Gadgetory

welcome to an unboxing of something that is honestly a little bit outside the scope of my expertise let me start by saying I love good sounding audio whether it's music movies or games but this is a in a completely different class from anything that I have experienced before this is the zone our essence one USB DAC and headphone amplifier it is according to a soos the world's first 8x symmetrical upsampling DAC and we're going to go ahead we're going to flip it around I'm just going to be doing a very very high level sort of coverage of exactly what this thing is and why you might care and then we're going to be following this up on my NCIX palm channel with a more detailed look at exactly what it is and why it's so special so this is the the zone are sort of symbol that the tiger that is sort of representing according to a Seuss the mankind's the endless pursuit of the essence of sound and also zone or essence STX is commitment to offer the best quality ever from an audio card so that is what a soos believes they've done here this is your ultimate deck solution Xtreme audio clarity with 120 decibel sound to noise ratio the difference between this and other 120 decibel sound the noise ratio devices we've seen in the past as this one has the testing to back it up so I would actually believe it it has a built-in headphone amp which powers up to audio file class headphones that is up to 600 ohm impedance headphones no big deal right user customizable tone characters with 11 swappable op amps so two of those are on the headphones and the others are not so you can change completely the way that the DAC sounds just by changing out to different op amps cleanest sound thanks to dedicated internal power supply so asus has put a lot of effort into the power supply that is inside this unit in order to minimize any interference or electrical noise that might be transmitted to the sound that you are listening to so we'll check out the packaging here home on the top there to keep it from getting damaged in any way this unfolds here this is a very expensive piece of kit I should probably you know preface this entire unboxing by saying that this is not something for your average Joe computer user at all it is very very hefty and this is not an internal device as I probably should not have to explain at this point in time this is meant to sit next to your computer and it is a Seuss's response to other high-end audio file class off our problems USB Dax but in their estimation should pretty much turn the entire rest of that market on its ear because it'll pretty much blow away everything else in their estimation if you guys are interested in specs they are here although I would like I said I haven't done as much sort of reading as I would be required to do in order to understand exactly what all of that stuff means I mean what I do see here is that they've specified every component they're using so for the audiophile guys out there who are really interesting in pairing this up with you know like a Sennheiser HD 800 or something along those lines you're going to know exactly what chips that it's using exactly which op amps it comes pre-configured with and exactly what this thing is capable of so package contents let's move on here to the accessories alright so we have a headphone jack adapter we have a power cord inside just like oh look at that I got a international one well it's okay it's just a standard PC one so it is capable excepting actually that's one of the cool things about the power supply it is capable of accepting any any voltage input so you can use it in North America you can use it in Asia you can use in Europe doesn't really matter include the USB A to B cable and then what's in the other box here fascinating so they managed to include only yeah not yeah they managed to not include only the one that I would be using with this particular device so there you go okay let's have a look at the unit itself then shall we and that's heavy so here we have our power switch we have our up sampling button we have our input selector so we can use coax Toslink or USB mute button this is your a volume adjustment and this guy right here nice big knobs is your headphone volume finally here is your headphone jack on the front the build quality this thing is outstanding actually it just feels like a piece of audio equipment which is a far cry from what you get with your typical PC equipment alright so here is your unbalanced output here is your balanced output so you do have the option of using either and they're each connected to a different set of op amps so you can customize how you want each of these outputs to sound here's your coax output here's your toast link or AB rather input here's your toast link or your optical input and finally here is your USB input you're going to want to make sure you select the correct voltage in this case I'm going to have to change that to 115 before using the device and then it comes with a little sticker covering up the power port and I'm going to leave that so that I don't accidentally screw this up when I when I go to plug it into power so who is this for total audio enthusiasts who want to use it on their PC although you are not bound to using a PC you can use any digital audio source and I would I would sort of suggest that most of the users who are going to be interested in a product like this are going to be using that port and not the stereo outputs that are here on the back be it the XLR or the coax out I would suggest most people are going to be using this as a way to drive their high-end headphones and deliver the most pure sound regardless of the volume level so the thing about a high sound to noise ratio is that even at a very low volume level you should still be able to enjoy all the different aspects of the music and hear the entire range very very clearly however if you do prefer more of a warm sound or if you prefer more emphasis on the bass then you can actually customize this guy whether you're using the ASA software or whether you're actually changing the hardware of the unit itself it's fully user customizable and there are no warranty void if remove stickers yeah you can take the whole thing apart if you really want to so you can actually color the sound that way to match your preferences now asus is comparing this to dax that are in the neighborhood of a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars that exists on the market right now and are quite well-regarded however this guy is going to be coming in at a significantly lower price point so 8.x symmetrical up sampling a Seuss is is touting the up sampling as a huge feature of this deck