PC Perspective - ASUS Xonar D2 Sound Card and U1 USB Audio Station Reviews

	ASUS Xonar D2 Sound Card and U1 USB Audio Station Reviews
	Author: Steve Grever Date: Jan 11, 2008 Subject: General Tech Manufacturer: Asus

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Summary

The following is a summary of the more detailed analysis of Asus' Xonar D2 and U2 sound cards. For all the in-depth analysis and testing you'd expect from us, be sure to click this link to get all the details!

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One of the most overlooked and underappreciated aspects of modern PCs are their ability to output high-quality sound. Most of today's mid-range and high-end motherboards come with decent 7- or 8-channel audio controllers on board, but they still skimp on many advanced features that PC enthusiasts, gamers, and audio professionals use in their daily activities like gaming and video editing.

Creative's Audigy and X-Fi series of sound cards have had a stranglehold on this market for as long as I can remember. But, with the emergence of Windows Vista, several other companies have created their own sound cards to help level out the playing field and make it more competitive for consumers.

Two recent additions to the market are ASUS's Xonar D2 Sound Card and U1 USB Audio Station. Both cards are geared toward different types of consumers with different needs. The Xonar D2 was created to compete with the X-Fi and other high-end sound cards, while the U1 Audio Station was developed to taken on all competitors in the external audio solutions market.

We will be squaring off these two products against Creative's X-Fi Premium to see which sound solution comes out on top during our synthetic benchmarks as well as during use on some of the most power-hungry PC games on the market today.

Asus Xonar D2

The Xonar D2 features the ASUS AV200 codec chip, four oversampling digital-to-analog converters, and one analog-to-digital converter. The AV200 can output up to 192KHz/24-bit sound.

Asus Xonar U1

The Xonar U1 is fairly small in stature, but its UA100 audio processor lays the smack down with its analog sample rate maxing out at 48 KHz in 5.1 mode (digital). The Xonar U1 also transcodes stereo audio source into Dolby Headphone, Virtual Speaker, and even 5.1-channel Dolby Digital and Pro-Logic II surround sound output.

Performance Tests

Testing both of these sounds cards in 16-bit and 24-bit environments gave us a good overview of the range available with these products. While the Xonar D2 and X-Fi Premium were pretty much neck-in-neck in every benchmark, we were most impressed with the performance we received from the Xonar U1. The U1's frequency response results were sub par compared to the D2 and X-Fi Premium, but this compact sound solution hung tough and kept pace with the high-end cards in the other areas we evaluated.

Our gaming benchmarks conclude that using the Xonar D2 during gaming gives a few more frames per second than the other two sound devices. What's the most surprising statistic is that the X-Fi card actually lost to the Xonar U1 during the Crysis benchmark. We ran this benchmark several times and each one confirmed that we got about 2 more frames per second than when we used the X-Fi Premium. One thing is for sure after using these products during testing – gamers can't go wrong with either the ASUS Xonar D2 or U1 if they want to see a small bump in their frame rates during gaming.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The Xonar D2 really opened our eyes to the possibilities that there could be a better audio processor on the market besides the X-Fi. The D2's ability to process high-definition audio at 192kHz/24-bit should really appeal to audiophiles and other sound professions. The real-time DDL and DTS Connect encoders should provide for excellent gaming and surround sounds over any home theater system.

The Xonar U1's performance is just as impressive as its small size and innovative design. Its support for DirectSound, EAX, OpenAL definitely seemed to enhance our DirectX 10 gaming experience in Windows Vista 64-bit too. The array microphone also seemed to do a great job of filtering out the background noise when it was used during a few online gaming sessions.

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