[thejammonster]

I haven't seen anything in this forum about this board, yet, so I thought I would start!  This board was just released a few weeks ago so there isn't a ton of info out there just yet.
 
Manufacturer's Page:
http://us.msi.com/product/motherboard/Z170A-GAMING-M9-ACK.html
 
Audio Components:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7332/msi-z170a-gaming-m9-ack-intel-z170-motherboard-review/index4.html
 

This quarter of the board is covered in amplifiers, DACs, ADCs, and high quality electrolytic audio capacitors; it's also probably responsible for a quarter of the cost of the entire product. MSI went back to the basics of implementing a sound card on a motherboard by literally implementing a sound card on the motherboard. There are multiple analog filter stages, many different types of operational amplifiers, and two sets of digital to analog converters (DACs) and analog to digital converters (ADCs), one set is for the back panel outputs and the other for the front panel header.
 
The audio is based on a C-Media CM6632A audio processor found on many sound cards. It uses USB 2.0 as its interface and PMC PM39LV010 1Mbit CMOS provides flash memory and is located on the back of the PCB. For the front panel, there is a Cirrus Logic CS5346 analog to digital converter, an ESSTech ES9016K2M SABRE digital to analog converter, a Texas Instruments TPA6120A2 high fidelity audio amplifier, and two National Instruments LM4562 HiFi dual audio amplifiers located on the back of the PCB. The back panel IO outputs use a Cirrus Logic CS5346 analog to digital converter, an ESSTech ES9006AS SABRE digital to analog converter, nine Texas Instruments FET-Input OPA1652 operational amplifiers, and three National Instruments LM4562 HiFi dual audio amplifiers.
 
The flash memory and amplifiers pictures on the right are located on the backside of the PCB and are some of the audio hardware referenced earlier. There are 13 red LEDs that light up the PCB divide, which isolates the audio card from the rest of the motherboard.

 
The C-Media drivers work fine in Windows 10 x64 but their interface looks really outdated (and doesn't really offer anything useful) so I am running it drivers-only.  The "Nahimic Audio Enhancer" seems to be some Sound Blaster-like sound effects bloatware so I'm not using it either.  The sound quality is good but a JDS Labs O2+ODAC sounds cleaner.  The headphone amp seems to have a lot of power and gets way louder than the O2+ODAC.  I find myself at about 30% in Windows most of the time but around 9 o'clock on the O2+ODAC (with 1x low gain).  Most of this has been on the AudioQuest NightHawk which are not particularly hard to drive, but the amps suggest that it shouldn't have much problem with most headphones.
 
Some Questions:
Regarding 32-bit/384KHz, it looks like the ES9016K2M DAC for the front panel is capable of this in 2ch stereo, and the ES9006AS for the rear panel is capable of 24-bit/192KHz in 8ch surround (per the website below).  Does this sound correct?
http://www.esstech.com/index.php/products/dac/
 
It appears that the back panel has more op amps for more channels of audio, but the TI op amps are different between the front and back panels.  What are peoples thoughts on these different TI models?  What about the National Instruments op amps (in terms of sound quality)?
 
Are the ADCs just used for analog input?  I've only seen DACs referenced before so I'm not sure what the ADCs are for.
 
Is there a way to utilize the motherboard DAC via USB to a dedicated amp?  I know there are many amp/DACs with USB input (O2+ODAC being one of them) but that seems redundant using 2 DACs.  Are there dedicated amp-only devices with USB input?  That question doesn't really make sense after typing it since I assume a DAC would be required to decode data from the USB input.  Can a 32-bit connection be established if an external DAC supports it, or does that depend on the C-Media audio processor?  C-Media's page below says it only supports 24-bit/192KHz, but I obviously don't understand how all of this works in concert.
http://www.cmedia.com.tw/ProductsDetail/C1Serno-1/C2Serno-8/C3Serno-12/PSerno-48.html

 

[pocahontas]

Bump, it's sound like a very good motherboard. It easly win versus most of common DAC and AMP.
I really doubt this motherboard to not win at least vs the CLASSICAL o2 odac. It outperform the o2 but the dac is still not as good for you? Very strange, i really doubt it.
It even come with technology software like you have with dedicated soundcard...