ASUS Sound Card Essence STX II vs crystal sound 2

[tom_spinach]

G'day mates

I think about buying the ASUS Sound Card Essence STX II. I own a x99 with crystal sound 2. Is it worth for high quality headphones? I know most will say. "today motherboard audio is fine. " " You wont hear a big dif." I ask for someone that has tested it by himself for music and gaming, what expressions he had.

Thanks.

 

[the nerd 389]

You've heard the common opinions. I won't reiterate those.

I have the STX, and it's not that great. Aside from a slightly-better-than-average output impedance, its only advantage is that it has a reasonably capable EQ.

For the best sound quality, stick with a powered USB setup. I recommend the O2/ODAC for critical listening and some professional audio work. It's able to drive any headphones you throw at it with no issue. It's designed to be perfectly transparent, so you can rest assured that if you are getting poor sound quality, it is not at all related to that amp/DAC. You shouldn't need any other headphone amp/DAC for sound quality reasons.

I should state up front that I have very specific requirements for my audio gear. My use case requires that I have as close to a perfectly flat frequency and phase response setup as I can get. If you like being able to hear what your gear is doing to something, you should ignore my advice. If you want to listen to your music as it was mastered by the artist/producer, you can't do much better than the O2/ODAC and Beyerdynamic DT880s/Sennheiser HD650s. That's the kind of gear they normally use to master music in the first place.

 

[tom_spinach]

Thanks for your answer. I own the Beyerdynamic DT880s and now will think about the O2/ODAC.

 

[tom_spinach]

Especially for the music, I doubt that soundcard will produce better sound of games.

 

[the nerd 389]

Especially for the music, I doubt that soundcard will produce better sound of games.

Depends what you want out of games. Most gaming cards have a mechanism to ask the game for 8 channels of surround sound audio that the card then combines into two channels for delivery to the headphones. If you think the card can give a better positional signal with just knowledge of 8 streams of audio than the game can with precise 3D coordinates, then get a gaming card.

In my experience, the algorithms used for mixing 8 streams into two don't do a particularly good job, though. Games these days actually do a half decent job approximating the HRTF for most people. That effort is thrown away by most gaming "7.1" cards.

 

[tom_spinach]

Well I guess I have just to try it out what the card makes with games. So but as you say I can expect more from O2/ODAC for music than from a soundcard.

 

[tom_spinach]

I hear a big difference in GTA 5. Xonar essence makes it awesome sound. Makes it really worth imo for gaming. Have not fully tested music yet. But difference wont be that big to be honest for a first comparnce.

 

[the nerd 389]

I've found basic 2-channel mode to make it easier to locate sounds than any combination of 8-channel or virtual surround settings. Virtual surround in particular makes locating things quite difficult. This has been my experience, but I'm curious about which you find to be better.

The most challenging aspect of directional sound to get right is with the source behind the player and either above or below the head. This is even more challenging if you don't rotate the camera when trying to locate the sound.

How precisely can you place sounds that are behind the camera, and also at a vertical offset:
- When in 2-channel mode without virtual surround?
- What about 8-channel mode without virtual surround?

For comparison, here is a binaural recording that you can use as a reference for the upper limit of what is possible with your setup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5G3HUiscW4

 

[tom_spinach]

I will have a closer look at it soon. Atm bit busy. I closed eyes in GTA after messing up to hear where the LE is coming from and it worked quite amazing.