****Revised 12/14/07 due to new information****
Introduction:
Most people know Asus for their mainboards; but Asus has quite a bit more than just mainboards in its list of offerings. There are Asus notebooks, phones, PDAs, network switches, CPU coolers, you name it and I think Asus makes it. The only thing that Asus lacked in PC peripherals was a sound card. But now all of that has changed. Asus, one of the leading tier one hardware manufacturers has jumped into the previously Creative dominated sound card market. This offering named the Xonar D2 is set to go head to head with Creative’s X-Fi but will it be able to measure up to the reputation the X-Fi has?
Let close our eyes and listen to find out.
Product: Asus Xonar D2
Author:
Sean Kalinich
Category: Enthusiast
Reviewed on: November 20th 2007
Product cost: $189.99
Manufacturer: Asus
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Carlos Echenique, Jason Hambly
{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The Xonar’s box is nice but does not reach out and grab you. If this was sitting on the shelf next to the other offerings you might pass it by. If you did stop and pick the box up (perhaps due to the large number of Dolby and other Logos along the bottom of the front cover), you might open the front flap. If this is what you did, then you would be impressed with what you saw. Under the front flap Asus put the color print that should have been on the outside and even allows you a look at the Xonar.
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After you have marveled at the packaging (this is of course after you picked it up, lifted the front flap, and paid the nice person at the checkout counter) you will probably want to open the box up and see just what Asus has stuffed inside.
If you did do this and not simply put it on the fireplace mantle for decoration, you would not be disappointed.
The contents of the box are quite impressive, here is the list:
Xonar D2 7.1 Channel Surround Card
Driver Support CD (Including Portable Music Processor utility)
Abletion Live 6 Lite software CD
Valuable Cakewalk Production Plus Pack CD (Sonar LE, Dimension LE, and Project5 LE)
PowerDVD 7 software DVD Player
1x Additional MIDI Bracket and adapter cable
2x S/PSIF TOSLINK optical adaptors
1x S/PSIF TOSLINK optical cable
4x 3.fmm to RCA cables for 8 channel output
Dolby Demo CD
Quick Start Guide
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Not a bad haul, the optical cable and adaptors alone are quite nice but to add in the extra analog cables to allow for analog surround makes the “stash” even better.
The software is entry level product but still nothing to thumb your nose at either.
{mospagebreak title=Design and Features}
Design and Features:
The Xonar was designed from the ground up to be a hardware based 7.1 digital surround card. Unlike Creative’s X-Fi (which decodes in software and is very bus dependent), Asus decided to move just about everything into hardware. The nice thing about this is you lose much of the PCI polling that is common with the Creative Cards. It also tends to add a much cleaner sound to the mix.
The major features (taken right from Asus’ website are)
| Audio Performance | Output Signal-to-Noise Ratio (A-Weighted): 118 dB Input Signal-to-Noise Ratio (A-Weighted): Output THD+N at 1kHz: Input THD+N at 1kHz: Frequency Response (-3dB, 24-bit/96kHz input): Frequency Response (-3dB, 24-bit/192kHz input): Output/Input Full-Scale Voltage Sample Rate Conversion Quality: |
| Main Chipset | Audio Processor: ASUS AV200 High-Definition Sound Processor (Max. 192KHz/24bit) 24-bit D-A Converter of Digital Sources: 24-bit A-D Converter for Analog Inputs: |
| Sample Rate and Resolution | Analog Playback Sample Rate and Resolution: 44.1K/48K/96K/192KHz @ 16/24bit Analog Recording Sample Rate and Resolution: S/PDIF Digital Output: S/PDIF Digital Input: ASIO 2.0 Driver Support: |
| I/O Ports | Analog Output Jack: 3.50mm mini jack *4 (Front/Side/Center-Subwoofer/Back) Analog Input Jack: Other line-level analog input (for CD-IN/TV Tuner): Digital S/PDIF Output: Digital S/PDIF Input: MIDI Ports: |
| Driver Features | Operation System: Windows Vista/XP(32/64bit)/MCE2005 Dolby® Technologies: DTS® Technologies: Smart Volume Normalizer™: Xear 3D™ Virtual Speaker Shifter: Magic Voice™: Karaoke Functions: FlexBass™: Other Effects: 3D Sound Engines/APIs: DirectX: |
As you can see the Xonar is an impressive creation on paper, with specifications that exceed the X-Fi in many respects. True, Asus does not have EAX 5.0 but that sound standard has not been implemented in many games and even with games that do have it there is a performance impact as well as other issues when this is enabled.
