Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance k70 and k95 these fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming visit Corsair comm slash Vengeance gaming to learn more now i've always said when people ask me for a sound card recommendation buy the cheapest asu's on our card that you can afford or the most expensive one you can afford whichever works best for you buy an ASA sonar now the reason I created the Linus tech tips forum was because a lot of the time there's people who know better than me especially when it comes down to the nitty gritty details of a given category and the audio sub forum reached out to me and said yo Linus we don't like that recommendation because it's not always necessarily true there are great options out there and one of them happens to be the file olympus e 10 USB amp and DAC and what this is is it is a sound card alternative so for those of you who don't know what a DAC is it stands for digital to analog converter and what it does is it takes a digital signal which your music is unless you're talking about like you know records or cassette tapes so it takes a digital signal and turns it into an analog output that can be interpreted by headphones or speakers or other kinds of inherently analog devices so it has a couple of advantages versus a sound card that goes inside your computer number one is it sits outside your computer so you can use it with the desktop you can use it with a notebook you can use it with PC and Mac it doesn't really doesn't really matter it just plugs in via mini USB B so there's that port right there which I actually don't mind micro is the one I hate there's been some confusion about this lately so there you go just plugs in by that and then plugs into a USB port on the computer at manage number two is because it is completely removed from the internals of your PC there's no real risk of electromagnetic interference now many internal sound cards have things like shields on them but obviously it's better to move away from the EMI and put an aluminum shield over the whole device anyway so without further ado oh yeah right the next advantages superb sound quality at a very low cost so file is particularly known for this they are extreme upfront about exactly what components you're getting inside what kind of specs they're running in fact you can go on the specifications on their website they're kind of like Swift tech this way where other waterblock manufacturers are just like oh it has the best flow it has this a site where Swift Tech just takes all their blocks and runs scientific comparisons and just gives you the straight grass it's like look this is how it performs exactly so on their site you can check out things like response curves and you can actually see they're not just saying oh well it has a you know flat frequency response no they're actually telling you exactly how much it has and then to go along with the bass boost button which is right here so there's actually a +3 decibel bass boost they actually show you what the curve looks like once you've enabled that as well and it looks quite good so you're getting quite a lot of bass up at the I guess I should mirror it so you're getting quite a lot of bass up here and then it comes down and two more of that flat curve that you saw before you enable bass boost now the more steep that line is the more punchy the bass will sound particularly at the low end and the more gradual that line is the more it's going to affect the mid tones as well but of course because you have this data you can make an educated decision before you buy the product now let's take a close look at the Olympus itself so here on the front there's a potentiometer which side there fancy way of saying volume control that is what happens to be inside of a volume control unit but most most people won't necessarily care too much about that there's a volume it are not volume indicator there's an a' power indicator LED the bass boost button I talked about before in all likelihood I would keep that off however if you do like more bass it is recommended to use bass boost that's built into a high-quality amp and DAC versus using something in software because and I guess I'm about to go in a bit of a rant here software eq's are not the be-all and end-all I was talking about I was talking on Twitter about the audio output quality of the HTC one and I was complaining about it and people said oh we'll just get you know power amp and you know set up your EQ no no no no no I have power amp and I've set up my EQ that doesn't change the fact that the hardware inside the HTC One is not as good as the iPhone 4 which is what I was comparing it to there is no substitute for better hardware so you yes using hardware to adjust EQ settings will be better than using soft we're at least in this case and that's what file has to say about and I tend to agree with them on the back of the unit we've got the USB in we've got a coaxial oh now this is kind of a funny one to me because coaxial is going to be carrying a digital audio signal and it won't be amplified so you've got a DAC an amp and then you're going to send a non non decoded non amplified anyway so the purpose of it is if you wanted to run something like an AV receiver which has its own amp and DAC off of like your MacBook which obviously doesn't have a coax out then you could go USB into coax out and then you could play your music off there if you really wanted to do something like that but whatever also on the back there's a line out so you can use that to plug into something like powered speakers so it really does take the place of a sound card in your system and particularly for mobile users where it's difficult to add a sound card or for people who don't necessarily have more expansion slots like if you run an ITX machine or m ATX machine that's full of graphics cards these can be a fantastic option on the bottom there's one thing that I had actually missed there so there's a low or high gain switch this is basically for headphones that are are lower or higher impedance so you want to turn the gain up if you have high impedance headphones and the e10 can handle up to 300 ohm headphones and then you want to turn it down for anything down to it's rated to around 16 ohm headphones so 16 to 300 ohms the last thing that's included are eight little rubber feet so you can actually put those wherever you want it if you wanted it to stand on you know this way then you could do that or this way or you could put all eight of them on same time I don't know whatever the reason they include eight is they include eight of them and I guess what's left to wrap up with is why this because file has a ton of different products some of which are just amps so they're meant to take a source from something like an mp3 player and just amplify it if you have higher impedance headphones that are going to not run very well directly off of your iPhone or Android phone or whatever else they have regular Dax that don't include amps they have an mp3 player they have a wide variety of products so the reason that we are going to start with this one is because it is a particular interest to PC users it's only around 70 bucks we means that if as long as it's outputting pretty darn decent sound which to my understanding it should haven't tried it yet but a will that makes it very competitive with other sound card options that are available thank you for checking out this unboxing an overview of the file e 10 don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos