ASUS Xonar DS

Zitat: + Preis-Leistungsverhältnis - Präziser Tiefton - Kein Dolby Digital Live

Zitat: For: + Low profile design + A truly affordable upgrade + Proper 3D sound for games Against: - No Dolby Digital

Zitat: While we´ve thoroughly enjoyed using and testing previous Xonar offerings here at Elite Bastards, and indeed Auzentech´s fabulous discrete audio offerings to boot, we´ve often found ourselves swallowing hard at the price tags sported by those boards. In a world where the vast majority of users are perfectly happy with on-board sound, only a small core sub-set of enthusiasts were ever likely to happily shell out over £100 for a sound card, while most PC enthusiasts would rather see that kind of money spent on graphics, memory, processor upgrades and so on. If cost has been your excuse for putting up with your system´s current on-board audio solution however, then ASUS´ Xonar DS might just be the game changer that shifts you towards a discrete sound card, because quite simply high quality audio for under £40 is an absolute steal. Of course, this more budget oriented Xonar offering does come with some disadvantages over its more expensive siblings, lacking the wealth of inputs and outputs provided by those boards and, perhaps more importantly, finding itself shorn of features such as real-time Dolby Digital encoding, and upmixing via Dolby´s own ProLogic IIx technology. Whether this is an issue to you or not depends entirely on what you plan to connect the Xonar DS to - If you´re running the card via analogue outputs then it´s of absolutely no concern to you, and similarly if you have a digital receiver with support for DTS then you won´t particularly miss Dolby Digital Live support in its absence. Where the Xonar DS really impresses at its price point is in terms of pure audio fidelity - It may be bereft of the EMI shield used by other Xonar boards, and it may have all of its hardware squeezed onto a far smaller PCB than its predecessors, but this barely affects sound quality at all. In our testing, the Xonar DS broadly matched the Essence STX, and indeed Auzentech´s X-Fi Forte, in terms of analogue audio quality for 16-bit operations, with the aforementioned Auzentech part only gaining an upper hand for 24-bit, 96KHz playback. Add to that the possibility of user upgradeable OPAMPs for the Xonar DS, as per other discrete audio solutions, and you have room for further improvements to audio quality to add to the mix. Overall then, the Xonar DS packs a lot of punch in spite of its diminutive stature, bringing the top-notch audio quality of previous Xonar efforts to a sub-£40 price point. The lack of Dolby Digital encoding or a PCI Express interface might disappoint some, but these are both necessary compromises to reach this kind of pricing level, and thus I can understand their absence on both counts. If you can live without those particular features, then the Xonar DS is a fantastic opportunity to make the leap away from on-board audio to the world of the discrete sound card - Trust me, once you´ve made that jump you won´t want to go back any time soon.