Asus Essence One Headphone Amp/DAC (CeBIT 2011) - Page 5

Go with an external amp and save yourself the trouble.  =]

He can still have trouble if he gets one of those generic external amps off ebay that happens to use cheap components and in up not doing that well with the amping. So more like checking up on the amp your looking at before hitting the buy button.

Can we classify this as vapourware yet?

 

Asus first showed the STX being called "StereoX" back then at a trade show:

 

give it some time.

Look like that design would had been better off unless there was major changes then just the amount of op-amp sockets. and besides the obvious changed in the RCA outputs amount.

....

Edited by jalyst - 8/9/11 at 10:28pm

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/_s1Smsty80C4/TXDA_YLk17I/AAAAAAAABR4/vQvUHCUYZ0s/s912/P1000878.JPG

 

so does this thing have 24 or even 32/192 bit perfect output or only upsampling? (does spdif support lossless transfer of 32-bit float?)

Edited by Thunderbolt - 8/3/11 at 4:01pm

There are indicator lights for 44.1 khz through 192 khz and then "Bit perfect" output, as well as an upsampling switch.

So 24 bit should be perfectly supported.

 

This article is relatively new, though it doesn't really bring much new to the table except confirmation that it is still coming.

http://techinstyle.tv/products/sound-advice-asus-xonar-essence-one/

 

Edit: Apparently it's coming in September and will retail at £ 270 in the UK and approximately kr 3745 in Norway.

Edited by BID - 8/12/11 at 3:50pm

Im wondering, will it be able to play stuff via wasapi? meaning I use winamp with wasapi output with my laptop and then transport this via spdif to the amp. is this going to be possible?

 

I prefer wasapi over asio

Edited by Thunderbolt - 8/5/11 at 5:40am

when it is released?.

That looks like a preliminary version as it has a different layout & a completely seperate analog path fot the headphone out with its own DAC & opamps. The headphone amp looks to be positioned above the Line out amps instead of below on the ST/STX. This puts the headphone amp farther away from the headphone jach than on the ST/STX cards. They may have used cheaper DACs on it to make up for having 2 of them than the ST/STX cards which only have one higher grade DAC (this is an assumtion based on the appearnce & the lower specs than the ST/STX cards). This card may have used solinoids to change the gain which means that the physical gain of the the headphone amp is altered. This would be better than the STX if that were the case but the solinoids may also be for redirection to the front panel of the computer, I believe this to be in fact the case though rather than for gain change.

 

Of coarse, I know this is all meaningless as this card was actually never released. If they did come out with a new version of the ST/STX card I would prefer them to have a physical means of changing the gain of the headphone amp as this would improve the S/N ratio & enable these cards to be used with high sensitivity IEM's without loss of dynamic range. The current ST/STX cards do this in software which causes a loss of dynamic range which for the most part is not noticable except with high sensitivity IEM's.

 

I sadly predict an output impedance of 10 ohms, just like the ST/STX series

I'm curious about it though, it may be a very decent DAC/AMP combo.

whats the problem with output impedance of 10 ohms with the stx? (got no clue)

You would be looking into possibly 6 dB variation in the frequency range low impedance headphones, for example, the sound signature of a balanced armature with a nominal impedance of 16 ohms (which actually means its impedance could range between 6 and 40 ohms) would be wildly changed.

when it is going to be released? i need on.