and I can see why they do that for a number of reasons number one they have the hardware to back it up number two is the fact that so much of the digital audio that you can obtain these days is very low quality but not everyone necessarily wants to go to the trouble or the expense although if you're really that worried about the expense I don't think you're buying one of these but neither here nor there not everyone wants to go to the trouble or the expense of purchasing or finding the high quality audio that they require so here's a little quick lesson on bitrate and sample rate and so the bitrate is basically how um how high quality of the sample you're taking of the audio we didn't really have this with analog because it doesn't really work quite the same way with digital everything is in terms of hard to find numbers kind of like how pixels don't necessarily equate to the image quality we saw on an analogue screen it's just a different way of doing things okay and then the sample rate is how many samples at that quality that we're taking per second so ideally you would have a very high sample rate a very high bitrate so upsampling takes your how many samples and your bitrate here and tries to smooth it out to make it more like how the artist would have intended for you to hear the audio so why is 8x symmetrical upsampling important and what exactly does that mean what it means is that it can up sample eight times from a variety of different sources so I'm going to equate this to actually more of a video example so when you're playing when you're playing older games that didn't support high resolutions especially when LCD monitors first came out so I got a 24 inch 1920 by 1200 monitor and I did that for a very specific reason the reason for that was that when I took older content that was running at 800 by 600 or was running at 1600 by 1200 and I up sampled particularly from 800 by 600 to 1600 by 1200 with black bars I was getting exactly a 1 to 4 relationship between the pixels that I have and the pixels that it's being up sampled to so this is not a perfect example because that resolution change doesn't add any additional quality to the image but what it does do is it is an even multiple so we're not going to lose any quality by dithering one pixel between sort of the surrounding ones and blending the colors and using cheats and hacks like that in order to increase the resolution so think of this as your audio resolution so a Seuss's explanation here is that common upscaling USB Dax transfer whatever audio source to 192 kilohertz indistinguishably however some audio sources that are lower quality and you would want to up sample do not evenly multiply to 192 kilohertz so that's why the symmetrical index of sampling allows you to have two different destinations so two different up sampling quality levels for the different audio sources so it's kind of like the display example I'm giving you guys where you want to not lose any quality while you are trying to increase the quality so as I mentioned before here we have a slide about the sound to noise ratio which is based or signal to noise ratio whichever you prefer and that is basically a soos comparing two of some other well-known USB DAX like I said you have so many sound cards I mean you can go back as as long ago as an auto g2z s and they're cleaning well in excess of 100 decibel signal-to-noise ratio it's kind of nonsense my expectation for an audiophile grade product like this is that this would be the actual signal-to-noise ratio that they have achieved but I haven't tested it yet now the higher up you get in terms of headphone quality the more power is required to drive the I mean they become speakers at a certain point rather than being just you know headphone doodads so yes you require an incredible amount of power to drive very very high-end headphones and they're saying basically I mean this is sort of iffy whether or not a regular normal headphone amplifier can dry the 300 ohm or you know anything about 32 ohms but the point of this is that they're saying theirs is capable of up to 600 ohm impedance headphones which is pretty much getting up there about as high as it goes so this is a fascinating way to do product development and I think it is such a step in the right direction that it definitely merits a mention check this out so they actually besides testing I'm sure they tested them besides testing them they actually selected the capacitors that they're using on the PCB based on what would interfere the least with the quality of the audio based on checking out high five forums like DIY audio and head 500 or at sorry head 5 org so that is a one way of taking user feedback and integrating that very closely with the development of a product because the reality of it is the guys who they're going to try and sell one of these two already know that they want these particular capacitors which guns of offense they want to throw into the device and you're not going to sell it to them unless you're using exactly what they want and Asus went and figure that out ahead of time so in short guys if you don't already know that you need one of these and if you don't know what all of these numbers meant and if you don't have the money to spend on a high-quality audio solution then this is pretty much not for you this is a very niche very high-end product is it a replacement for a sound card yes is it a replacement for a sound card for every gamer and every guy who sits and listens to their iTunes library on the computer no this is a very specialty product it will deliver better audio quality than almost anything else you can hook up to your PC but you got to pay to play and I got to say I'm definitely looking forward to checking this out but for myself personally I don't think I would be running out buying one of these because if you don't have the hardware to properly take advantage of it and buy hardware I don't mean your PC because your PC is irrelevant it uses the onboard chipset in order to completely eliminate any quality interference that could come from a low-quality PC or low quality sound card whatever the case may be but I'm talking hardware in terms of the headphones you're using the I mean it's not really hardware but the audio sources that you're listening to you're going to want to make sure that you're properly equipped to take advantage of a guy like this before you go and set one up in your home so thank you for checking out my unboxing on Linus tech tips and don't forget to subscribe to my NCI XCOM channel as well because once I've had a chance to actually play around with this a little bit I would love to give you my impressions