today I have another ASUS oxar rather Zonar product to unbox this is the
mobile headphone amp USB sound card so ASUS's claim is that this can power up
to 150 ohm headphones which should
basically cover anything out there as
far as gaming headsets go so this is a
gaming oriented product and they are saying that can pretty much power any
gaming headphones and it is a great replacement for onboard notebook audio
so there is the USB device itself you know what let's go ahead and get it open
up here and then we will talk about it in a little bit more detail actually you
know what no let's do the back first okay audio chipset is uh proprietary
ASUS one it uses USB 2 okay out look features has an LED
indicator play music and idle LED on mute is Led off
okay cool operating systems Windows 7 and vist and XP Dolby Technologies
including Dolby headphone Dolby virtual speaker Dolby prologics and Dolby
Digital live so Dolby headphone means that you can use this sound card in
order to power your regular stereo headphones in Virtual surround okay so
that's a sort of a preference thing whether you like it or not but you'll
have the option analog output Jack and
digital spiff output combo so it has a 3 and2 mm mini analog and digital combo
Jack cool built-in headphone amp with up
to 98 DB sound to noise ratio signal to noise ratio sorry I always say sound to
noise ratio but I know it's not right okay for 32
ohms cool okay so you actually have
three different gains that you can select in the software so you can tweak
it depending on what kind of impedance the headphones you're using happen to be
analog input jack is a mic in okay so you can use this for your microphone as
well as for your headphones okay driver features you can just sort of look at
that you guys can pause if you really want to read that okay actually no some of these are
important so the 3D yep normalizes the volume smart volume normalizer k Magic
voice that's kind of neat modifies the sound of your voice for VoIP and online chat
applications hello I'm Linus okay that's
not very good but whatever gx2.5 enables the latest eax audio so that's eax
5.0 and audio performance so there's your audio performance specs right there
what else we got here system requirements really 256 Megs of RAM Al I
can't run this on like my uh my Pentium one okay package contents okay what else
we got here some not English headphone amplifier so extra base punches and
sound details by fine tune headphone amp circuit okay whatever that
means what they're trying to say is that using a headphone amp even a small USB
powered one like this and using a a sound card even a USB one like this is
going to be worlds better than whatever you're using on your notebook now the
exception might be notebooks that actually have high-end onboard sound
although those are few and far between I
have been an advocate for a very long time of using Sound Solutions that
aren't total totally horrible so the
Zonar u3 aims to achieve that on the
notebook side I would not necessarily recommend using this on a desktop
because that is not the intended purpose but for a notebook you can expect to
have a significantly better experience so you can output to a variety of
different things including look at this you can output SPI if out to uh an
amplifier or rather a receiver you can connect headphones and microphone you
can connect a line in audio source and you can configure what all of
these are doing through the driver we also have included a USB extension cable
so this is going to allow you to not plug it directly into your notebook say
you have a notebook that doesn't have um enough space around the USB port so you
got other things plugged in you can't fit sort of a bulky connector like this
well you can use the extension cable to just run it a little ways away so let's
have a look at the u3 itself it's fairly straightforward I
think there we go it's got two things on
the top that look like speakers but they're not okay it's got a cap which
stays connected which is kind of handy because you don't want to lose it okay
it's got a split ring keychain attacher thing here so in
theory that will also help you to not lose it there are is your headphone jack
as well as your microphone
jack hold on just a moment so what makes this better than
your onboard audio in all likelihood your onboard board audio is using an
inferior audio chipset because that's one of the specs that Joe average
consumer doesn't care about when he's shopping for a notebook so they tend to
cheap out on it uh the other reason is that it is separated from the rest of
the components that are inside your notebook so there's all kinds of fan spinning and electrons moving around and
high frequency switching going on that causes all kinds of absolute havoc on
audio equipment which is designed to operate best we want designed to operate
best but is limited to operating best when there are very few sources of
interference so I would say you're going to get the best performance out of it when you actually take it and plug it
into this and get it as far away from your notebook as possible one of the
other reasons is they use what they're calling X grounding in order to reduce
even further the interference that can be caused by the PCB design itself so
that's good as well one last thing I wanted to also mention actually this is
on my deck here you know you don't have to look at that so there's three different modes there's viip mode
there's gaming mode and there's excite mode and basically those are just you
know zero boost to the noise Audio Level
then there's a 9 D boost which also includes amplifying some of those higher
range sounds you know the the footsteps for U FPS Gamers and then
finally the excite mode I think is more for viewing videos so it's a little bit
louder so and is great for you know explosions and all that kind of good
stuff so thank you for checking out the unboxing video of The Zone ru3 don't
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