sound card unboxings always seem to generate a fair amount of interest so
today i'm going to be having a look at the x studio 5.1 from azentec i can come
right out and tell you any awesome tech sound card is probably a good choice you
just find the one in your price range and buy it and it's probably
either the or close to the best card to buy in that price range so there's a
little summary on the side here of the connectivity so you can see this is
either a low profile or a full height card it supports a bunch of different
outputs which we'll have a closer look at when we've actually got the card out of the box this is the x studio 5.1
which i believe already said why don't we just like go ahead and
open up this package and start having a look at this thing we can talk about the
specs on the box uh while we're doing that
okay as long as i can get the uh
wrapper undone then we'll be in good shape another thing that awesome tech is a
pretty unique instead they allow you another way that they're unique is that
they allow you to swap the op-amp so those are the actual uh chips built into
the sound card that do the amplification so you can swap in anything you want
whereas on a lot of other brands of sound cards you would actually have to
desolder the original ones and solder on new ones they make it a lot easier for
you and that basically allows you to buy
different op amps and tune it to whatever however you want the card to
sound now this one only has a socket for
the front for the two stereo channels so
for your your front left and front right channels although their higher end cards
actually have swappable sockets for even many of the other channels as well so
here's actually here we're not going to look at the sound card quite yet let's have a look at what's included in terms
of accessories and cables and other stuff
all right well we've got our low profile bracket which is all fancy and gold
plated and looks very nice has a little ozin logo stamped into it
then we have a little adapter okay so we'll show you how that works in
just a moment and then we have an empty plastic
bag oh i guess that's what this was inside
so that it would stay protected but it fell out in shipping
that's too bad there now we've re-boxed that particular aspect of this card then
we have an easy setup guide which is in a variety of different languages and
tells you how to easily set up the card
all right setting up sound cards fairly straightforward you plug it in you install the driver here's the
installation cd download the latest drivers off the aussie tech website for
best results all right so we'll have a look at the part itself now
it's a fairly inexpensive card actually i believe this is one of the least
expensive if not the least expensive that ozintech has ever released so it's
a great opportunity for someone who's never tried an awesome tech sound card
to find out what all the fuss is about so you can see from this plug here we
can are from the back of the card here we can plug in optical audio out
we have a um
shoot i believe that's a line in probably would be my guess we have a
microphone and then we have our 7.1 audio out here so this is uh headphones
is here uh this one is center this one is
front and this one is side did i say 7 point or rear i did i say 7.1 i meant
5.1 this is a 5.1 card so here is the
swappable op amp here so that is the
amplification chip for the front
connector so that's that one so you can put in something else if you want it is
socketed so you can remove it quite easily all right let's talk a little bit
more about the features that are included with this board so it has support for uh hd front panel audio
that's something that was missing on a lot of sound cards until ozintech came
on the scene because uh certain sound card manufacturers wanted you to buy
proprietary front panel connectors but this will hook up to the front panel of
any case which is great for a value solution like this
next we've got internal digital output via two pin connector okay so that's
right there and what else do we have on here
they've got a 3d surround engine driver support so that's q sound i've actually
never heard of q sound before but if anyone has this card feel free to post
under the comments of the video and let us know what you think of the q sound 3d
engine and that pretty much covers everything i
wanted to say about it
oh apparently the mic has has a preamp gain of plus six
decibels which is great because i don't know about you but i've used a lot of
mics and a lot of sound cards and i find that 90 of the time it's just not loud
enough and so they've added a little bit of a boost to it which is uh which is
really nice if you boost it properly you don't get that distortion and the last
thing we got is oh yeah the audio processor being used is a via 1723 audio
processor and you can see that right there so thank you for checking out my
unboxing and first look at the x studio 5.1 i know there's not a whole lot to
talk about with a sound card but the point of this video is basically in this
price range if this is sort of if you've never had a dedicated sound card before
you don't know what you're missing because on board audio despite what
whoever will tell you about it is just not as good as a dedicated card even
with a value solution like this you're going to get a much more satisfying
experience versus on board so i definitely recommend picking up an
awesome tech sound card if you haven't already