[Xanthos]

Looks good, hopefully the drivers are solid.

 

[keiith]

Quote:

And if films and music is more your bag the Dolby and DTS will enhance many movie titles while the Full Duplex HD audio at 192Khz/24Bit is going to provide some serious sound clarity. Or if you prefer, pumping the music from your portable music player, be it MP3, iPod or even CD will let the XOnar work it’s Dolby magic and add the above features into the sound you hear.

This has got me quite interested. I wonder if this feature is actually something...

 

[error401]

Quote:

Originally Posted by keiith /img/forum/go_quote.gif what the... I wonder if there is any performance SQ wise by using PCI-Express as opposed to PCI... If Creative haven't done this, why did Asus =\ sounds like a bit of a marketing gimmick methinks.

Well, Creative stopped innovating at least 5 years ago when they bought out the rest of the market to secure their monopoly. I wouldn't exactly use them as a benchmark for what's worthwhile in a soundcard. Much like MS, they just continually rehash what they've already taken from other companies.

As for whether there's any SQ improvement - I doubt it. It should be possible to get lower latency, and there will be less issues with PCI bus contention causing buffer underruns (ie. during periods of heavy disk access). The PCI bus is now fourteen years old. It's on the way out, we don't need it anymore now that PCI-E is prevalent and many components are onboard that used to use PCI (NIC etc.). I think it's more a move away from PCI than a move to PCI-E. This makes sense on Asus' part as they can cut PCI support from their motherboards and still make money on the soundcard part. It seems to me like we're almost at the point where mobo manufacturers will stop PCI support, and that'll shut Creative out of the market until they catch up with a PCI-E part.

 

[Jokieman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mminutel /img/forum/go_quote.gif Well, ASUS makes solid quality motherboards so they know what they are doing. No EAX support might turn some people off (gaming wise anyway) but this is head-fi; we care about sound quality.

EAX is effectively dead as we know it anyway. Gamers will have to upgrade to Vista to take advantage of DirectX10, and Vista dropped support for Direct3D sound. So current gen cards that support EAX are worthless on Vista systems.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MaloS /img/forum/go_quote.gif Waaaaah , I thought PCI Express meaning the laptop cardbus standard that is plaguing me right now - most useless port EVER. PCMCIA was more useful.

/agreed. There's exactly 1 option that I've found for a PCMCIA Sound Card, and exactly 0 options for Express Card. And I have 1 of each on my laptop (sigh)

Unfortunately buying the Audigy 2 ZS is out of the question since creative is not going to support it on vista. No point in buying a product that the manufacturer won't support. Shame too, cuz newegg just dumped the price by $40.00.... I guess that's why. heh.

 

[Daroid]

Quote:

Originally Posted by keiith /img/forum/go_quote.gif If Creative haven't done this, why did Asus =\ sounds like a bit of a marketing gimmick methinks.

You have a point there. Before the X-Fi was released (four months) it was revealed that the first version would be a PCI card followed by a PCI-E card, this was an official preview, which i can't find any more though.
But it is always a matter of choosing the interface for the most established standard. Asus might have done a bad move here, only time will tell.

My main gripe with the current ExpressCardSlot systems is that it is a mere PCI-E 1x connector. Fine for a lot of stuff, but this is one of the reasons than Asus' XG station will fail in a few years.

 

[error401]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daroid /img/forum/go_quote.gif My main gripe with the current ExpressCardSlot systems is that it is a mere PCI-E 1x connector. Fine for a lot of stuff, but this is one of the reasons than Asus' XG station will fail in a few years.

1x PCI-E has nearly twice as much bus bandwidth as PCI, which CardBus is based on. For the foreseeable future I don't see a need for more than 250MB/s on an external device interface like PC card slots provide. Internally we may need to step disk controllers up off PCI-E 1x to 4x or something, but I just don't see any application needing that kind of bandwidth that you'd be plugging in and out. You want an external video card for your laptop?

 

[Dihnekis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jokieman /img/forum/go_quote.gif EAX is effectively dead as we know it anyway. Gamers will have to upgrade to Vista to take advantage of DirectX10, and Vista dropped support for Direct3D sound. So current gen cards that support EAX are worthless on Vista systems. /agreed. There's exactly 1 option that I've found for a PCMCIA Sound Card, and exactly 0 options for Express Card. And I have 1 of each on my laptop (sigh) Unfortunately buying the Audigy 2 ZS is out of the question since creative is not going to support it on vista. No point in buying a product that the manufacturer won't support. Shame too, cuz newegg just dumped the price by $40.00.... I guess that's why. heh.

What the hell?? Why are all these companies not supporting their products through Vista. The Audigy 2 ZS is still selling now, and didn't even come out that long ago. Same thing with nvidia and the nforce3 motherboards... still available all over the place, yet they've stated they won't be releasing drivers for Vista.

This pisses me off so much, I've got a relatively new system that now can never go to Vista.

 

[cotdt]

whoa... very bizzare that M-Audio is using blackgates on their cards!

 

[KinesongPayaso]

...so any updates?
i wanna get a pci-e soundcard that doesnt cost $200