This video is brought to you by the Intel Core i7 4770K unlocked processor.
If you're a speed freak, add an Intel 3500 series SSD to your Haswell system
for a truly enthusiast class experience. Now, I often get asked which sound card
to buy. And the answer over the last couple years has been inevitably
uh decide on a budget and then buy whatever Zonar card fits inside your
budget because it's pretty much that simple. Back in the day, every sound
card that was a sound card worth buying was creative. And then for a while, it
was Ozentech. And nowadays, it really seems like it's just ASUS is the way to
go. But not all of their sound cards are built with the same things in mind. In
fact, they have a couple of offerings at the same price point around that $200
range that do differ a little bit. So, today we're going to be having a look at
the Zonar Feebis. This is the, as you
may or may not have figured out based on
the massive Republic of Gamers logo on
the front of the box, this is the gaming oriented card. So, it's not necessarily
about, oh, well, we brought you the absolute best possible DAC and we
brought you, you know, swappable op amps for, you know, the music listening audio
files out there. It's more along the lines of the features that enhance the
gaming experience. So, why don't we start with the card itself physically,
which has a very ROG look to it, as you
can plainly see, at least you'll be able to once I finally get it out of the box.
So, it uses a PCI Express 1X interface. This is the same as the Zonar STX, which
is actually for music listeners, maybe the better choice. It has dedicated 7.1
audio out using all 3 and 12 mm jacks.
This is again a more gaming oriented feature because many audio files are
going to be using headphones that use the larger jack style. So they would
have to adapt to get down to this whereas many gamers are using gaming
headsets which use standard 3 and 12 mm jacks. Another thing that gamers often
do is they'll have mic and headphones and then they'll have a separate speaker
setup that they use sometimes. So that's why it has dedicated plugs for all of
them. This is in contrast to my personal Zonar Zense which is actually a very
very very similar card which uses a
breakout cable in order to achieve those surround uh those uh those surround
outputs. There's a link right here. So that's for the external control box.
More on that in a moment. And other than that, you've got pretty standard looking
sound card. So the back of the card is a matte black PCB, which I've come to
expect at this point from high-end gaming gear. Then on the top of the card, we find a PCI Express power
connector. This is essential for the amped headphone port on this card. It
can handle up to 600 ohm impedance headphones. So yeah, you need more power
than can be delivered by a simple PCI Express slot. Other than that, speaking
of 600 ohm impedance headphones, there's a Zonar Feebas logo at the top that
glows red when you're in high impedance headphone mode and blue when you're in
low impedance headphone mode, which I think is kind of cool. And the rest of it is covered by a simple matte black
shroud with ROG branding on it as well as ASUS branding and then some very cool
aggressive looking lines. Now, this actually has a functional purpose as
well as looking nice. An EMI shield does exactly what you might think it does and
reduces electromagnetic interference by
shielding it. So, there you go. We can remove that though by simply removing
four screws, which gives us a better look at the actual guts of this card.
Man, it just looks high-end. It's got all these components on it and stuff.
So, the processor itself is an Oxygen CMI 8888. This is a slightly updated
version of the controller that's in the Zent. And then for our DAC, we're using
a TI PCM 1796A DAC. Slightly slept
stepped slept down. It's asleep over there. No, it's not asleep over there.
Slightly stepped down versus the Zonar Essence STX. And speaking of things that
are step down versus the Zonar STX is what you're going to see looking closely
at this card is that while it does use JRC 2114 op amps, they are soldered. So
you do not unfortunately have the option to change them out for different op
amps. What op amps basically do is they
can color the sound or they can they could be more warm or more rich or more
uh flat or whatever else. And some people have a very their their ear is
very tuned to a preference of what they want to hear and they like being able to
swap out op amps like you can on the Essence 1 or the Zonar Essence STX. Not
possible on this card. It's sort of a take it or leave it. We've tuned it this
way and this is how you're going to experience it because this card is
optimized for gaming. Not necessarily those discern this discerning m music.
My screen turned off. those discerning music listeners and those audio files
and those sorts who want that customizability. Also, there's a
headphone amp built into this guy right here. So, there's the that is a
TPA6120 A2 headphone amp able to handle, as I said before, up to 600 ohm
headphones. The 7.1 circuitry is completely separate from the headphone
circuitry. And while it's reasonably high-end, it's not to nearly the same
extent because, well, there's a lot more of it. And it's deemed less important
from a gaming or even an audio file standpoint because you're bound to be
using probably There you go. There's your
spitf out. Probably a digital out to some kind of external decoder or you're
going to be using headphones directly off of it. And if you're using something like powered speakers, they're not going
to be so high-end that you'd notice much of a difference. Anyhow, this brings us
to the Feebas control pod, which is maybe not that different from what you
might find if you have a pair of speakers that includes one of these already, but it does have some cool
functionality. So, it allows you to extend your headphone and microphone jacks, meaning that you can, you know,
plug in short cables. So, some headphones come with the breakaway cables these days. You've also got a
control pod cable. There you go. That goes right there. So, you go ahead and
plug all these in together and they're conveniently togetherly located
locations just like that. And it allows you to do a few different things. You
can adjust your volume with the knob on the top. You can mute your mic by
pressing it. And then there you go. You plug in your front headphone and microphone. It's got a bit of weight to
it. But this this, my friends, is where the special sauce happens. Those are two
microphones. And if you were someone who
was not using this correctly, you can use this as a microphone. Please don't
do that. That's get a real microphone. But what you can use this for is
environmental noise cancellation. Now, I haven't used the Zonar Feebist yet. I'm
unboxing it now. But I have used their Thunder FX external sound card, and I
can tell you their environmental noise cancellation, at least on that one, I'm sure it's better on this. It's like,
yeah, thumbs up you because what it does is it uses these mics to listen to the
environment and then the microphone on your headset itself to listen to you and
it's able to cancel out what these ones here in a very, very cool, very
effective. It works. It's awesome. It's actually really, really good. So that
along with their Zonar software, which I personally really like. That's part of
what makes their sound card so easy for me to recommend, are what makes this
sound card so easy to recommend. So the Zonar software has gotten an ROG skin.
I've actually used the skinned version. I personally don't like it quite as
much, but I'm not as used to it because the one that I use day-to-day is a Zent,
which doesn't have the ROG skin. But this one comes with something that not
all Zonar cards do, and that's Dolby Home Theater V4. So, this allows you to
add virtualized surround support to things like headphones, which is uh from
what I've read, haven't tried it yet, very, very effective and a definite
differentiating factor between this one and other Zonar cards. So, there's a
graphic equalizer as well built into the Dolby side of the software. And then
there's the separate Zonar software. There's two two separate applications
for it. And there's also a tweak dialogue option that allows you to in
movies and games particularly enhance dialogue and hear it more clearly, which
from what I've seen apparently actually works, which is uh which is very very
cool and probably part of the reason why this product has been on the market a
year already by the time I'm actually doing this video and hasn't been replaced in any way yet. So,
subjectively speaking, haven't used the card yet, but it is very, very similar
to the Zonar Zense, which I've been using extensively for a long period of
time. And with the Zonar Zense, I was never tempted in any way to upgrade the
card. Personally, I'm not one of those audio file guys who is swapping out op
amps on a regular basis for the most tuned possible music listening
experience. That's not me. I do appreciate good audio. I do appreciate a
high-end sound card and a decent pair of cans and all of those things. I mean,
who doesn't appreciate a decent pair of cans? But I'm not one of those super
fussy guys. So, based on my experience with the Zense, I can confidently
recommend the Feebis because it has, well, this additional benefit, which is
nice. It also looks really cool and glows in your system, which is also
nice. And with some of the more gaming oriented features such as the oh the
environmental noise cancellation can't underscore how important that is enough
especially in something like a crowded land as well as the EAX emulation and
Dolby home theater V4. Yeah, very
excited to try this out. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for unboxings, reviews, and other computer
videos. And let me know in the comments, do you have a sound card yet? Because as
much as I'm talking about a $200 sound card right now, ASUS has Zonar cards
that are like 3040 bucks. In fact, they have a headphone amped one that isn't
that's under $50. And I get tweets at
least probably once a week. I'll get a tweet or a message or something like
that saying, "Hey, Lionus, I didn't try a sound card until you told me to try
one. And holy crap, I can't believe I wasn't doing this before. It makes such
a big difference compared to onboard." Unless we're talking about very high-end
onboard like what you might find on something like a Maximus 6 formula. Thanks for watching guys. Don't forget
to subscribe and we'll see you again next time.