Audio Testing

ASUS has a very well-designed audio circuit on the ASUS MAXIMUS IX FORMULA; one worthy of the rest of the board's design. However, there does seem to be a driver issue, and one that has been reported on other ASUS Z270 products by other users on various websites, including ASUS's ROG website. None of these users seem to have found a proper working fix.

One of the advertised features of the ASUS MAXIMUS IX FORMULA is the ability to use separate audio streams, such as having chat audio from TeamSpeak or Discord on your headphones and game audio on your speakers. In practice, I have found that the software to do this, called Sonic Studio, is a part of the Realtek driver install, and it allows you to customize the set-up of such configurations for the audio per application. It seems that this causes some sort of conflict with a manual configuration, and overrides my settings, and in such a way that the only way to get any audio after driver installation, configuring for separate audio streams, and rebooting results in the audio only being available over both speakers and the headphones at the same time (and I mean ANY since both speakers and headphones seemingly become disabled).


This being new software and an advertised feature, I find it to be a big problem since I have had to install the audio driver daily, or have had to leave the PC on forever in order to use the audio as I would like to (and as I do with any other motherboard), and that is simply not acceptable. Since the setup works fine before a reboot, this is clearly a driver issue only, and there needs to be an update that makes this problem disappear. It is possible that the Windows audio driver and not the ASUS driver is the culprit, but either way, with no fix available other than trying a fresh OS install ( I have tried every audio driver from the ASUS support page for this board), this proves to be a trying problem that has me quite frustrated with ASUS.

All that said, this board's audio quality is truly quite superb, both over the front and rear outputs. RMAA results are below:

RightMark Audio Analyzer