Just installed the ASUS D2X and after having a fiddle with the settings I'm getting really impressive results. Tin like sound at first through the Z5500 and nothing from the centre channel. Changed the settings to a pseudo 7.1 even though the hardware is 5.1 and it mixes amazingly well! Just re-exploring some of my CDs, never realised the range of sound on offer! Only bummer is the lack of a front panel header unless I'm mistaken? Any pointers from D2X users?
The Logitech Z-5500, like most computer speaker, has a headphone jack on the wired remote controller. Plug your headphones their. This also give you the headphones volumes at your reach.
The Z-5500 are great as a surround system but the headphone jack is rubbish unfortunately. Just installed the Realtek Drivers and linked the front panel to the motherboard on my P8P67 and it's markedly better than the Z5500. Just a shame I can't take advantage of the ASUS D2X with headphones... conveniently! No I'm not diving behind my case if I have the urge for headphone play!
Really? Isn't not a pass through jack? (Computer to amp but untouched sound, to headphones) On my Logitech 2.1 speaker, my headphones.. granted are not good, they sound the same if I plug them of my computer on the back or on my speakers. Which is good, as my sound card, which I want to replace due to ultra poor drivers, doesn't have any onboard connections.
https://brainbit.wordpress.com/ Install those unofficial drivers if you haven't already. They fix a range of things that the official ones get wrong, as well as offering slightly better performance. The official drivers have some really stupid bugs involving automatic volume leveling, high memory usage, high latency, upmixing problems.. etc. - So the unified drivers from CarvedInside should get you the best experience possible from your Xonar.
Cool, at least ASUS is not suing them or provide cease and desist letters, like Creative Labs does. I still can't believe that when Vista was out, someone not only made Vista drivers with every panel form Creative work on it, but it was way better than the XP drivers in every shape and form, heck even the replicated panels was light and had more features. And he was a lonely guy, not a team of programmers. This is mainly because the sound card market is small, and sound cards aren't replaced like GPU's or CPU's.. people tend to keep them for 1-2 computer builds, and sometimes even longer.. until either they are no more supported drivers for Windows, or that it breaks. It is clear that a sound card manufacture doesn't make much money, and sometimes has to rely on outsourcing for drivers and coding, hence why they are not great. But it's not a reason, like Creative to completely ignore quality control, and testing... to a point where the longer you sleep your computer, the less likely it will wake up successfully, memory hog problem, pops once and loudly at random after stooping music after a moment of silence, and other issues.
Behave! Just tried the unified driver and it is better, what a result. Sound is crisper and distortion from switching audio sources is completely eliminated. Tried a little light Jazz and that was spot on, dropped in some Slipknot and it handled some of the more noisy ensembles very well. Sound in game in so far as Portal 2 is much clearer from the outset. Getting the odd DP spike but not noticed any ill effect from it at the moment.
