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ASUS XONAR Essence STX 124 dB SNR/Headphone Amp Card Unboxing

2012-05-25
hey everybody welcome back TECA tomorrow I'll wreck fairs here and today we're going to be taking an unboxing and first tech look at a new product and the people over at AE soos what's not really that new but it's still a really cool product and one of the really good things about this new zone our essence XTX card is as a hundred and twenty four DB signal-to-noise ratio not a lot of people out there going what exactly does that mean well that means that the card is going to be very high and clear clarity card 124 signal noise Rachel means you have a large area before you start getting a bunch of weird sounds like you know background noise in kissing alloy or just like this garden right here you can throw on headphones and be done with them unfortunately I got a deal with when I'm healing today not really liking it but anyways this card is really technologically a very very sound and solid card it's coming to market about you get anywhere from one hundred and sixty-four dollars anywhere up to like two hundred dollars but if you look around you can get up around one hundred and sixty dollars online they've got it at Amazon for about a hundred and sixty-three bucks so today we're gonna actually take this thing apart you first of all like any good boxing I will show you guys at the front of the box open up we're going to go inside of here now I know you guys hate it and if you read up the box but I mean basically that's why these guys make boxes there's a reason why they do make a box if you guys take a look at but I was going to go over some of the really cool things nietzsche con capacitors all the way around these the best top-of-the-line ones they're all gold you can see them this thing also has op-amp technology which means that you can basically change the way the sound card sounds that's right you can change it from anywhere from being very high and very tinny and clear with no bass all the way down to like a super rapper likes with like very solid bass but not that much high-end it's very very real all you do is you're going to pull these little heat problems off change them off and you can actually change the way that the card sounds and that's head we're going to refocus and start looking at the card over here so we've actually open this box a couple times because we were checking this card out it was really cool so full profit basically the unboxing stuff so if you guys know the Box a little thing move that other way so here we can see the packaging is a plastic overlay I'll just go ahead and remove that to get it out of the way the card in the plastic and underneath is the actual so the contents of the box so we'll get that stuff actually out of the way real quick and let's you folks see that we have the zone our essence XTX this is their Quick Start Guide it's gonna tell you all the different connectivity way to hook up your card now this card's different than a lot of other sound cards out there you actually have to have a molex power connector on it that's for the headphone amp did you get very clean headphone amp clarity with that let me get this out of the way this little jack right here which is actually the one that I will be utilizing when I put the speakers in here behind me I've got my out the cleansing these are my expressionist speakers I'm going to be hooking these to the sound card and then plugging them into my little green plug into my computer right there I will be using this plug set that off to the side you get a zone art essence xef is your audio precision test report like a Zeus has gone way out of their way to make sure that this sound card is totally high-end it's geared for audiophiles if you're just a basic gamer who only has like you know 20 $30 headphones this is not your town card it's just not this things geared for the audiophile who wants to use a really pro set of headphones one of the great things about this but they have all the lab results inside of here which tells you all the different things about it total harmonic distortion see the noise ratio all that stuff if you're watching the video to say this is an overpriced thing blah blah blah blah for some people out there it might be but if you want clear very warm sound you're going to invest your money and you're going to want to take a look at this like I said it's not for the meek here's the sound card driver get that out of the way a lot of people ask in the phoebus video if there was digital audio on it optical and yes there was I just forgot to show you guys a thing my bad my apologies here's the headphone jack and right here is the little optical plug this plugs into the car and your optical cable plugs in right here a couple more things here before get to the card this is just basically a poster and then again a another poster so two posters now let's get to the card you guys can see on the back here we have standard quarter inch headphone jacks there's been previous generation cards from Asus that have had sent Iser headphones I have those I plan on testing those out here as well here are the two ports that I'm going to be using those are these two right here I'll just plug right into here nice and simply I'm not going to do it and like I said if you're going to use the optical cable it plugs in right down here at the bottom take a quick look right here PCIe quick look at the back now I'm going to take a quick break off here