How to connect an External Amp to Asus Strix Raid DLX

[notaglove]

Hi everyone, this is my first post on this forum. I am new to the whole audiophile thing and due to being new and thinking I could resist the temptation to better my setup after a quick taste I bought the Strix Raid DLX sound card. This card sounds great with my HD 598, but I just bought my (as of this time) Max budget pair of headphones the HD 650/6XX from Massdrop. I've heard that they really sound good with a powerful amp and I've been looking at the Schiit Lyr 2 since its got tubes and is solid state as well (always wanted to try tubes). Now I'm not asking for a review of the product or anything like that, I just want to know from any of you who have purchased a Raid DLX if you've successfully connected another amp to it. The manual makes it seem easy by saying to connect a "power amplifier" to the Front and Rear outputs on the card that are usually meant for speakers. I'm very confused because I don't know how front and rear translate to stereo (left and right). On the other hand, the card has a side out that is meant for the left and right speaker pair when the thing is used in a 7.1 setup. But I have no idea whether thet works as left and right when the other outputs aren't plugged in.

I basically don't want to have to pay for a new dac bc I'm on a budget. Maybe later I'll do it but not now. So any help would be very welcome.

 

[MindsMirror]

The "rear" port is for rear speakers in a surround speaker system, and the "power amplifier" referred to in the manual is a speaker amplifier. Since they built a headphone amp into the card, the don't expect many people to use an external headphone amp with it, so they didn't add instructions for that situation. Simply connect the headphone amp to the 3.5mm "front" port, which has the front left and right channels.

Alternatively you could connect the headphone amp to the "headphone" port. This is double amping which is not desired, but if the ASUS card works similar to the SoundBlaster Z, it might be the only way to get headphone surround processing to work with the external amp. You might want those processing features for gaming or movies, but for music I would not use them. If you don't use or want any of the cards processing features then just use the "front" port.

 

[notaglove]

Thank You SOO much. You can't possibly know how much time I've spent on this. Anyway, I've realized that all the gimmicky stuff like surround aren't that useful in my modern games, so I'm fine with stereo. One thing I could use your insight on though would be whether you think EQ should work when plugging into the front out.

EDIT: Not even sure I'll use it, but it might come in handy at some point.

 

[MindsMirror]

Yes, EQ will work. It's only the headphone surround processing that I think might not work with the "front" port. Personally I would not use the sound card's EQ, I would use EqualizerAPO or a VST plugin which would likely be more flexible and better than the card's EQ.

 

[notaglove]

Yes, EQ will work. It's only the headphone surround processing that I think might not work with the "front" port. Personally I would not use the sound card's EQ, I would use EqualizerAPO or a VST plugin which would likely be more flexible and better than the card's EQ.

Hmm, I'll have to check them out. I hope one of them is free.