Speaking in terms of aesthetics, (any of you that have read one of my case reviews knows I am big on this) the Xonar is an impressive site. Asus have added a black EMI shield with a small circular yellow light. While this is attractive it is somewhat pointless as the card faces the bottom of your case. Now do not misunderstand me the EMI shield is not pointless; just the light.
The outputs along the back are very interesting, the fact that they light up the color of the cable that should go into the jack (Pink light for the Mic jack etc) is a very nice touch. They also have dual purpose SPDIF jacks; you can use either optical or coaxial cables for these two jacks. As I mentioned above Asus provided cables for just about any type of sound set up, or for you to tie someone up pretty well (if you are into that sort of thing).
Software Controls:
For controlling your new Xonar, Asus has provided a control panel that is very functional and easy to learn. As you can see from the screen shots below; everything you need to configure and control your Xonar sound is right at your fingertips.
While I know all of this is interesting, I am pretty sure you want to know how well it performs and sounds.
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{mospagebreak title=Performance}Performance:
As previously mentioned, Asus put pretty much everything in hardware
**Editor’s Note**
I have an official statement from Asus on the Xonar D2.
It would appear that the AV200 is based on the 8788 but not the same chip.
They do admit that the Dobly Digital is done in software but also explain that due to dirver optimizations the proccesing is not a system bottleneck.
EAX 1.0 and 2.0 are done in hardware and provide positional audio support.
"C-Media helped Dolby develop the DDL core kernel for the PC platform so that it’s optimized to run via CPU. You could say the cards that use 8788 do so because they are designed to deal with Dolby/DTS signals (but the 8788 doesn’t necessarily decode/encode those signals by itself).
So 8788 based cards that outright say they encode/decode using the 8788 chip are lying. shame on them. 8788 cards that claim Dolby HW support within the 8788 are bending the truth. Cards that say ‘Real-time Dolby Encoding’ are sorta going around that HW decode/encode issue altogether, and making everyone scratch their heads."
As for the AV200 (Asus’ version of the 8788) this is what they have to say about that.
"AV200 processes the audio from PC host to PCI bus and transcodes them to I2S and S/PDIF out and also handles some audio input/output routing/mixing. This means it’s also controlling 3D positioning, and EAX in hardware (as you saw from RM3D) Aside from that, it doesn’t need to do much else, and like 8788 it doesn’t encode/decode Dolby signals.
Running certain processes via software isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but some enthusiasts have a slow time waking up to that reality. C-media’s tests showed that processing 7.1 channel audio use less than 3% of a modern CPU. (Less than 5% for DDL DTS encode) The added cost of putting in a dedicated chip to offload that 5% wouldn’t justify the benefit. Instead, meant to tackle the fundamental aspects for creating great sound, and that’s where you’ll see the R&D investment going. I stand by that approach.
It’s also far simpler/cost effective to upgrade your soundcard with new features, encoding standards and optimizations via software driver updates. Had we gone with a decidated hardware solution for signal processing, we’d probably find ourselves stuck in the same Windows-Vista-hates-me boat as Creative."
On a side note they also went on to eplain that the use of the word "process" is not meant to indicate that the AV200 performs any hardware based processing other than EAX Positional audio.
The AV200 is meaely the control chip or brain for distributing the commands issued from the CPU/Software with the added benefit of EAX Hardware(1.0 and 2.0) support for positional audio.
to reduce the amount of CPU overhead you usually find on “the other guy’s” sound cards and most Audio Codecs built into mainboards. This also allows for on-the-fly encoding of surround sound for non-surround streams such as games.
The real proof though is in the actual quality of sound that comes out when you are playing your favorite game or watching an HD or BluRay DVD movie. However, this is not something easy to convey; there are no numbers to use and no real benchmarks that tell you how good something sounds. While there are analyzers that will graphically display sound and show you the distortion that is in the sound waves; none of that can really let you know how good something will sound.
To give you the most accurate review of the Xonar D2 possible, I used a method similar to my case reviews but more in depth.
I asked eight people to watch a BluRay movie (The Fifth Element), play two video games, Watch HD-TV, and finally to listen to both CD and MP3 quality music.
This was done for both the Xonar D2 and a Creative Labs X-Fi Platinum.
Speakers used were a set of Logitec Z-5500 Digital speakers using the Toslink Digital Optical cable for surround sound playback.
