Hardware Asus Xonar DX

Its been a long time since creative had any genuine competition in the soundcard market and by extension there was a real alternative to buying whatever they were putting out and putting up with terrible driver support, so its definetely an exciting event now it's happenning.

I'm quite tempted to replace my audigy 2 with one of these, though I'm not in a particular hurry to do so yet. I have my suspicions that the small number of occasional stability problems I have experienced are all down to the creative card and its drivers (pull a headphone/speaker lead out while the pc is running = hard crash, run certain multiple audio programs at once = hard crash with looping audio etc, sometimes after a reboot the error reporting will lead back to an known error with creative drivers too, which they seem to have no intent to fix)

 

I've had an XtremeGamer card for a year. Originally it worked under Vista X64, but *something* (perhaps Windows updates/driver updates) broke the microphone support around 9 months ago.

Creative have washed their hands of it a long time ago because 'it is an OEM card'. This was the final straw, and I vowed to adopt the first reasonably-priced alternative.

And here we have it! I'm going to hold of for a few weeks for financial reasons, but this DX sounds like the card for me.

Creative, it's hopefully the beginning of the end, and quite frankly it's long overdue.

 

I've got an X-fi collecting dust in my case while I use the on-board audio because Creative never got around to building the linux drivers they promised years ago. A sound card that only works in one OS and requires crawling behind the computer to switch the speakers from the onboard to the discreet every time is pretty useless, and so I'm using the onboard because it works. If it wasn't for the fact that I don't have an extra PCIe slot, i would already have one of these.

 

if they released a pc-express, i would buy one in a heartbeat (would proably have to import one from the states but i would)

 

It is PCI-Express.

 

Ive just installed mine today.

Its ****ing awesome!!!!!!!! ive not really heard the distortion in a average mp3 but the vocal separation is superb as is the bass response.

For £55 its a ****ing bargain and quite an attractive bit of kit, also the drivers work flawlessly for Vista 64bit which i run.

 

[edit] Cancel!!

Repeat after me... [/edit]

I replied to Woodstock, with a link to the card on Scan... and only then noticed he's from NZ

 

So you're happy with it then, yeah?

 

I'll be getting one here shortly

 

I've had one in since last weekend, encountered one issue which is that my zalman 5.1 (6 actual speakers interpreted froma 5.1 signal) don't work properly if I set the control panel to 5.1 in windows and theres reverb/desynched output also on 4 or more speaker settings .. but if I leave that on 2 speakers in the control panel and 5.1 in the windows speaker settings the 5.1 does seem to work properly in games (where I want it to really) and the two speaker setting sounds a little better I think for music/watching things than the old audigy 2 did anyhow, so I'm fairly happy with it.

*edited: my poor ping problem has re-occurred I've justnoticed so perhaps that was entirely unrelated after all.

 

Just responding to this comment:

"When asked, they explained that this is purely because the power from a PSU is far cleaner than it is from the motherboard, meaning you again get far less interference and therefore better quality sound. At least, that’s how the theory works."

I noticed that they have now come out with a standard PCI version of this card (sold on Newegg). It has no extra power connector like the PCI-E version does. I would think this changes the truth of what they told you? Otherwise why wouldn't they have added it to the PCI version also?

 

iirc correctly the pci version was released before the pci-express, so they made the decision either after it was too late to add to the pci edition or to give an advantage (selling point) to the pci-e edition

 

The PCI version was out in the first place, the PCI-E one came later.

I originally thought it was due to the PCI-PCIe converter chip on the board, but Asus Taiwan told me directly it was because of "better quality". Whether PCI is simply grounded better or there's some issue with PCI-E I couldn't say for sure.

 

What media playback software did you guys use for this?

 

I'm having a very hard time finding a good quality oxygen free gold plated stereo loopback cable for testing. The best I can do with Rightmark at the moment with a few *regular* stereo cables i have laying around is a noise level of -100 and dynamic range of 100. That's at 24-bit, 96khz testing. I'm sure i can reach the reviewed specs if I had the right cable. Where can I get one (online)? Exactly what was the one used in the review? Maybe I can purchase one like it.

 

Have a look here.

Cpemma bought himself a couple, if you're unsure I'll bet he'd let you know what they're like.

 

I'm very confused by this part, the D2 and D2X both have EAX, just 2.0 rather than 5.0 - is that what was meant? A rather weighty clarification if you choose not to make it