folks I'm just not going to do the total thing in the cameras it takes too much time but there are four screws in the back of here so real quick folks I will show you guys everywhere on the card where I have taken the screws out there's one here one here one here and there's going to be a final one right here which I'm now going to remove I'm going to take the card over go ahead and remove this so let's take now a closer look at the card now that we've strip it down to its naked form now this card's broken up into two sections this is the power section of the card and this is the audio section of the card we're going to start here at the back we can see that we have a single power connector right here then through here we have two more capacitors that are right here these are actual for power conditioning then we can see we have all the Nietzsche con these are all their gold-plated parts like we talked about before if you have your old-school CD or whatever and you want to hook it up directly into here you have the option to be ability to do that as well we're going to flip it back around here now there are two chips on here there's the a Zeus right here this is a combined with C media they helped design this chip and then right here is an additional chip and this is basically the power translator which helps transfer all the power stuff into the audio section to make the clean audio now let's jump over to the audio section of the card one thing I want everybody to take note of is right here there's a little copper thing right here you can see this this is actually a separator for the sound from the power I know that you guys might think wow a wall but that's actually what it's really doing this is actually a copper wall separating the power from the sound part of the card now this card features hyper routing circuitry design this is something exclusive to a Zeus where they utilize the PCB design to separate signal and noise ensuring only the cleanest signals that are passed to the sensitive components this one's actually ensures your headphones sound really clean don't hear any hissing or any that go into it once again we see the new chicon Feingold professional audio capacitors these capacitors use state-of-the-art edging technologies nietzsche cons feingold capacitors deliver rich bass and crystal-clear high frequencies this is why this card is basically an audiophile cards not using any low-end components whatsoever another thing that separates the zone our essence STX from its peers is it uses superior decks use the beurre Brown PCM 1792 a now these are the best digital to analog converters you can get in the market they convert signals at 127 DB signal-to-noise ratio I've turned the card around folks so we can look at some of the other features about this card it also features independent power sources for the line and headphones out those are these right here and then we also have the swappable OPA sockets these are the opamp sockets these are the ones I was telling you about before that you can remove on here and change them to get different types of sounds on the card that's this little chip right here now that's going to be very interesting JJ from Asus has actually said that they have another kit they can send me I'm actually going to remove this and change the sound out in the future but that'll be another really cool review the card also features a perfectly sealed audio analog path you can see that is the clearness all the way around the card all the etchings actually kept closed and by each other so the kimonos don't have any electrical leak on the card at all once again providing clear and low noise sound earlier we talked about the independent power sources for the headphones but there's also something that actually helps the headphones sound really good is the built-in headphone app the essence XCX uses a high quality TI TP a 6-1 208 ooh headphone driver which supports headphones to up to 600 ohms of impedance drive your headphones is intended without additional application what this really means when they say that is that there's enough power on the car driven by the chip that even the cards that have very very high ohms which are the very highest ones you can get out there like Denon bear all those they're going to sound perfectly clear in here and the headphones will be able to drive them hence why this this thing is called a headphone amp for audiophiles so folks that's pretty much all of the great features of the new essence STX zone art from the people over at asu's I mean you guys can just see from the layout all the goal components from the way the power comes in its power conditioning this is not just your run-of-the-mill sound card if you take a plate off any other sound card you're just going to see a few little capacitors here and there they're not going to be gold or anything else like that so hey folks I hope that you like this I tried to bring this a much more in depth unboxing and first look at the features of this card so I'll be seeing you guys back here is I actually hooked this card into my system back there and will show you a video first we'll show it as we install the card then we'll show you sound using the old on board of the board that I have over there which you guys know is the rampage for extreme and then we'll show you what it sounds like with the new zone our essence STX thanks for watching I'm Eric and I'll catch you guys back here on deck or tomorrow
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