Hardware Asus Xonar DX

Maybe having decent competition will spur creative into action now. Ive never come across a company which has neglected its clients as much as they have... all because they have pretty much had a monopoly of the sound card (non integrated) market. For a long long time I had to put up with snap, crackle and pop on my X-FI whilst playing BF2... all down to dodgy driver support.

And dont even get me started on their buggy driver bloated installs.

Welcome to party Asus... If I were to ever buy a soundcard again I would consider the DX. The problem is.. HD onboard audio is good enough for most people these days. Atleast the DX is up for consideration... unlike anything Creative sells.

 

Uh... What?

SMT Caps are used purely for mechanical reasons (they can be soldered with the SMT reflow process, rather than having to have an additional wave soldering step in the process). There is no benefit to having SMT caps other than the ability to reduce the number or steps involved in manufacturing, and perhaps the fact that they couldn't have ICs on the bottom side of the board if it had to be wave soldered.


Incidentally, essentially anyone involved in recording or who is to any extent an audiophile is probably going to wince when you give them an internal soundcard.

Bit-tech should review an actual high end soundcard or two. Something by M-Audio or DigiDesign or even E-MU (though they've been bought out by creative) would be nice.

 

Why, only a few people could/would make use of them. A discrete sound card, imo, is better than on board for a simple reason, i don't want to listen to every piece of data that is exchanged inside the box.

 

There's levels of audio-snobbery we have to accept.

I've been told otherwise from the Taiwanese about SMT capacitors compared to DIPs with regards to ESR, but yea, it could also be a manufacturing ++

 

That's true.

I guess what really bothers me is the representation of this soundcard as being "high end"... It's not.

It's a fancy gamer soundcard, and that's about it. If it was left at that, it would be one thing. However, when you start discussing SNR, channel seperation, noise levels and such, you're really venturing into the audiophile range anyways. When you posit that this is a "high end" card in that light, it's an obvious falsehood.

Even if it's never reviewed, it would be interesting to have the data from a decent (what's a better adjective, professional?) soundcard (m-audio, etc...) for comparative purposes.

 

I won't deny I'm a bit of a snob.

There's no such thing as a DIP capacitor (the word's usage in this context sounds like a mis-translation). DIP (Dual InLine Package), or nowadays more commonly DIL (Dual In Line) is a term for integrated circuit packaging. The only time i've even heard of a capacitor called a "DIP Capacitor" is with reference to a ceramic capacitor specifically designed to be installed in a DIP socket, and that was a ceramic capacitor.

Electrolytics come in Radial and Axial leaded varieties. Radial is by far the most common, and what they would be using if they weren't using SMT parts.

Incidentally, radial and SMT electrolytics are identical in construction. To make a SMT electrolytic, basically a radial electrolytic is inserted into a plastic carrier, and the leads are bent and flattened. You can actually straighten the leads, and use the cap in a through hole situation if you want. I've done it in a pinch, when I dropped a part from a PO at work, and was in a time crunch.

 

If you have speakers that cost less than your car you will not hear a difference between the xonar (or any other affordable soundcard) and the "high end" stuff from m-audio and such. however, even the cheaper xonar slaps on board sound around and does the happy dance on its corpse, not only do you get better sound quality, there is also something else, lower cpu usage.
What I mean is that the xonar (or x-fi (if you survive the drivers)) is pretty much as good as it gets for the average consumer who only spends a few hundred £ on speakers, so it is "high end" as in everything above would be pointless overkill.
Of course there are other cards avalaible for the audiophiles, but they also spend thousands to have good sound from all the way from the source to the speaker. For them the Xonar (x-fi as well) is low end "rubbish", but its a different target audience with different priorities and different requirements.

 

When are we going to get rid of the floppy power connector? my motherboard uses one, my fan controller and if i was to get one of these (which i might do as it looks very nice) then that would be another.

Anyway, great review!

 

for proper eax testing shouldnt you have chosen a game like bf2/bf2142 as they all enable eax?

 

if the spdif out doubles as the mic in does that mean you cant use digital output and have a mic?

 

I don't really see the need for reviews of professional audio equipment here. Added to that "high end" is a subjective term anyway. M-audio cards are to this, what Quadro FX is to Geforce. By your logic a 9800GTX isn't high end.

 

Funny, since when is "No one ever told people to reduce their Audio Quality to get better frame rates" evidence that native hardware audio support isn't needed? Try running BF2, a 3 year old game on Highest settings with High Hardware Audio settings through AC97. I've seen frame rates plummet just because of this.

 

Can you hook it up to 9800gtx so can output audio over HDMI?
I'll wait to see how Creative's PCI-Express XtremeGamer compares. Then have to locate descent 5.1 wireless speakers.

 

Asked this a couple of years ago and the answer was no. But I'll ask again now..are there YET any soundcards capable of putting out Spdif/RAW rather than decoding and then outputting? Cheers.

 

disregarding all other comments

YAY FOR A MID-RANGE CARD THATS NOT CREATIVE!

 

Yup, a problem if you do team-speak, but a consequence of the cards price in many respects.

teamtd11 - I've been complaining for ages for a Molex instead.

Denis_iii - only if you have an S/PDIF to 2-pin cable - there's no internal loop back pins. That's a good point, actually, and in fact the holes on the PCB at the back labelled S/PDIF out are unused.

 

Ok so i bought this card about a month and a half ago and it was for one reason, music. I use the card in a 16x slot (4x electrical), and it works prefect. I just run it stereo out to my Technics SA-DA10 receiver which is bi-amping my M80 newton series cambidge soundworks speakers with running no post processing on the receiver end. Let me just say the first song on perfect circle's album Thirteenth step "The package" is pretty amazing. The newest released NIN album the one for free (the slip), i got it in 24bit 96khz, track 4 Discipline thats sounds amazing too. I can't really describe it other than amazing sorry. However good it sounds to me for music, which i don't think i could get it sound better for me, I have run into a game issue with it on none other than system shock 2 and apparently its kinda the same issue it was having with bioshock, weird. It cause the game to crash at certain points which isn't a surprise considering how many times it has crashed on me, i just got past that part of the game by disabling my soundcard, but hey the game is going on ten years old they don't publish it anymore so its not a complaint, really the only complaint i have with it is when i boot up my computer right before windows loads the soundcard itself makes a funny internal clicking noise like "click click" does anyone else hear that same sound, it just kinda worries me. Oh the ss2 crash windows says it was caused by "cmgxsrv.dll" so me being the bright person that i am i google it and low and behold one page shows up talking about xonar bioshock patch well i run the patch but now i'm having a problem with cmgxsrv2.dll so go figure. In the end i don't care about the game support it makes my music sound amazing and thats all that counts for me, best album Metallica And justise for all, that also sounds amazing. Love it

 

It has a connector (well atleast mine came with one) to transfer sound over hdmi so yea

 

I'm going to get headphones for around 400€. Will there be a (great) difference between this card and the "big" brother Xonar D2? Or should I get a different sound card at all? It will be ONLY used with the headphones, a never use speakers with my computer (plus speakers are crap anyway).

 

I hope that's OK - it's not like it lights up or something.