[Sovelin]

I recently installed my Asus Essence STX and the first thing I'm gonna say is: WOW! What a difference! Anyway, I'm using the sound card to power my DT770/80. The settings I'm using for musing right now are Dolby Headphone, and clicking on the music symbol. Music sounds great. But I have a couple questions about the other settings (I'm clearly very new to this).
 
7.1 virtual speaker shifter: With my headphones, when I enable this setting, it just makes everything louder. Am I supposed to notice anything else besides everything being louder? Is this a good setting for music, or is this a setting more for movies or something?
 
Dolby Pro Logic IIx: When listening to music, all this did was make it quieter. I adjusted the bar on the right to bring everything forward, and it sounds just the same as if I disable this feature. What is the point of this?
 
GX: When listening to music, I hear no difference if I enable or disable this. What exactly does it do?
 
PCM Sample rate: I set this to 192, mainly cuz it's the highest number. Didn't really notice a difference when I dropped it to 96 so I'm leaving it at 192.
 
SVN: This also seems to make everything louder. Though I've noticed with this enable I get more response from all frequencies. Does this just adjust the volume so it is loud enough for me to hear all frequencies I should be hearing?
 
Dolby Digital Live: When I click on this, it disables the audio. Not sure why.

 

[LazyButHappy]

Hi, I have an Essence STX too and I can answer some of your questions (but not all).
 
7.1 virtual speaker shifter: this didn't appear to do much, but I think it just lets you play about with the positions of speakers in the control panel (moving them further away, closer, rotating the sound, etc.)
 
SVN: Smart Volume Normalisation - this attempts to normalise the sound to avoid big differences in volume.  E.g. listening to a movie at night, you might get bits where people are whispering one moment and there's an explosion the next.  There's not great need to enable this if you're using headphones and aren't annoyed by that.  It'll make it easier to hear quiet stuff and some speech but it'll be less dynamic.  It might be useful for games (e.g. letting you hear footsteps more easily in Couterstrike).
 
GX: this is a games-related thing that emulates EAX (environmental audio extensions), a Creative Labs technology that gave different sounds to different environments.  Not a lot of games use this now (I believe EAX is deprecated and replaced by something in OpenAL) so it's only really useful for older games.  There won't be any effect when listening to music.
 
PCM sample rate: digital music works by taking samples (snapshots) at given frequencies.  The more samples that are taken, the more accurately it'll represent the sound (although there's also the bit depth to consider).  Most of your music probably uses 44.1 or 48 but you can get higher quality stuff occasionally (Blu-Ray, HD audio).  I've not noticed any appreciable difference when leaving it the maximum setting versus changing it to match the file in question.  I've seen some people on the net suggesting you change it to match the files playing but that seems like a tremendous pain to be honest.
 
I'm not sure about the million-and-one Dolby technologies (many seem to be related to faking surround sound from stereo sound).  I do know that they usually end up making things sound a bit muddier to me (e.g. Dolby Headphones) compared to leaving them off.
 
Also worth mentioning: have you tried using the headphone out of your STX?  There are a few ways to connect your headphones (RCA, headphone out) and I've only seen the SVN option when using the RCA connectors (which I'm currently using).  I think the RCA connection bypasses the amp so you might see some benefit if you use the headphone amp and set the gain to the >= 64 ohm setting (the middle setting).  It can't hurt to try, anyway.