$90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best

EconolineCrush writes "Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its X-Fi audio processor for more than two and a half years. Now the SoundBlaster has a new challenger in the form of Asus' $90 Xonar DX, which delivers much better sound quality than the X-Fi, PCI Express connectivity, and support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding. The Xonar can even emulate the latest EAX positional audio effects, providing the most complete competition to the X-Fi available on the market."

Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit

Yes, esp. considering Microsoft has no tits and if it did, they'd be nasty man-boob type tits that nobody wants to see or even acknowledge their existence.

Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive

[jflo]

I would suck the hell out of that MS Man Boob... aka the MSMBN - Microsoft Man-Boob Network -.... I mean seriously, how good would that milk be? Seriously.

Does it work with Linux?

[Godji]

Please don't mod me funny, I'm asking quite seriously. If it runs with open source drivers, does 7.1 and has hardware mixing so that I don't have to bother with dmix, I'm buying it tomorrow morning.

Why bother

[hack slash]

Improved sound quality? What for? I've got tinnitus you insensitive clod.

Re:Kudos to Asus

[0xdeadbeef]

WTF? Two girls one cup? On YouTube? That ain't going to last long. I think what you meant to post was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw [youtube.com]

You might be surprised by M$' man-boobs

[PaulGaskin]

And how many people are latched onto them. Just look at all the Microsoft-friendly interlopers who are trying to subvert the free software movement. These people are suckling at the M$ teats.

Re:tell the difference?

[maxume]

Damn it, I wanted to crack wise about digital cables.

I was going to go for something like "If a good cable costs $300, how much does a good DIGITAL cable cost?".

Re:tell the difference?

[turing_m]

Don't forget the $480 wooden knobs, for that rich, warm sound.

Re:Dead Issue

[Boogaroo]

Lemme guess, you can hear the difference in the sound when using the gold plated optical fiber cables.

Re:Does it work with Linux?

[Godji]

Come on people, this is not funny :)

Somebody mod me down NOW!!!

Re:tell the difference?

[Sycraft-fu]

Well, actually with digital cables you do need to get a proper one, if you are doing a sufficient length. Now I say proper, not good, because what matters is impedance. Digital audio is pretty high frequency (as much as 25MHz for 192kHz stuff) and as such the cable acts like a wave guide as it does for video. Well, like with video it is a 75-ohm coax cable that you need. So while you don't need anything pricey, you do need to make sure you don't just use any old cable for digital audio.

Am I seeing Solid Capacitors?

[Wolfier]

Neat! I look forward to the day when the electrolyte capacitors go the way of the Dodo.

Re:EAX emulation...

[Slashcrap]

How much CPU does it use up like on an old Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2; all updates)?

Sorry, no idea. I have figures for an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2), but it's missing a few updates, so they wouldn't be of much use to you.

Re:Sound Cards

[Hal_Porter]

At University I had a friend who was an audiophile. One day he came in looking very pissed off. I asked him why and he ranted that one of his female flatmates female friends had told him he was "the sort of man who stops having sex so he could turn over the record".

All those complex arguments I tried to use to convince him he was wrong and that music really does sound better on a decent quality CD player than a vastly more expensive record player were so utterly outmatched by those few words.