Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by the intel core i7 4770k unlocked processor if you're a speed freak added until 3500 series SSD to your Haswell system for a truly enthusiast class experience now I often get asked which sound card to buy and the answer over the last couple years has been inevitably I decide on a budget and then buy whatever's on our card fits inside your budget because it's pretty much that simple back in the day every sound card that was a sound card worth buying was creative and then for a while it was AHS and tech and nowadays it really seems like it's just a soos is the way to go but not all of their sound cards are built with the same things in mind in fact they have a couple of offerings at the same price point around that $200 range that do differ a little bit so today we're going to be having a look at the Xonar Phoebus this is the as you may or may not have figured out based on the massive Republic of gamers logo on the front of the box this is the gaming oriented card so it's not necessarily about oh well we brought you the absolute best possible DAC and we brought you you know swappable op-amps for you know the music listening audio files out there it's more along the lines of the features that enhance the gaming experience so why don't we start with the card itself physically which has a very rog look to it as you can plainly see at least you'll be able to once I finally get it out of the box so it uses a PCI Express 1x interface this is the same as the zonar STX which is actually for music listeners maybe the better choice it has dedicated 7.1 audio out using all three-and-a-half millimeter jacks this is again a more gaming oriented feature because many audio files are going to be using headphones that use the larger jack style so they would have to adapt to get down to this whereas many gamers are using gaming headsets which use standard three-and-a-half millimeter jacks another thing that gamers often do is they'll have mic and headphones and then they'll have a separate speaker setup that they use sometimes so that's why it has dedicated plugs for all of them this is in contrast to my personal zone ARS ents which is actually a very very very similar card chooses a breakout cable in order to achieve those surround those are those surround outputs there's a link right here so that's for the external control box more on that in a moment and other than that you've got what pretty standard looking sound card so the back of the card is a matte black PCB which I've come to expect at this point from high-end gaming gear then on the top of the card we find a PCI Express power connector this is essential for the amp'd headphone port on this card it can handle up to 600 ohm impedance headphones so yeah you need more power than can be delivered by a simple PCI Express slot other than that speaking of 600 ohm impedance headphones there's a Xonar Phoebus logo at the top that glows red when you're in high impedance headphone mode and blue when you're in low impedance headphone mode which i think is kind of cool and the rest of it is covered by a simple matte black shroud with our OG branding on it as well as a sous branding and then some very cool aggressive looking lines now this actually has a functional purpose as well as looking nice and EMI shield does exactly what you might think it does and reduces electromagnetic interference by fielding it so there you go we can remove that though by simply removing four screws which gives us a better look at the actual guts of this carbon it just looks high-end it's got all these components on it and stuff so the processor itself is an oxygen CNI 8888 this is a slightly updated version of the controller that's in the sense and then for our DAC we're using ATI PCM 1796 a DAC slightly slept steps slept down it's a sleep over there no it's not a sleep over they're slightly steps down versus the zone our essence STX and speaking of things that are a step down versus the zone our STX is what you're going to see looking closely at this card is that while it does use jrc 2114 op amps they are soldered so you do not unfortunately have the option to change them out for different op amps what op amps basically do is they can color the sound or they can that could be more warm or more rich or more flat or whatever else and some people have a very their ears very tuned to a preference of what they want to hear and they like being able to swap out op amps like you can on the essence one or the zone our essence STX not possible on this card it's sort of a take-it-or-leave-it we tuned it this way and this is how you're going to experience it because this card is optimized for gaming not necessarily those disturb this discerning muted music my screen turned off those discerning music listeners and those audio files and those sorts who want that customizability also there's a headphone amp built into this guy right here so there's the that is a TPA 6120 a 2 headphone amp able to handle as I said before up to 600 ohm headphones the 7.1 circuitry is completely separate from the headphone circuitry and while it's reasonably high-end it's not as nearly the same extent because well there's a lot more of it and it's deemed less important from a gaming or even an audiophile standpoint because you're bound to be using probably there you go there's your spit if out probably a digital out to some kind of external decoder or you're going to be using headphones directly off of it and if you're using something like powered speakers they're not going to be so high-end that you'd notice much of a difference anyhow this brings us to the Phoebus control pod which is man maybe not that different from what you might find if you have a pair of speakers that includes one of these already but it does have some cool functionality so it allows you to extend your headphone and microphone jacks meaning that you can you know plug in short cables so some headphones come with the breakaway cables these days you've also got a control pod cable there you go that goes right there so you go ahead and plug all these in together and they're conveniently together lis located locations just like that and it allows you to do a few different things you can adjust your volume with the knob on the top you can mute your mic by pressing it and then there you go you plug in your front headphone microphone it's got a bit of weight to it but this this my friends is where the special sauce happens those are two microphones and if you were someone who was not using this correctly you can use this as a microphone please don't do that that's get a real microphone but what you can use this for is environmental noise cancellation now I haven't used the Xonar Phoebus yet I'm unboxing it now but I have used their Thunder FX external sound card and I can tell you their environmental noise cancellation at least on that one I'm sure it's better on this sleep yeah thumbs up you because what it does is it uses these mics to listen to the environment and then the microphone on you headset itself to listen to you and it's able to cancel out what these ones here in a very very cool very effective it works it's awesome it's actually really really good so that along with their zone our software which I personally really like that's part of what makes their sound cards so easy for me to recommend are what makes this sound card so easy to recommend so the zone our software has gotten an ro G skin I've actually used the skin version I personally don't like it quite as much but I'm not as used to it because the one that I use day-to-day is a Zen switch doesn't have the ro G skin but this one comes with something that no dolls and our cards do and that's Dolby home theater d4 so this allows you to add virtualized surround support to things like headphones which is from what I've read haven't tried it yet very very effective and a definite differentiating factor between this one and others on our cards so there's a graphic equalizer as well built into the Dolby side of the software and then there's the separate zone our software there's two two separate applications for it and there's also a tweak dialog option that allows you to in movies and games particularly enhance dialog in here more clearly which from what I've seen apparently actually works which is which is very very cool and probably part of the reason why this product has been on the market a year already by the time I'm actually doing this video and hasn't been replaced in any way yet so subjectively speaking haven't used the card yet but it is very very similar to the zonar Zen switch I've been using extensively for a long period of time and with the zone ARS ents I was never tempted in any way to upgrade the card personally I'm not one of those audiophile guys who is swapping out op amps on a regular basis for the most tuned-in possible music listening experience that's not me I do appreciate good audio I do appreciate a high end sound card and a decent pair of hands and all of those things I mean who doesn't appreciate a decent pair of hands but I'm not one of those super fussy guys so based on my experience with the scents I can confidently recommend the Phoebus because it has well this additional benefit which is nice it also looks really cool and glows in your system which is also nice and with some of the more gaming oriented features such as the health the environmental noise translation can't underscore how important that is enough especially in something like a crowded LAN Hall as well as the EAX emulation in Dolby home theater v4 yeah very excited to try this out don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos and let me know in the comments do you have a sound card yet because as much as I'm talking about a 200-dollar sound card right now a soos has zonar cards that are like 30 40 bucks in fact they have a headphone amped one that isn't that's under $50 and I get tweets at least probably once a week I'll get a tweet or a message or something like that saying hey - I didn't try a sound card until you told me to try one and holy crap I can't believe I wasn't doing this before it makes such a big difference compared to on board unless we're talking about very high-end onboard like what you might find on something like a Maximus 6 formula thanks for watching guys don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you again next time you