Driver

The Immersa Pro will work right out of the box without a driver. But, if you want to change the color of the RGB light, and use the software features, you must download to the UIX driver from Cougar, here. The UIX driver is a little light on features and certainly does not expose the full feature set of the C-Media chipset.

There are only three settings available, Xear Surround, the RGB lighting control, and a 10-band equalizer. What’s interesting here is that, internally, the CM 6533X1 has a 5-band hardware EQ built in. 

When you install the UIX, it sets the equalizer to ‘FPS’. If you’re a purist, you’ll probably gag at the atrocity, but surprisingly, it also sounds alright. The Immersa Pro needs a little bit of EQ to sound their best. Now, where did all the other Xear effects go?

They are presented in the Windows Sound control panel applet.

I’m not privy to what the custom settings tab does, and probably neither does Cougar. For testing, the equalizer was left disabled, but to give the Immersa Pro a more K7XX sound, I played with the equalizer a little bit.

The amazing thing is that the Immersa Pro does sound good, very punchy, and gets the groove on. The C-Media chipset allows for 24-bit, 96KHz playback, and recording.

Of course, where would we be without Xear Magic Voice?

The RGB effects are similarly simple to use. There are some preset effects, Steady, Breathing, Off, and Swift.

Swift is probably the coolest feature, it allows you to choose the colors you want to cycle through. Not bad. I did notice that you can’t control Cougar’s mice with the same UIX. You need to download a second UIX to control their mice. But, when you really want to RGB all the things, you can with UIX. It isn’t totally comprehensive, either, many settings for the Immersa Pro were in the Windows Sound control panel, but it shows promise. The UIX is otherwise very stable, and didn’t hiccup once while I used it.