Gadgetory

today I have another a sous oxen are rather zone our product to unbox this is the mobile headphone amp USB soundcard so azusa's claim is that this can power up to 150 ohm headphones which should basically cover anything out there as far as gaming headsets go so this is a gaming oriented product and they are saying that it can pretty much power any gaming headphones and it is a great replacement for onboard notebook audio so there is the USB device itself you know what let's go ahead and get it open up here and then we will talk about it in a little bit more detail actually you know what not let's do the back first okay audio chipset is proprietary Asus one it uses USB 2 okay public features hasn't LED indicator play music and idle LED on mute is LED off ok cool operating systems Windows 7 in Vista and XP Dolby technologies including Dolby headphone bill via virtual speaker Dolby Pro Logic s' and Dolby Digital live so dolby headphone means that you can use this sound card in order to power your regular stereo headphones in Virtual Surround ok so that's a sort of a preference thing whether you like it or not but you'll have the option analog output jack and digital spit if output combo so it has a three and a half millimeter mini analog and digital combo jack cool built-in headphone amp with up to 98 decibel sound to noise ratio signal to noise ratio sorry I always say sound to noise ratio but I know it's not right okay for 32 ohms cool okay so you actually have three different games that you can select in the software so you can tweak it depending on what kind of impedance the headphones you and using happen to be analog input jack is a mic in okay so you can use this for your microphone as well as for your headphones okay driver features you can just sort of look at that you guys can pause if you really want to read that okay actually know some of these are important so the 3d yep normalizes the volume of smart volume okay magic voice that's kind of neat modifies the sound of your voice for VoIP and online chat applications hello hi - okay that's not very good but whatever GX two-point-five enables the latest EAX audio so that's e^x 5.0 and audio performance so there's your audio performance specs right there what else we got here system requirements really 256 Meg's of RAM oh so I can't run this on like my my Pentium 1 ok package contents ok what else we got here not English headphone amplifier so extra bass punches and sound details by fine tune headphone amp circuit ok what they're trying to say is that using a headphone amp even a small USB powered one like this and using a sound card even a USB one like this is going to be world's better than whatever you're using on your notebook now the exception might be notebooks that actually have high-end onboard sound although those are few and far between I have been an advocate for a very long time of using sound solutions that aren't total totally horrible so the zone are you three aims to achieve that on the notebook side I would not necessarily recommend using this on a desktop because that is not the intended purpose but for a notebook you can't expect to have a significantly better experience so you can output to a variety of different things including look at this you can output spit if out to an amplifier or rather a receiver you can connect headphones and microphone you can connect a line in audio source and you can configure what all of these are doing through the driver we also have included a USB extension cable so this is going to allow you to not plug it directly into your notebook say you have a notebook that doesn't have enough space around the USB port so you got other things plugged in you can't fit sort of a bulky connector like this well you can use the extension cable to just run it a little ways away so let's have a look at the u3 itself it's fairly straightforward I think there we go it's got two things on the top that look like speakers but they're not ok it's got a cap which stays connected which is kind of handy because you don't want to lose it okay it's got a split ring keychain attached your thing here so in theory that will also help you to not lose it there are is your headphone jack as well as your microphone jack hold on this moment so what makes this better than your onboard audio in all likelihood your onboard audio is using an inferior audio chipset because that's one of the specs that Joe average consumer doesn't care about when you're shopping for a notebook so they tend to cheap out on it the other reason is that it is separated from the rest of the components that are inside your notebook so there's all kinds of fan spinning and electrons moving around and high frequency switching going on that causes all kinds of absolute havoc on audio equipment which is designed to operate that's one design dog very best but is limited to operating best when there are very few sources of interference so I would say you're going to get the best performance out of it when you actually take it and plug it into this and get it as far away from your netbook as possible one of the other reasons is they use what they're calling X grounding in order to reduce even further the interference that can be caused by the PCB design itself so that's good as well one last thing I wanted to also mention actually this is on my deck here you know so there's three different modes there's VoIP mode there's gaming mode and there's excitement list you know zero boost to the noise audio level then there's a nine decibel boost which also includes amplifying some of those higher range sounds you know that the footsteps for you FPS gamers and then finally the excite mode I think is more for viewing video so it's a little bit loud or so and is great for you know explosions and all that kind of good stuff so thank you for checking out the unboxing video of the sonar you three don't forget to subscribe for - 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