- Sunday, 22 November 2009
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My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here - Robert Burns
Asus pitches at high-end sound
ASUS claims its new Xonar Essence STX range of audio cards is capable of industry-leading 124dB SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) in signal clarity.
This firm says the sound card is 64 times clearer the most on-board audio chips which are in the 85-88 SNR range.
The card is equipped with a built-in headphone amplifier capable of driving any headphone with up to 600 ohms of impedance to their full extent and less than 0.001% of distortion, without additional amplification.
The card is at a suggested retail price of £185 including VAT. It currently costs around $200 on US etail sites.
The board features Asus own Hyper-grounding circuitry design that uses a PCB design to separate signal and noise - ensuring that only the cleanest signals are passed on for decoding.
It also comes with Swappable OPamp sockets, complete Dolby Home Theatre technologies and DS3D GX2.5 3D gaming engine technology. µ
L'INQ
Asus UK
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What is it's DRM status? I'm interested but not at the cost of adding Rights Management hardware to my device.
This is good news. For the last 7 years there has been no innovation in the PC user sound card industry. Well, there's Creative's introduction of a powerful SPU (Sound Processing Unit) with it's own memory on the card. Very good! But there were sooo many driver problems that all the innovation went unseen. What I would like is to see small steps in REAL INNOVATION with deluxe drivers. I've had it with Realtek's codecs that ALL have problems when you install NEWER drivers (different from the old drivers on the CD). I'm disappointed that nVIDIA left the sound card market. A good innovative card from nVIDIA or any other company priced anywhere from 30$ to 130$ (depending on the model features) would be perfect. And I think would they really sell. I think ANY user that buys a video card for gaming ... at any price between 100$ and 500$ would also buy a sound card priced in the 30$ and 130$ range .
I'm still waiting on a good notebook soundcard as I play everything on my notebook. I also wanna know the tangible benefits. I have seen FPS improvements from using a soundcard on some notebooks but those cards are old and not very full featured. Then again the real problem is we don't have enough audio in surround sound or high quality enough to really take advantage of a soundcard anyway.
if I touch the pc case the sound is quietened almost completely. I don't know if it's the pc, the electricity in my home or I'm just fantastic! On board sound which has no noise interference is what I would like. I'm sick of buying expensive cards, the basics of sound should be on-board and at a good quality. If the card cost £40 I might actually buy it, but not at the same price as ATI 4870 1GB plus regular sound card (4870 1GB OCUK £165 inc VAT).
What really pisses me off is all these nice looking cards with anodized aluminium covers with lovely designs etched on them that no one will bloody see once it's facing down and underneath your graphics card in an ATX case.