Asus Xonar seen on our sonar

AS EXPECTED for a long time, Creative finally has a competitor in the PC quality sound space.

And, it's a serious one - Asus.

Its Xonar D2 (PCI) and D2X (PCI-Express - another first) look positively seriously, with their good looking black noise shields, and gold-plated slot covers. Not to mention the 1 GIPS DSP and other hardware-accelerated stuff under that shield to offload the CPU from bothering with sound processing.

New features include ALT - analogue loopback transformation - a good work around DRM protection for copying without quality loss, including the extra audio effects.

The dynamic range and signal to noise ratio are claimed to be 1 - 2 dB better than Creative X-fi Elite Pro card, thanks also to that stylish black noise shield.

Similar claims are there for the frequency response and maximum sampling rate - 192 kHz instead of 96 kHz. And oh yes, there is full Dolby Digital and DTS support built-in, while the EAX native support is stuck at version 2.0.

So, overall, an impressive card, I have to say - its total peak processing capabilities are supposedly still a few times behind X-Fi, but the overall package combination of features and quality is interesting, while minimising the CPU involvement. We'll have more of this in an upcoming comparative analysis, followed by a proper benchmark test. µ