If you grew up nerdy in the 90s, you'll likely have fond memories of the ubiquitous Sound Blaster range of desktop speakers and sound cards from hardware maker Creative.
The brand's still around, and it's aiming to make a big splash again with a uniquely customizable hub to connect all kinds of devices on your desk. There are a lot of gadgets that do this, but the Sound Blaster Re:Imagine takes a modular approach, allowing you to mix and match a bunch of components for controlling your devices and launching shortcuts.
Let's start with the practical stuff. The audio hub is a rectangular slab meant to sit on your desk and make it easy to hook up your gear to your computer. There are two USB Type-C ports, a 3.5-mm headphone out, a mic in/line in, line out, and TOSLink Optical in.
An additional Type-C port draws power, and there's Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth connectivity on board for your wireless earbuds and headsets. It will also support an external monitor over USB-C, and USB hubs if you've got more devices to plug in.
Creative says this is designed to work with Windows, MacOS, and Linux machines, as well as game consoles and mobile devices. It's also a high-resolution digital analog converter (DAC) and amp for audio output to headphones and speakers.
The hub delivers up to 32-bit/384-kHz audio via said DAC and amp; it'll power headphones up to 300 ohms, as well as drive large desktop speakers.
The hub itself runs on Linux using an octa-core processor and 8 GB of RAM built in, so it can operate standalone or tethered to your desktop. To that end, it comes with a 3-inch touchscreen, and a memory card slot to expand the 16 GB of flash storage.
Using the touchscreen and the input modules that can slot into the panel facing you, you can control volume and route audio where you want it – meaning, you can have audio from your desktop play through your headphones, hear music from your phone on your speakers, and vice versa.
Here's where the modularity comes in. The horizontal base unit has five slots that can fit magnetically attachable modules. That includes the screen, as well as a series of shortcut button sets, a knob, and dual sliders.
You can program these input modules to engage all kinds of shortcuts; Creative mentions actions like muting a call, launching apps, starting a recording in your DAW, and activating smart home gadgets. The same goes for the knob and sliders. It's sort of like what you can do with the Elgato Stream Deck and similar devices with customizable shortcuts, albeit with more flexibility thanks to the inclusion of physical controls.
I'd be all over this: I already enjoy adjusting my PC's volume by turning a knob on my 8bitdo mechanical keyboard; I'd love to get my hands on more such controls for scrubbing through footage while editing video and zooming in and out of graphic design files.
The hub is also an open platform with an SDK and root access, so you can code your own applications to run on the hardware, and not be restricted to the initial set of functions it ships with.
Creative says the hub can do some fun things too, like run retro PC games on the little display using an on-device DOS emulator, bring back the animated Sound Blaster Parrot mascot, and even revive the Dr. Sbaitso speech synthesis app from 1991 that basically conversed with users with a robotic voice.
Between delivering polished hardware, offering a customizable platform, and running a community for users to exchange custom apps, this is an awfully ambitious project – even for an established outfit like Creative. It's been working on this since January, and it will need to go all in if it intends to make the Sound Blaster Re:Imagine a success. That said, I love the concept, and I'm rooting for it.
The hub is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, where the Re:Imagine is listed at a retail price of US$500. At the time of writing, it's being offered at a discounted perk of $328; that includes the horizontal base unit, screen, and one module each of the shortcut buttons, knob, and dual sliders.
The team plans to introduce a larger, more squarish hub as a stretch goal for this campaign, with a total of six slots on board.
All crowdfunding campaigns carry an element of risk, so you'll want to keep that in mind if you choose to back this campaign. That said, Creative has been in the hardware business for decades, and currently sells a nifty product it previously crowdfunded: a dual-camera webcam setup.
If all goes to plan, orders are slated to ship to select countries in June 2026, and delivery costs will be calculated later in the year (ranging between $25-$50). Going by Creative's responses to its backers' questions, it looks like it might expand the list of countries it'll ship to, which currently includes US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Australia, and Singapore.
Check out the Sound Blaster Re:Imagine over on Kickstarter.
Source: Creative Technology
