Wednesday, June 6th 2007
Computex 2007: ASUS Showcases New Generation Audio Card
ASUS, announced the first product of its brand new product line: the ASUS Xonar D2 7.1-channel audio card. This new audio card is based on the AV200 audio chip, which offers a SNR of 118db for both audio in and out to all 8 channels. Besides delivering impressive audio quality, the Xonar D2 is also packed with multiple sound technologies like Dolby Digital Live, Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual Speaker, and Dolby Pro Logic IIx, which creates up to 7.1-channel surround from stereo or 5.1 sources as well as DTS Interactive for real time AC-3 encoding. The Xonar D2 also comes with a special application called "Portable Media Processor". This application works with the onboard ALT (Analog Loopback Transformation) circuit to provide almost lossless analog recording audio quality from digital music files. For more details regarding ASUS Xonar D2, please click here.
Source:
ASUS
27 Comments on Computex 2007: ASUS Showcases New Generation Audio Card
Live encodes 2.0/2.1 audio into DD compatible soundstreams - Giving you 5.1 Dolby Digital audio off of other audio sources (MP3 and such)
DTS is older, thats just higher audio quality and 7.1 sound, whereas DD is compressed and only does 5.1 audio.
I thought Asus' soundcard was supposed to use the "Oxygen DSP sound chip" made famous on the Auzentech and razer sound cards? Also, wasnt it supposed to have an integrated DSP with X-Fi technology or supposedly, based on the X-Fi cards with a marriage of the Auzentech Oxygen chip? I could have sworn that was posted sometime back. DAMN MY MEMORY FOR FAILING ME!!!!
"Stylish EMI shield for stable audio quality" says a brochure.
YEah, C-Media chips is what I meant to say. Thanks guys.
EAX win xDDDDDdddd Joke for today. Like there is use for eax 2.0 anymore... Is that trying to say that X-Fi doesn't have EAX 2.0 HW support?! At least mine has for 2, 3 & 4.
EAX is dying thanks to vista and should remain dead - creatives constant hardware upgrade path is ridiculous (Many games only support software or the latest EAX - my audigy4 is a good card - why must i use software since it doesnt have EAX 5.0)
Death to creative! long live... well... someone who has tech support!
The Xonar D2 may look stunning in terms of hardware specs, but let's wait and see what software and drivers will come with the card.
Also, i hate them for not allowing any other sound card maker to go beyond EAX 2.0
Im still waiting for it to be really tested before i make up my mind :)
creative is not the only company suffering lame driver support...and cmedia drivers are made third party, cmedia doesnt make jack.
CMEDIA is nothing special...just a tad better than intergrated, but todays better boards are having decent sound...
Remember Aureal? Aureal > Creative :respect: (I still have and use a Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 "SuperQuad" card to this day and love it)
Anyhow, saying CMEDIA is a tad better than onboard shows a lack of knowledge and understanding. You have to remember that CMEDIA caters to the whole sound market segment, not just gamers/enthusiasts ect ect... Even though Creative has a sort of "budget" line of sound cards, products from CMEDIA and others in this catagory were never meant to compete against this.
Those cards from Auzentech/BlueGears and a few others using modern high end CMEDIA chips and chipsets, IMO, are superior products to anything @ Creative with really the only breaking point being a lack of higher EAX support (and for me personaly, I could care less as I've never found anything special about EAX anyhow).
Not just to bring up a dead topic, but they are showing it off this week.
I think what it comes down to is driver support. For me that means Linux drivers, most of you: Vista drivers. They do have an advantage in a way though, they are starting from scratch so they don't have years of legacy code thats completely incompatible with anything but the pre-vista windows sound model. Lets just hope they use that to their advantage.
fail to produce anything new...
ALT claim is rather ridiculous
"onboard ALT (Analog Loopback Transformation) circuit to provide almost lossless analog recording audio quality from digital music files."
It is not just BS. It is nonsense. Analog is lossless. Hence its name.If software is horrible then there is rather nothing to miss, right?
I have used creative Live sound card for 11 years... I kind of accept they do not support it for Vista. In fact no other piece of hardware from late 90's could work in my PC even 5 years ago. So I'd say they are actually pretty good in this regard.