ONKYO SE-300PCIE: X-FI with discrete opamps!! Hail the new king...

Yea I read it on another forum and was gonna post unless some1 else didn't. I hope this would be the card to have for those concerned with both gaming and music listening in mind. I doubt I will give up this Audigy 2 ZS with the lovely kX Audio drivers anytime soon but when I do I'll need a GOOD replacement.

It's quite expensive though for a soundcard that has an X-Fi chip on it so hopefully it'll be worth it too. :p

WOW looks awesome!

wow US$400,

So someone finally grabbed the concept of the Titanium HD and released an official X-Fi mod with balls. Would love to listen to that baby, kind of a step up above Auzentech, which is saying a lot.

But agreed that the price is steep.

I really don't see how it can get any better than the Xonar Essence STX. I can hear every little detail in my music, its amazing.

Interesting indeed but for the price I'd prefer to have an external device..

Well if it's better sounding than Essence ST/X I wouldn't mind the price as the configurability of soundcards such as built-in equalizer, 3D positional processing effects such as CMSS-3D or Dolby Headphone and Reverb etc are really worth up to $150 for me. Sometimes I don't know how people can cope without it! :p

Since the regular Titanium HD is already as good as Essence STX, this Onkyo will easily sound better.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roller 

Since the regular Titanium HD is already as good as Essence STX, this Onkyo will easily sound better.

I wish it had both support for CMSS-3D AND Dolby Headphone though (think there's any chance for that?), would love to have a soundcard with built-in support for both those. Still DH can be used with foobar2000 with tweakable channel mixer settings (=> even better results!) for music listening at least so I'd still concider CMSS-3D support more important but more options the merrier and DH for some games may work very good too.

DH? Meh. I don't even like CMSS, for that matter. Sound itself is more important, and cleaner without virtualization techs. The whole concept of a full fledged new gen X-Fi (meaning no XtremeAudio) rebuilt with high quality parts really ticks me in a good way

Using foobar for DH has the advantage of enabling the user to update the component, while hardware versions are locked to the version that came with the hardware in the first place.

If that card's price range was 200-300, I wouldn't think twice on getting it, but Onkyo is stretching it a bit far IMO.

IIRC, the SNR/Dynamic ranges are much lower then the current heavyweights.  The 300 is listing about 120dB (spec) so about 117dB realworld.

So, technically it is not even up to the same specs as CL or ASUS current offerings and as far as specs go about the same as the Prelude, Forte..etc

Now, with the improvments in the circuitry that onkyo is suggesting you may have excellent noise and distortion charactheristics but that reamins to be seen or rather heard.

I am not trying to form an opinion before I hear or measure the card just stating fact of the released information.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roller 

So someone finally grabbed the concept of the Titanium HD and released an official X-Fi mod with balls. Would love to listen to that baby, kind of a step up above Auzentech, which is saying a lot.

 

But agreed that the price is steep.

What is the concept of Titanum HD?

Actually all their soundcards are priced that way, probably it has more to do with the Made in Japan statement, than with the quality of the components used..

Wait a minute..no replaceable OpAmps?