Differences between ASIO support for Asus Sonar STX and Creative Titanium HD

Hello guys,

I own both the Titanium HD and Xonar STX sound cards. There was too much discrepancy over which one is the better card and I ended up purchasing both of them. I've had both cards for about a month. I'll use them for another 2 months and will sell one of them.

Anyway, I've been testing them interchangeably and I've come across something interesting when using ASIO with both cards.

I have purchased JRiver Media Center and I like it a lot. However, when using ASIO with the Xonar STX, I have neither a functional windows volume control nor the ability to play anything else on the card until I completely stop music reproduction on the media player.

I take this is the normal operational method when using ASIO, since the audio stream is being fed directly to the sound card, thus bypassing any Windows recoding, correct?

Despite this logical assumption, when using ASIO with the Titanium HD, I am still able to do these two things:

1) I have a functional windows volume control. (Even though there is no green audio volume bar bouncing up and down in the volume control)

2) I am able to play as many simultaneous audio streams as I please.

Wouldn't that be an indication that ASIO is, in fact, not being used?

As far as music quality goes, both cards deliver outstanding quality under ASIO playback, so I'm quite puzzled as to if the Creative card is actually utilizing ASIO at all.

Thank you for the explanation.

I will post it over at Jriver, as well. I wanted to post here because the same thing happens with Foobar when using ASIO. So, I thought that maybe someone could have come across the same situation.

When using Foobar, I can also use the windows volume control normally, even though I've properly selected ASIO output in the music player.

This only happens with the Titanium HD.

Anyway, it's good this is not supposed to be happening. I'll try to use other driver versions and see if the problem ceases.

Thanks again.