldn't find any compatible Creative hardware. Same thing happened when I tried to update the firmware.

I've also tried different USB 2.0, ports, tired all USB 3.0 ports, tried a different USB cable... nothing. On top of that, the LEDs on the speakers do not light up when powered on (not sure if they're supposed though).

I have not yet tried the speakers through the normal 3.5mm speaker jack, but even if that did work, I'd be unable to use the features of the speakers, which I kinda want to do.

Does anyone know what might be the cause behind this? Or has anyone owned these speakers and had similar problems? Any help or info would be great. Cheers.

UPDATE: Tried 3.5mm connection instead and still didn't work. Power LED lights up when plugged in but I think it's supposed to turn on once you've turned the unit on. Also, the RGB LEDs on the speakers randomly light up when plugged in, even if the unit is turned off.

I'm suspecting some sort of power short somewhere, since it's powered on of sorts, when powered off.
 
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Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2009
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11,175
I saw another thread about these speakers pop up before with quite a few people saying they have had problems. The issues mostly seemed to be hissing noise. What you are describing seems worse than any of the other issues I've seen. One poster did open them up and found the issue was a result of poor quality soldering. No surprise I guess; made for the lowest price possible.

It's probably worth you opening them up and seeing if you can see any signs where soldering might be an issue. Anything more than that, then it's probably something you can't do much about, unless it's obvious defective components which can be replaced.
 
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13 Jul 2019
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Yeah, I actually came across that thread shortly after I posted mine. It did prompt me to open mine up and take a look at the solder joints. Annoyingly, they all looked perfectly fine. To be honest, I think the entire mainboard is faulty, I could find JUST the mainboard, I could get them working again. I may just get a set of the Kratos S3 since they don't use USB... one less thing that can go wrong.
 
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