now this is a pretty cool product this is actually a bundle product this is the
ASUS ASUS ASUS Zonar zents so this is a
premium gaming audio set which means it comes with a premium gaming audio sound
card as well as a premium gaming audio headset and this is the I mean this is
exciting because this is actually a senheiser PC 350 that is rebranded
espcially for this bundle so the value of this bundle is phenomenal because
this is a really expensive headset this is an expensive sound card and they
actually come together for a price that's it's still expensive but you know
it's not it's less expensive I guess so here we go go with your zents go for
Glory let's talk a little bit about what Aus has to say about themselves on this
product triumph over your opponents in FPS games with Precision Acoustics
Embrace Clarity for the win with Emi Shields and8 DB sound to noise ratio and
fight to the end with ergonomic headset design this is all very good stuff and
let's have a look at what they have to say on the inside of the box so first of
all this is tested for the ultimate gaming gear all right so basically
they're saying Aus and Sennheiser teamed up which is kind of what I was saying
before which is very good okay you can triumph over your enemies now this is
key right here powerful headphone amplifier this sound card the zent sound
card here actually has a headphone amp and why is that important you might ask
well because the PC 350 is actually a
very premium headset and what that means is that the drivers in here have a
higher impedance than just your typical Cheapo headphones so it means that in
order to really get the best results out of this particular headset you need an
amplifier so until recently you couldn't buy a sound card that had a proper
built-in headphone amplifier but now you can so there you go Embrace Clarity for
the wind so Emi shielding covers it so that you don't have sort of random
interference uh bothering your sound card realistic 3D game audio okay here's
your IO ports list right here so we've got a mic line in headphone output with
support for up to 600 ohms of impedance nice 7.1 Channel speaker output as well
as digital audio output so we've got the whole works here's your package contents
which we're not going to look too closely at because we're going to open the package and we've got Christo
Christopher Sun okay true Pro gear for
pro FPS Gamers cool so they've got a little gamer quote on there too
excellent so I'm going to go ahead and try and figure out the best way to open
this box which appears to be from this side not the other side the other side's
tempting they got those stickers on there but I'm on to their tricks I'm
going to open it from this way
okay oh okay no I get it you have to do
both so I'm not onto their tricks their tricks are too tricky for
me see this is the problem with like live one take unboxing videos is I have
to like figure out the box in real time you know I actually had a pair of a PC
350 uh headset not a pair of headset I
had a PC 350 headset not long ago and I also have an hd555 and I got to say the
hd555 particularly is one of the most
difficult boxes I have ever encountered in fact it seems like headsets in
general are are fairly challenging like I had a some real problems with the
Corsair hs1 as you guys may or may not recall if you saw that video I just
couldn't get that box apart for the life of me okay so let's have a look at the
sound card first okay okay here right away like plus 10 points check it out
matte black PCB ASUS gets major major
points for that because nothing looks better in a gaming machine than a matte
black PCB with nice shiny chromed ACC
sense and that is just outstanding okay
so there is that uh that Shield that were talking about so you can actually
here you can see under it in some places you can even see a copper heat sink down
there so they are actually cooling uh probably the amplifier would be my guess
cuz I can't imagine the audio processor needs a copper heat sink on it but you
can see right here that this card does require external power from a four pin
Molex connector okay we've also got a
plugin for our front panel audio all right let's see what else we got on this
card that's worth talking about hm
I mean I wish I could sort of show you more of the card but I can't because it's got this cool shroud on it but I
mean the Shroud is pretty sweet but when it's installed in your case you'll
probably see it sort of something like this so you'll be able to see the bottom
of it a little bit you'll be able to see the top acoustic powered by Sennheiser
it's really really nice looking card okay so here oh yeah this is important
PCI Express 1X that is the interface that this card uses and I get a lot of
questions about this but yes you can put a PCI Express 1X card in a 4X slot in an
8X slot in a 16x slot doesn't matter it'll just use less bandwidth boom done
so there you have it that is what you need to do you just plug it into any PCI
Express slot and it'll work 100% okay here we've got spiff output so that's
your digital out here we've got 7.1 out and I'm probably going to find an
adapter somewhere to show you how to use that then we have our headphone as well
as our microphone now please note these are the larger audio jacks not the ones
that you typically find on the back of a sound card so here we go we can sort of
keep picking away at this box and figuring out how exactly it comes apart
so uh okay there seem to be some kind of tabs here and we can try to see how that
works okay there's some kind
of this is ridiculous look at this okay so that comes off there but then it oh
yeah here we go so there's Clips here in the plastic I mean the thing is you'd
