Asus Xonar D2

Listening Time

We grabbed some headphones (Sennheiser HD495, HD220 and Grado SR80s) and plugged them into a Creek OBH21 SE headphone amp (without DAC) and sat down for some intense listening.

The first and clearest point to get across is that what you listen through matters as much or more than the sound card you're using. The difference between headphones, even in the same price region can make a phenomenal difference to the bass and treble response - for example the HD495's are a good pair of open backed headphones and the give a far better bass than the closed backed HD220's which are more suited to Jazz, Vocal and Classical. This is regardless of sound card. Our testing took into consideration an average of all the headphones we had to hand, to what we thought sounded better overall.

The 7.1 Virtual Shifter simply adds a treble and boosts the loudness of the audio, giving a more intense vocal range which is very well suited to stuff like Bob Dylan and some Classical but not a huge range else. For Daft Punk's Aerodynamic, it added an unnecessary strength that made listening to it difficult on the HD220s in particular. Dolby Headphone, our long time favourite enhancement just completely butchers Bob Dylan in comparison (poor Bob), adding an echo of all things. It made the music sound like you were listening in a small, metal room.

DTS:NeoPC and Dolby Pro Logic IIx do absolutely nothing noticeable. We clicked them on and off repeatedly in different tracks but there was no difference. Both Dolby Headphones and Virtual Surround 7.1 just add an EQ boost and loudness, with little else. It's "tuned" but it can sometimes just make a track completely wrong: this was true for both compressed and CD quality audio.

The Smart Volume button actually works quite well by taking out the very harsh and sharp tones from a track without affecting the fidelity of it too much, but there is no customisation on the amount of normalisation it does - it's just a pre-set quantity. Even then, we still preferred to listen with it off. There was no fuzziness, interruption or audible response in the playback when the CPU, PCI bus or hard drive was used, so Asus has the grounding sorted correctly, although it might also depend on the design of your motherboard and what other equipment you use in close proximity as well - a water pump or WiFi adapter might make specific problems, just like with any internal sound card.

We plugged in the ADI SoundMAX 1988B from the Asus Blitz Extreme, which is featured on its own daughterboard with EMI shield and despite not being a huge fan of the chipset on paper as it's never had performed that well in RMAA 6.0.5, it still proved a formidable alternative to the Xonar D2. There was far more bass, which was particularly noticeable with the weaker, closed backed HD220s whereas in comparison the Xonar had very little. It was actually very hard to tell if the Xonar was particularly better than the onboard audio, and unlike the Sondigo which seems to perform better with Dolby Headphone and Virtual Shifter 7.1, the Xonar is better with it all off.


In gaming the Xonar works very well, despite the lack of advanced EAX. There's not much difference between just plain positional audio and EAX 2.0 in Call of Duty 2, for example, and the output lacked a kick from explosions and gunfire. Half Life 2 - Episode One also worked exceptionally well with just positional audio and again the Xonar sounded better without any of the extra effects enabled. There were no problems with drivers and audio corruption like we've had with the Sondigo Inferno and the CMedia Oxygen chipset in Vista, and throughout the testing, general experience was very good. It wasn't quite as good as the X-Fi + EAX Advanced HD experience, but that's always dependent on the game support and use of EAX 3/4/5, which varies quite significantly depending on the use.

Value

For the same £117 as the Xonar D2 you could have imported yourself a Sondigo Inferno 7.1 this time last year with a similar chipset, on the presumption you could have been bothered. However, since Creative has licensed its X-Fi technology out to Auzentech, the Prelude X-Fi will soon arrive for around the same price and it comes with 64MB of X-Ram, uprated AKM DACs among other components and the usual Auzentech expertise that has made its products so popular. Or, if you fancy something a little more expansive, Creative has its Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty 7.1 Champion Series Soundcard with 5.25" bay adaption that includes a whole host of extra inputs.

The Xonar D2 still has good value, but all of a sudden it now has a lot more competition.

Final Thoughts

Asus is onto a winner in some respects - the bundle is the best we've seen to date, the card is made extremely well and includes some awesome features. However, these features are still identical to the CMedia Oxygen chipset we've been looking at for nearly the last year now. The software included has potential, but it's the usual "looks good and sacrifices ease of use" and the drivers in Vista still need some work, but its certainly better than the CMedia Oxygen drivers (although not its software). If you were a hardcore gaming nut, you still wouldn't buy this over an X-Fi - that's a given, but for the casual to regular gamer it will still suffice and with more and more games including Dolby features over EAX, like Bioshock for example, both cards should offer an equal temptation.

In all honesty though, I almost feel let down because the hype and features haven't translated into a special audio experience. It still feels CMedia-esq, there's little differentiation apart from a funky lighting array and an EMI shield. Underneath the glitz, it just feels like a new shell on the same software and an inaudible difference. That's not a bad thing by a long stretch, but it's not going to set your ears on fire either.

• Features
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• -
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• 8/10

• Performance
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• -
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• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
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• -
• -
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• 7/10

What do these scores mean?