Gadgetory

soundcard unboxings always seem to generate a fair amount of interest so today I'm going to be having a look at the X Studio 5.1 from awesome tech I can come right out and tell you any awesome tech soundcard is probably a good choice you just find the one in your price range and buy it and it's probably either thee or close to the best card to buy in that price range so there's a little summary on the side here of the connectivity so you can see this is either a low profile or a full-height card it supports a bunch of different outputs which we'll have a closer look at when we've actually got the card out of the box this is the X studio 5.1 which I believe I already set up we just like go ahead and open up the package and start having a look at this thing we can talk about the specs on the box while we're doing that okay as long as I can get the wraparound done then we'll be in good shape another thing that awesome tech is a pretty unique instead they allow you another way that they're unique is that they allow you to swap the op-amp so those are the actual chips built into the sound card that do the amplification so you can swap in anything you want whereas on a lot of other brands of sound cards you would actually have to desolder the original ones and solder on new ones they make it a lot easier for you and that basically allows you to buy different op amps and tune it to whatever however you want the card to sound now this one only has a socket for the front for the two stereo channels so for your your front left and front right channels although they're higher in charge actually have swappable sockets or even many of the other channels as well so here's this actually here we're not going to look at the sound card quite yet let's have a look at what's included in terms of accessories and cables and other stuff alright well we've got our low profile bracket which is all fancy and gold-plated and looks very nice has a little oz and logo stamped into it then we have a little adapter okay so we'll show you how that works in just a moment and then we have an empty plastic bag oh I guess that's what this was inside so that it would stay protected but it fell out in shipping that's too bad there now we've reboxed that particular aspect of this card then we have an easy set-up guide which is in a variety of different languages and tells you how to easily set up the part all right setting up sound card is fairly straightforward you plug it in you install the driver here's the installation CD download the latest drivers off the Logitech website for best results alright so we'll have a look at the card itself now the fairly inexpensive card actually I believe this is one of the least expensive if not the least expensive that awesome tech has ever released so it's a great opportunity for someone who's never tried an awesome tech sound card to find out what all the fuss is about so you can see from this plug here we can are from the back of the card here we can plug in optical audio out we have a shoot I believe that's a line in probably would be my guess we have a microphone and then we have our 7.1 audio out here so this is a headphones is here this one is Center this one is front and this one is side did I say 7.0 rear I did I say 7.1 I meant 5.1 this is a 5.1 card so here is the swappable op-amp here so that is the amplification chip for the front connector so that's that one so you can put in something else if you want it is socketed so you can remove it quite easily alright let's talk a little bit more about the features that are included with this board so it has support for HD front panel audio that's something that was missing on a lot of sound cards until Asin tech came on the scene because certain sound card manufacturers wanted you to buy proprietary front panel connectors but this will hook up to the front panel of any case which is great for a value solution like this next we've got internal digital output via a two pin connector okay so that's right there and what else do we have on here they've got a 3d surround engine dragger support so that's cue sound I've actually never heard of q7 before but if anyone has this card feel free to post under the comments of the video and let us know what you think of the Hughson 3d engine and that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about it well apparently the mic has has a preamp gain of +6 decibels which is great because I don't know about you but I've used a lot of mics and a lot of sound cards and I find that 90% of the time it's just not loud enough and so they've added a little bit of a boost to it which is uh which is really nice if you boost it properly you don't get that Distortion and the last thing we got is oh yeah the audio processor being used is a via 1723 audio processor and you can see that right there so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the X Studio 5.1 I know there's not a whole lot to talk about with a sound card but the point of this video is basically in this price range if this is sort of if you've never had a dedicated sound card before you don't know what you're missing because onboard audio despite what whoever will tell you about it is just not as good as a dedicated card even with a value solution like this you're going to get a much more satisfying experience versus onboard so I definitely recommend picking up an awesome tech sound card if you haven't already