never be able to put this box back together after you took it apart I mean
maybe that's the point cuz most places NCI included uh don't take Returns on
headphones for hygienic reasons and so I
guess they want it to be as difficult as possible to put it back together without
uh looking like it's been taken apart so there we go we've finally removed that
part of the plastic oh I think we can actually Slide the whole no we can't
Slide the whole thing out we can slide out part of it you got to be kidding me
okay so that's uh um that's secured in there in some other fashion but I think
we found the accessories yes we have
achieved something today there we go all right so here
first things first uh let's find this so
what the what is
this oh look at that you got to be kidding
me it looks like this do not only coaxial out but also optical audio out I
did not notice that on the box that's
very cool so you got this little adapter so it'll grab your Optical signal which
is actually under the coaxial digital
audio that's really cool okay so there
there's that we've also got a uh here we
are where's that we've got one adapter
oh so if you want to use it with uh with something else because you can see the
included Zen headset that already has the larger Jacks but if you wanted to
use it with a smaller headset they've included one adapter for that as well
okay and then here is the adapter for the what appears to be a DVI port but do
not plug a monitor into it I'll tell you that much right now do not plug a
monitor into this uh so you go ahead and plug that in there then you can go ahead
and uh here let's just plug that right in like that and there is your 7.1 audio
out and they are colorcoded and those do appear to be goldplated connectors there
we are so that's pretty much it for the sound card I think we've got everything
relevant plugged into it right now so you can see it in all of its Glory here
we have a Zonar quick start guide which
also has a driver CD throw it away download the latest off the ASUS website
quick start guide shows us a little bit about the audio card
layout okay so yeah here there's a combo digital output Port very very cool
very cool indeed gaming headset PCI bus Golden
Fingers install the audio card do all these things what else we got in here
connect the TV tuner
card okay that's it that's it for English all right now I'm going to have
to ask the cameraman probably to uh oh never mind okay I think we got it I
think we got it okay I think we're we're
one step there we go I think now we can extract the
headset yes success look look at this
thing it's ridiculous
okay so this is a fairly standard looking PC 350 other than the uh than
the larger headphone and microphone connectors and let's just go ahead and
extract it from the plastic that it's sitting in so PC 350 as I mentioned
before this is an expensive and premium gaming headset so you've got a nice pley
material it's designed to fit extremely
large ears so if you've got like long ears you can actually wear the PC 350
quite comfortably and I do know a couple of people with PC 350s who have also
said that it is extremely comfortable even with glasses because of the way
that the cushioning is designed you can easily have something sitting under it
and it's not going to put undue pressure on your head now you don't have the uh
the padding only on the ear cups youve also got it on the headband itself where
it is actually even softer I mean it's hard to demonstrate something like how
soft the cushioning is on something but I hope this kind of gives you the point
like I'm putting no pressure on this whatsoever it's very comfortable for
long gaming sessions it includes a boom mic which is adjustable so in terms of
how far you want it to sit away from your face so you see you can put it up
here and then you can bring it down and you can actually adjust it in so if I
just kind of ah give it a bit of a bin then it'll come in like this and if you
want it a little bit further away then you can adjust it a little bit further away like that now these are a closed
headphone which means that I actually cannot hear a whole lot of what I'm
saying right now but the benefit of that is you have a very good stereo effect
because you're not going to get any spill over when the right speaker makes
noise say someone's walking over there and you hear the footsteps right so when
the right speaker makes a noise it's not going to leak out and then come into
your left ear so it's able to keep things very isolated for good
directionality and it also means that you're not going to disturb others when
you're gaming late at night so if there's like you know explosion and
gunfire and all that stuff the people in the Next Room are not going to be like
banging on your wall hey what do you think you're doing so that's uh that's a
definite benefit of using a closed style headphone and I think we've shown these
in pretty good detail you've got the labels here for the right as well as for
the left earphone although there's a quick check if you put it on and the mic
doesn't come down towards your face if it comes down in the back of your head
then it's probably not on the right way I think so that should uh that should
pretty much take care of itself for most users all right and last but not least
we have built-in volume control which has a nice little volume indicator there
as well as an onoff switch for the mic thank you for checking out my unboxing
of the Zonar Zen premium gaming audio set and don't forget to subscribe to ncx
Tech tips as well as Linus Tech tips and there now I actually have everything
plugged into this guy that looks hardcore