Asus Xonar D2X

[Helevitia]

Cool, more competition, but I am liking the Prelude more right now.

[az]

Ahem! So EAX 2.0 is somehow better than EAX HD 5.0 (which I assume is backwards compatible)?

And since when do I need a soundcard to record stuff from DRMed files to DRM-free files? There are software soundcards like totalrecorder to do that without any DAC/ADC quality loss. And there's still the recompression loss. And I thought vista could deactivate recording capabilities while playing back DRMed files, or was that idea scratched? And DRM is dying anyway

So much hype and marketing. We'll see. But it's nice to see more competition to Creative.

[Jammrock]

Looks cool. So are we limited to just coax for digital? I don't see an optical socket.

It uses those cool dual SPDIF sockets. A single socket covers both coax and optical TOS/link SPDIF. It's actually mini-TOS/link, and you need an adapter for regular TOS/link cabling, but they are ~$15 USD. Look at the second link and you'll see the LEDs inside the RCA jacks.

[Claymonkey]

Looks cool. So are we limited to just coax for digital? I don't see an optical socket.

[Jammrock]

The hard part of a soundcard is not really the DSP - you can buy that somewhere. The analog signal part is harder to get right and does affect the sound much more (when we're talking about music, not realtime positional audio). And wasn't that the soundcard with the fan on it?

No fan, just the funky looking metal shield.

[az]

The hard part of a soundcard is not really the DSP - you can buy that somewhere. The analog signal part is harder to get right and does affect the sound much more (when we're talking about music, not realtime positional audio). And wasn't that the soundcard with the fan on it?

[Jammrock]

Speaking of sound cards:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7573

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=5024

Asus showcased their new Xonar at Computex and finally spoke about the DAC/DSP. Apparently they hired C-Media to build them an exclusive chip. Preliminary specs look pretty nice, and it comes in PCI and PCIe flavors.

The ASUS Xonar D2-series features full-duplex 24-bit/192 KHz audio processing on all inputs and outputs. ASUS claims the Xonar D2-series can reach signal-to-noise ratio levels up to 118dB. The new sound cards also support Dolby Digital Live and DTS:Connect technologies for single-cable multi-channel audio enjoyment.

Additional Dolby and DTS technologies such as Dolby Headphone, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, Dolby Virtual Speaker, DTS Interactive and DTS Neo:PC. The ASUS Xonar D2-series also supports ASIO 2.0 for low latency audio tasks.

Looks like Creative is finally getting some competition.

Jammrock