Hardware Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim Review

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/08/22/asus-xonar-hdav-1-3-slim-review/1

The HDAV Slim is an affordable, half-height sound card for HD audio. It doesn't monkey around with compressing or 'enhancing' the audio on your Blu-ray disc, it just delivers pure, unadulterated HD audio goodness to your speakers or amp.

 

Neat, but quite expensive for what it is. Particularly with a PCI interface.. Fail

Linux support is likely to be non-existent too.

 

is the Xonar HDAV1.3 Deluxe better than all of creatives sound cards ?

 

Lol Creative. The only thing they're good for is artificial "gaming" effects.

 

I don't understand the point of wasting two HDMI ports to carry separate sound and video signals - HDMI was meant to carry both together, and many AV amps don't have HDMI ports to waste like that.

Also, how do you get an optical signal out of a coax SPDIF connector?

£100 seems a lot of money for something that is effectively an SPDIF passthrough - something which ATI's HD cards do fine already - so what's the benefit of this card?

 

Different Drivers and it's not ALC..

 

It's one HDMI from your craphics card to your sound card, and one from your sound card to your AV amp. Not two separate cables. That'd be retarded.

You use a converter, or some kind of multi cable.

SPDIF can't carry full HD sound unless it's 2.0, so it's not just an SPDIF passthrough. I think you might want to re-read the review...

 

They probably couldn't fit the PCI to PCI-e converter chip on something so small.

 

In case you're scratching your head in response to my comment, all other ASUS sound cards do use a PCI - PCIe converter onchip to enable the card to use a PCI-e X1 slot instead of a PCI slot.

 

Ah, that makes much more sense. I wondered why it had two HDMI ports

I misread. I though the review said that the card was HDMI 1.3 compliant, which would have meant that the card was just passing the DTS-HD/TrueHD signal for the amp to process. Because it's only 1.2 compliant, that means the card is doing the processing instead, which does make sense now.

I'd have liked to seen some kind of test to determine the actual saving in CPU load when using this card compared to having the CPU doing the decoding.

Reason I ask is that I'm building a cheap, low-power movie server, but it doesn't have enough grunt to play an HD movie unless it's re-encoded to a more CPU-friendly format like DIVX - so if I could offload the video processing to a GPU and the audio processing to this card, it might be enough to allow it to play HD movies in their original format.

 

Wtf is HD audio?

 

essentially its lossless surround sound, in the form of dolby trueHD and dts-HD...

The above is pretty misleading... The only point to having this soundcard is if you want to bitstream dolby or dts... (and have the ability to decode that stram on your receiver)

edit: well, ok it would be a fairly ok buy for someone with an amp with hdmi in but without the ability to decode true hd or dts master onboard

 

I refuse to call it HD audio because that term doesn't make any sense.

 

okay so I didnt read the whole thing but the whole point of HDMI is Audio and Video in one easy cable SO that HDMI in plug would thta be to take video coming off of your video card and send it to the audio card to be mixed with the audio and then the video and audio is sent to the HDMI out to go to the reciever/tv?

 

It seems like an utter load of bollocks, though I'm sure a number of purists are willing to pay the premium to get the "HD" audion through a discrete sound card. Off to the bar, brb ->

 

"HD" is classed as anything over 48KHz/16bit (DVD quality).

After that, it could be anything, but the usual suspects are 96KHz/24-bit or 192KHz/24-bit for PCs.

 

I feel that HiDefinition (AKA HD) is overabused.

 

This is explained in the article, please read it.

 

I rather not but thanks anyways not all that interested in the card enough to read that review, that was my only curiosity question I had about it.

 

HourBeforeDawn: You would have wasted less precious time of your life if you had just read the article, instead of waiting for replies on a forum. Each to his own I guess....

Also I don't care if I waster time writing this post. I like it. It's fulfilling for me.

Also Asus need to quit making crap. This card belongs nowhere.