Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the a soos zone our essence STX now I talked about sound cards a lot and people ask me for sound card recommendations a lot and you know there's sort of lower end ones the whole zone our line actually is just kind of awesome so whatever your price range is just by his owner and you'll be fine um but this one is like the baller zone R this is the zone R with all the features that you need especially if you use headphones so 124 decibel sound to noise ratio which is just ridiculous I mean remember that decibels are essentially a doubling of in terms of sound to noise ratio it's a doubling of quality every time you go up three decibels okay so thank remember that so when you see something that's a hundred and ten decibels sound to noise ratio that is like many times worse than this okay it has swappable op amps which means you can actually customize the sound of it according to your liking so if you don't know what op amps are those are the the components on the board that actually do the amplification for the card okay so we're going to go ahead and start opening this up the reason I'm opening this is because we're using it in like an ultimate system build guide so if I was picking an ultimate sound card for me personally this is the one that I would choose let's have a look at what a Suze has to say for themselves on the Box here anyway though so industry-leading okay with basically no distortion built-in headphone amp provides exceptional quality even with 600 ohms of impedance remember guys for context a sennheiser HD 800 is 600 ohms of impedance so we're talking like spending well over a grand on headphones before you're going to run into the limits of what this can drive okay nikka con fine gold capacitors offer great dynamic performance it uses audio capacitors which are actually different from the kinds of capacitors that some competing products are using on sound products whether it's built into a motherboard or whether it's built into a sound card where they're more like motherboard capacitors different faster will affect the way the sound comes out of the analog things like remember guys okay any of the music you're listening to is inherently digital any of the sound you listen to is inherently analog so the process of converting that digital signal to an analog sound is extremely complicated and depends on every aspect of the design of the card so everything from the processor to the DAC so that's the digital to analog converter everything to the do they have anything on here about the emi shielding okay well emi shielding to keep just random interference that's bouncing around inside your PC from it from affecting any part of that process to the to the op amps as well everything affects the process so okay moving right along perfectly shielded EMI freon okay there it is customize your sound card effortlessly with swappable app op-amp sockets you can just buy them online it's not a big deal okay in terms of driver features Dolby Digital live you'll be headphone will be virtual speaker it'll be Pro logic to track sound 3d vocal effects smart volume acoustic echo low acoustic echo cancellation that's kinda neat okay and let's go ahead and check out the card itself so they have like an awesome picture of the heart which we'll use to help us through the process oh yeah so guys if you'd if you don't know I'm running um a soos uh s run what am i running I'm running a zone our sense which is a similar card to this one but actually not quite as good if I was going to pick my ultimate sound card this one would be it so in terms of i/o you've got stereo outputs so front right front left this is if you're using an external amplifier so for for amplified speakers or something like that then you've got your amp headphone jack you're lying in and your spit if this is your digital out so this is a headphone lovers sound card this is not for you know 7.1 or you know whatever sort of things that people think are fancy this is for audiophiles who are interested in stereo speakers high-quality output - stereo speakers or high-quality output to headphones it does have front panel jacks so you can still plug in your front panel head phone jack and microphone jack but honestly guys if you're not using these ports you're doing it wrong with a sound card like this has a dedicated molex power adapter or connector rather and that is because this card actually does draw some power in order to deliver that crunchy sound at a moment's notice it also has some very large caps going on just going to help with that as well you can see that while this sort of shield on here this EMI shield looks like it has gaps in it there's only very small gaps so from the inside of the case there's almost no way for any kind of interference to get made because he's actually blocked there's a copper piece that's right in there that makes it so that nothing can really sort of get in there it uses PCI our rather PCI Express 1x connectivity remember guys that can be plugged into any PCI Express slot whether it's 1 X 4 X 8 s or 16 X PCIe one PCIe 2 PCIe 3 all of those standards are are basically interchangeable for the purposes of something like a sound card here's an adapter so you can take those analog outputs and you can run them to just sort of a regular stereo jack okay here's an adapter for this so you can run smaller Jack headphones or microphone off of this alright and then there is Oh awesome I actually didn't realize this but this coax Jack right here is actually optical as well so you just use the included adapter and you can get them you can do optical audio up from there too alright in fitted documentation audio precision test report your individual sound card was actually tested and this was printed out from your sound card so this will give you the full characteristics of your card this card that's in the box as opposed to being some kind of generic you know how a lot of high-end products come with like a certificate of performance or something like that that actually has no basis on this thing this physical object that's in the Box not how it works with an essence STX this is a serious sound card alright we got a thing about the philosophy of something in a picture of the card ok that I'm less interested in moving right along we've got its uses driver desk don't use this download the latest off the EC's website they're excellent also there's a third-party universal driver for zone are cards that actually has a couple of extra features so that's kind of cool here's a sticker that you could put on something ok here's a Quick Start Guide here's a bother so there's a lot of documentation in here slick there's another Quick Start Guide there's two Quick Start Guide so these the same thing oh no they have different part numbers on them ok and then there's like another poster they have two posters included ok all right who um I think that pretty much covers it so if you're looking for a sound card recommendation my general recommendation is some kind of zone art card if you're looking for a specific recommendation I would take this one personally I'm more of a headphone guy I don't use surround so that's that's the context of that recommendation from me but let's just see if we're missing anything here hyper grounding circuitry design okay oh I don't know if I mentioned but it uses a beurre Brown PCM 1792 a digital analog converter so that's part of achieving that 124 decibel single noise ratio this one can do even better than that swappable op amps perfectly sealed analog output path with all that shielding and all of that good stuff and I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing your first look at the zone our essence STX from Asus don't forget to subscribe to Ana's tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos