welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASUS Zonar Essence
STX now I talk about sound cards a lot
and people ask me for sound card recommendations a lot and you know
there's sort of lower-end ones the whole Zone R line actually is just kind of
awesome so whatever your price range is just buy a Zonar and you'll be fine um
but this one is like the baller Zonar
this is the Zonar with all the features that you need especially if you use
headphones so 124 DB sound to noise
ratio which is just ridiculous I mean remember that decb are essentially a
doubling of of in terms of sound to noise ratio it's a doubling of quality
every time you go up 3 DB okay so think
remember that so when you see something that's 110 DB sound to noise ratio that
is like many times worse than this okay
it has swappable opamps which means you can actually customize the sound of it
according to your liking so if you don't know what opamps are those are the uh
the components on the board that actually do the amplification for the
card okay so we're going to go ahead and start opening this up the reason I'm
opening this is cuz we're using it in like an ultimate system build guide so
if I was picking an ultimate sound card for me personally this is the one that I
would choose let's have a look at what ASUS has to say for themselves on the
box here anyway though so industry leading okay with basically no
Distortion built-in headphone amp provides exceptional quality even with
600 ohms of impedance remember guys for context a Sennheiser hd800 is 600 ohms
of impedance so we're talking like spending well over a grand on headphones
before you're going to run into the limits of what this can drive okay
nickon fine gold capacitors offer great Dynamic performance it uses audio
capacitors which are actually different from the kinds of capacitors that some
competing products are using on sound products whether it's built into a
motherboard or whether it's built into a sound card where they're more like
motherboard capacitors different capacitors will affect the way the sound
comes out of the analog signal like remember guys okay any of the music
you're listening to is inherently digital any of the sound you listen to
is inherently analog so the process of
converting that digital signal to an analog sound is extremely complicated
and depends on every aspect of the design of the card so everything from
the processor to the Dax so that's the digital to analog converter everything
to the do they have anything on here about the Emi shielding okay well Emi
shielding to keep just random interference that's bouncing around
inside your PC from from affecting any part of that process to the uh to the op
amps as well everything affects the process so okay moving right along
perfectly Shield Emi free okay there it is uh customize your sound card
effortlessly with swappable app opam sockets you can just buy them online
it's not a big deal uh okay in terms of driver features they'll be digital live
D be headphone D be virtual speaker they'll be Pro logic 2 direct sound 3D
vocal effect smart volume acoustic Echo oh acoustic Echo cancellation that's
kind of neat okay and let's go ahead and check out the card itself so they have
like an awesome picture of the card which we'll use to help us through the
process oh yeah so guys if you if you
don't know I'm running um an ASUS uh s
what am I running I'm running a Zonar zent which is a similar card to this one
but actually not quite as good if I was going to pick my ultimate sound card
this one would be it so in terms of IO you've got stereo outputs so front right
front left this is if you're using an external amplifier so for for Amplified
speakers or something like that then you've got your amped headphone jack
your line in and your spit this is your digital out so this is a headphone
lovers sound card this is not for you
know 7.1 or you know whatever sort of
things that people think are fancy this is for audio files who are interested in
stereo speakers high quality output to stereo speakers or high quality output
to headphones it does have front panel Jacks so you can still plug in your
front panel headphone jack and microphone Jack but honestly guys if
you're not using these ports you're doing it wrong with a sound card like
this has a dedicated Molex power adapter
or connector rather and that is because this card actually does draw some power
in order to deliver that Punchy sound at a moment's notice it also has some very
large caps going on which is going to help with that as well you can see that
while this sort of shield on here this Emi Shield looks like it has gaps in it
there's only very small gaps so from the inside of the case there's almost no way
for any kind of interference to get in there you can see it's actually blocked there's a copper piece that's right in
there that makes it so that nothing can really sort of get in there it uses PCI
or rather PCI Express 1X connectivity remember guys that can be plugged into
any PCI Express slot whether it's 1X 4X 8X or 16x PCI E1 pcie2 pcie3 all of
those standards are are basically interchangeable for the purposes of
something like a sound card here's an adapter so you can take those analog
outputs and you can run them to just sort of a regular stereo Jack okay
here's an adapter for this so you can run uh smaller jack headphones or
microphone off of this all right and then there is a oh awesome I actually
didn't realize this but this coax Jack right here is actually Optical as well
so you just use the included adapter and you can get an uh you can do optical
audio out from there too all right included documentation audio Precision
test report your individual sound card
was actually tested and this was printed out from your sound card so this will
give you the full characteristics of your card this card that's in the Box as
opposed to being some kind of generic you know how a lot of high-end products
come with like a certificate of performance or something like that that
actually has no basis on this thing this
physical object that's in the Box not how it works with an Essence STX this is
a serious sound card all right we got a thing about the
philosophy of something in a picture of the card okay that I'm less interested
in moving right along we've got uh ASUS's driver disc don't use this
download the latest off Theus website they're excellent also there's a third
party um Universal driver for Zonar
cards that actually has a couple of extra features so that's kind of cool
here's a sticker that you could put on something okay uh here's a quick start
guide here's a wow there's there's a lot of documentation here slick there's
another quick start guide I told you there's two quick start guides are these
the same thing oh no they have different part numbers on them okay and then
there's uh like another poster they have two posters included
yep okay all right
cool um I think that pretty much covers
it so if you're looking for a sound card recommendation my general recommendation
is some kind of Zonar card if you're looking for a specific recommendation I
would take this one personally um I'm more of a headphone guy I don't use
surround so that's that's the context of that recommendation from me but uh let's
just see if we're missing anything here hyper grounding circuitry design okay oh
I don't know if I mentioned but it uses a bur Brown PCM 1792 a digital analog
converter so that's part of achieving that 124 DB single noise ratio this one
can do even better than that swappable op amps perfectly sealed analog output
path with all that shielding and all of that good stuff and I think that pretty
much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
Zonar Essence STX from ASUS don't forget to subscribe to L's Tech tips for more
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