AuzenTech X-Studio Low Profile 5.1 PCI Sound Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,145 words · ~5 min read
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sound card unboxings always seem to generate a fair amount of interest so
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today i'm going to be having a look at the x studio 5.1 from azentec i can come
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right out and tell you any awesome tech sound card is probably a good choice you
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just find the one in your price range and buy it and it's probably
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either the or close to the best card to buy in that price range so there's a
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little summary on the side here of the connectivity so you can see this is
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either a low profile or a full height card it supports a bunch of different
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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
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which i believe already said why don't we just like go ahead and
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open up this package and start having a look at this thing we can talk about the
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specs on the box uh while we're doing that
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okay as long as i can get the uh
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wrapper undone then we'll be in good shape another thing that awesome tech is a
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pretty unique instead they allow you another way that they're unique is that
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they allow you to swap the op-amp so those are the actual uh chips built into
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the sound card that do the amplification so you can swap in anything you want
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whereas on a lot of other brands of sound cards you would actually have to
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desolder the original ones and solder on new ones they make it a lot easier for
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you and that basically allows you to buy
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different op amps and tune it to whatever however you want the card to
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sound now this one only has a socket for
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the front for the two stereo channels so
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for your your front left and front right channels although their higher end cards
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actually have swappable sockets for even many of the other channels as well so
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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
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of accessories and cables and other stuff
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all right well we've got our low profile bracket which is all fancy and gold
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plated and looks very nice has a little ozin logo stamped into it
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then we have a little adapter okay so we'll show you how that works in
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just a moment and then we have an empty plastic
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bag oh i guess that's what this was inside
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so that it would stay protected but it fell out in shipping
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that's too bad there now we've re-boxed that particular aspect of this card then
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we have an easy setup guide which is in a variety of different languages and
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tells you how to easily set up the card
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all right setting up sound cards fairly straightforward you plug it in you install the driver here's the
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installation cd download the latest drivers off the aussie tech website for
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best results all right so we'll have a look at the part itself now
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it's a fairly inexpensive card actually i believe this is one of the least
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expensive if not the least expensive that ozintech has ever released so it's
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a great opportunity for someone who's never tried an awesome tech sound card
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to find out what all the fuss is about so you can see from this plug here we
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can are from the back of the card here we can plug in optical audio out
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we have a um
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shoot i believe that's a line in probably would be my guess we have a
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microphone and then we have our 7.1 audio out here so this is uh headphones
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is here uh this one is center this one is
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front and this one is side did i say 7 point or rear i did i say 7.1 i meant
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5.1 this is a 5.1 card so here is the
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swappable op amp here so that is the
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amplification chip for the front
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connector so that's that one so you can put in something else if you want it is
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socketed so you can remove it quite easily all right let's talk a little bit
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more about the features that are included with this board so it has support for uh hd front panel audio
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that's something that was missing on a lot of sound cards until ozintech came
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on the scene because uh certain sound card manufacturers wanted you to buy
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proprietary front panel connectors but this will hook up to the front panel of
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any case which is great for a value solution like this
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next we've got internal digital output via two pin connector okay so that's
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right there and what else do we have on here
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they've got a 3d surround engine driver support so that's q sound i've actually
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never heard of q sound before but if anyone has this card feel free to post
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under the comments of the video and let us know what you think of the q sound 3d
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engine and that pretty much covers everything i
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wanted to say about it
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oh apparently the mic has has a preamp gain of plus six
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decibels which is great because i don't know about you but i've used a lot of
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mics and a lot of sound cards and i find that 90 of the time it's just not loud
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enough and so they've added a little bit of a boost to it which is uh which is
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really nice if you boost it properly you don't get that distortion and the last
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thing we got is oh yeah the audio processor being used is a via 1723 audio
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processor and you can see that right there so thank you for checking out my
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unboxing and first look at the x studio 5.1 i know there's not a whole lot to
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talk about with a sound card but the point of this video is basically in this
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price range if this is sort of if you've never had a dedicated sound card before
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you don't know what you're missing because on board audio despite what
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whoever will tell you about it is just not as good as a dedicated card even
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with a value solution like this you're going to get a much more satisfying
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experience versus on board so i definitely recommend picking up an
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awesome tech sound card if you haven't already