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today I have another ASUS oxar rather Zonar product to unbox this is the

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mobile headphone amp USB sound card so ASUS's claim is that this can power up

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to 150 ohm headphones which should

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basically cover anything out there as

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far as gaming headsets go so this is a

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gaming oriented product and they are saying that can pretty much power any

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gaming headphones and it is a great replacement for onboard notebook audio

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so there is the USB device itself you know what let's go ahead and get it open

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up here and then we will talk about it in a little bit more detail actually you

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know what no let's do the back first okay audio chipset is uh proprietary

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ASUS one it uses USB 2 okay out look features has an LED

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indicator play music and idle LED on mute is Led off

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okay cool operating systems Windows 7 and vist and XP Dolby Technologies

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including Dolby headphone Dolby virtual speaker Dolby prologics and Dolby

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Digital live so Dolby headphone means that you can use this sound card in

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order to power your regular stereo headphones in Virtual surround okay so

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that's a sort of a preference thing whether you like it or not but you'll

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have the option analog output Jack and

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digital spiff output combo so it has a 3 and2 mm mini analog and digital combo

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Jack cool built-in headphone amp with up

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to 98 DB sound to noise ratio signal to noise ratio sorry I always say sound to

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noise ratio but I know it's not right okay for 32

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ohms cool okay so you actually have

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three different gains that you can select in the software so you can tweak

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it depending on what kind of impedance the headphones you're using happen to be

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analog input jack is a mic in okay so you can use this for your microphone as

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well as for your headphones okay driver features you can just sort of look at

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that you guys can pause if you really want to read that okay actually no some of these are

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important so the 3D yep normalizes the volume smart volume normalizer k Magic

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voice that's kind of neat modifies the sound of your voice for VoIP and online chat

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applications hello I'm Linus okay that's

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not very good but whatever gx2.5 enables the latest eax audio so that's eax

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5.0 and audio performance so there's your audio performance specs right there

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what else we got here system requirements really 256 Megs of RAM Al I

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can't run this on like my uh my Pentium one okay package contents okay what else

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we got here some not English headphone amplifier so extra base punches and

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sound details by fine tune headphone amp circuit okay whatever that

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means what they're trying to say is that using a headphone amp even a small USB

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powered one like this and using a a sound card even a USB one like this is

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going to be worlds better than whatever you're using on your notebook now the

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exception might be notebooks that actually have high-end onboard sound

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although those are few and far between I

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have been an advocate for a very long time of using Sound Solutions that

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aren't total totally horrible so the

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Zonar u3 aims to achieve that on the

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notebook side I would not necessarily recommend using this on a desktop

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because that is not the intended purpose but for a notebook you can expect to

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have a significantly better experience so you can output to a variety of

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different things including look at this you can output SPI if out to uh an

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amplifier or rather a receiver you can connect headphones and microphone you

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can connect a line in audio source and you can configure what all of

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these are doing through the driver we also have included a USB extension cable

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so this is going to allow you to not plug it directly into your notebook say

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you have a notebook that doesn't have um enough space around the USB port so you

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got other things plugged in you can't fit sort of a bulky connector like this

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well you can use the extension cable to just run it a little ways away so let's

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have a look at the u3 itself it's fairly straightforward I

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think there we go it's got two things on

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the top that look like speakers but they're not okay it's got a cap which

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stays connected which is kind of handy because you don't want to lose it okay

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it's got a split ring keychain attacher thing here so in

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theory that will also help you to not lose it there are is your headphone jack

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as well as your microphone

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jack hold on just a moment so what makes this better than

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your onboard audio in all likelihood your onboard board audio is using an

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inferior audio chipset because that's one of the specs that Joe average

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consumer doesn't care about when he's shopping for a notebook so they tend to

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cheap out on it uh the other reason is that it is separated from the rest of

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the components that are inside your notebook so there's all kinds of fan spinning and electrons moving around and

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high frequency switching going on that causes all kinds of absolute havoc on

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audio equipment which is designed to operate best we want designed to operate

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best but is limited to operating best when there are very few sources of

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interference so I would say you're going to get the best performance out of it when you actually take it and plug it

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into this and get it as far away from your notebook as possible one of the

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other reasons is they use what they're calling X grounding in order to reduce

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even further the interference that can be caused by the PCB design itself so

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that's good as well one last thing I wanted to also mention actually this is

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on my deck here you know you don't have to look at that so there's three different modes there's viip mode

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there's gaming mode and there's excite mode and basically those are just you

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know zero boost to the noise Audio Level

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then there's a 9 D boost which also includes amplifying some of those higher

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range sounds you know the the footsteps for U FPS Gamers and then

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finally the excite mode I think is more for viewing videos so it's a little bit

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louder so and is great for you know explosions and all that kind of good

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stuff so thank you for checking out the unboxing video of The Zone ru3 don't

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