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vengance gaming to learn more now I've always said when people ask me for a
sound card recommendation buy the cheapest ASUS Zonar card that you can
afford or the most expensive one you can afford whichever works best for you buy
an ASUS's own art 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 lonus 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 F Olympus E10 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 Tak 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 a desktop you can use it with a notebook you can use it
with uh PC Mac it doesn't really it 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 it just plugs in by that
and then plugs into a USB port on the computer Advantage 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 Advantage is superb sound quality at a very low cost so f is
particularly known for this they are extremely upfront about exactly what
components you're getting inside what kind of specs they're running in fact
you can go on the specifications of their website they're kind of like swifttech this way where other water
block manufacturers are just like oh it has the best flow it has this it has
that where swifttech just takes all their blocks and runs scientific
comparisons and just gives you the straight grasp 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 uh frequency respon no they're
actually showing you exactly how much it has and then to go along with the base
boost button which is right here so there's actually a plus 3 D base 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 Base up at the I guess I should mirror it so you're
getting quite a lot of Base up here and then it comes down into more of that
flat curve that you saw before you enable base boost now the more steep that line is the more Punchy the bass
will sound particularly at the low end and the more uh gradual that line is the
more it's going to affect the midtones 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 is their fancy way of saying volume control that is what
happens to be inside of a volume control unit but most uh most people won't
necessarily care too much about that there's a volume or not volume indicator
there's an power indicator led the Basse 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 base boost that's built into a high quality amp in Dack
versus using something in software because and I guess I'm about to go on a
bit of a rant here software eqs are not the Beall and endall I was talking about
uh I was talking on Twitter about the audio output quality of the HTC1 and I
was complaining about it and people said oh we'll just get you know power ramp and you know set up your e no no no no
no no I have power ramp and I've set up my EQ that doesn't change the fact that
the hardware inside the HTC1 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 software at least in
this case that's what file has to say about it and I tend to agree with them
on the back of the unit we've got the USB in we've got a coaxial out now this
is kind of a funny one to me because um coax seal is going to be carrying a
digital audio signal and it won't be Amplified so you've got a DAC and amp
and then you're going to send a non non- decoded non-amplified um anyway uh so
the the purpose of it is if you wanted to run something like an AV receiver
which has its own ampen Dack off of like your MacBook which obviously doesn't
have a coax out then you could go USB in to coax out and then you could play your
music off there if you really wanted to do something like that but whatever um
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 uh people who don't necessarily have more expansion slots like if you
run an ITX machine or matx machine that's full of graphics cards these can
be a fan 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 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 um so 16 to 300
ohms the last thing that's included are eight little rubber feet so you can
actually put those wherever you wanted 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 at the 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 uh
why this because F 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 dacks 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 of particular interest to PC users it's
only around 70 bucks which 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 I will um that makes it very competitive
with other sound card options that are available thank you for checking out
this unboxing and overview of the file E10 don't forget to subscribe to lus
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