Now these people did not know which cards was which but I asked them to give me a score of 1 to 5 for sound quality and vibrancy.
Below are the numbers and some of the comments I received on the Xonar.
| Xonar | X-Fi Platinum | ||
| Blu-Ray | 4.5 | 4.3 | |
| 4.5 | 4.2 | ||
| 4.4 | 4 | ||
| 4 | 4 | ||
| 4.15 | 3.75 | ||
| 4.6 | 4.2 | ||
| 3.75 | 4.1 | ||
| 4.5 | 4.4 | ||
| Total | 4.3 | 4.11875 |
Smooth, Clean, Crisp
| Xonar | X-Fi Platinum | ||
| HD-TV | 4.6 | 3.8 | |
| 4 | 3.9 | ||
| 4.2 | 4 | ||
| 4.75 | 4 | ||
| 4 | 4.2 | ||
| 4.4 | 4.4 | ||
| 4.25 | 4.75 | ||
| 4.4 | 4.8 | ||
| Total | 4.325 | 4.23125 |
Full, Vibrant
| Xonar | X-Fi Platinum | ||
| BioShock | 4.6 | 4 | |
| 4.7 | 4 | ||
| 4.35 | 4 | ||
| 4.45 | 3.8 | ||
| 4 | 3.9 | ||
| 4 | 4.5 | ||
| 3.95 | 4.5 | ||
| 4.75 | 4.6 | ||
| 4.35 | 4.7 | ||
| Total | 4.31875 | 4.25 |
Crisp, Full
| Xonar | X-Fi Platinum | ||
| HL2 | 4.6 | 4.8 | |
| 4.8 | 4.9 | ||
| 4.85 | 4 | ||
| 4 | 4 | ||
| 4.3 | 4.25 | ||
| 4.6 | 4.4 | ||
| 4.55 | 4.25 | ||
| 4.5 | 4 | ||
| Total | 4.525 | 4.325 |
Yup, you guessed it, another vote for Clean and Sharp.
| Xonar | X-Fi Platinum | ||
| CD Audio |
4.5 | 4.3 | |
| 4.5 | 3.9 | ||
| 4.6 | 4.5 | ||
| 4 | 4.7 | ||
| 4 | 4 | ||
| 4.7 | 4 | ||
| 4.8 | 4.5 | ||
| 4.4 | 4.3 | ||
| Total | 4.4375 | 4.275 |
More of the same Full, Crisp, Ballsy
| Xonar | X-Fi Platinum | ||
| MP3 Audio | 4.5 | 4.3 | |
| 4.4 | 4.25 | ||
| 4.2 | 4.3 | ||
| 4.7 | 4.5 | ||
| 4.75 | 4.6 | ||
| 4.4 | 4 | ||
| 4 | 4 | ||
| 4.6 | 4.25 | ||
| Total | 4.44375 | 4.275 |
Again the Xonar was described as having the fuller and cleaner sound.The overall impression from everyone was that the Xonar reproduced sounds with more clarity and fullness than the XFi did. For me the sounds even in gaming seemd to less processed and cleaner. The differences between the lows and highs were more apparent and there was no mud in the midrange.
{mospagebreak title=Pricing/Warranty}
Pricing/Warranty:
The pricing of the Xonar D2 is set to compete with Creative’s offering directly with a price point running around $189.99 this is a little more than the standard X-Fi without the “break-out box” but since the features exceed those found on the X-Fi Platinum and the Azuntec X-Fi offering the price is right about what you would expect.
The warranty is the standard warranty you have come to expect from Asus with 3 years being the term of coverage.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
I have to say that prior to receiving the Xonar D2 I was a creative fan, after using and listening to the Asus Xonar D2 I am a convert. The sound from the Xonar was much more full bodied than the X-Fi and I was able to get surround sound in games with the Dolby Live processing. The internal Digital Decoder was astounding and even outperformed the direct digital out through SPDiF in many cases. The configuration utility was also well put together. The installer worked with Vista x86 and x64 without any hic-ups. There were also none of the performance issues from PCI polling that you sometimes see from the X-Fi.
For a first jump into the world of discrete audio Asus has a hit. If you are looking for a discrete sound card with a ton of input/output options, great sound and ease of use the Xonar is the card you should look at.
For its combination of quality, performance, and design we are happy to award the Asus Xonar D2 our "Best on the Planet" award and rate it a "Must Have"
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Acknowledgements:
I would like to thanks Charlton Ho and Eric Chen at Asus for their help in getting this review put together.
Discuss this review here
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