Asus Xonar SOUND CARD coming soon!

[jondl]

I just saw this at VR-Zone and thought this should have its' own thread. Cmon' its ASUS joining the sound card market! Finally Creative can have competition and maybe get their act together. I know Asus is known in the motherboard market to supply ample amounts of bios'.

Anyway, enough rambling. Will other companies follow asus into the sound card market? Will the arrival of this new sound card drop the currently $300 dollar sound cards to appropriate levels? I HOPE SO!

Anyone with info or knowledge on this sound card can chime in if they want.

//edit
source: http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4778

 

[SonicIce]

interesting

 

[QueBert]

the VIA Envy chip is better than anything Creative has, it's hard to compete with Creative. But my Razer Baraccuda is SWEET, it uses the VIA Envy chip. I could care less about EAX, my old Vortex 2 with A3D had better sounding 3d sound, and how many years ago did Aureal die? haha

aside from the name, I don't see anything Creative has going for them, I hope Asus's card can come out and do some damage to Creative. I was hoping Razer's offering would, but it's too expensive and haven't seen it retail (yet) but in terms of pure sound quality after buying it I will NEVER touch another Creative. I went Razer from X-Fi for anyone wondering.

 

[SonicIce]

i still want a vortex 2 for my win98 box...

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: SonicIce
i still want a vortex 2 for my win98 box...

SOF with the A3D patch was pure badass

 

[darkswordsman17]

Originally posted by: QueBert
the VIA Envy chip is better than anything Creative has, it's hard to compete with Creative. But my Razer Baraccuda is SWEET, it uses the VIA Envy chip. I could care less about EAX, my old Vortex 2 with A3D had better sounding 3d sound, and how many years ago did Aureal die? haha

aside from the name, I don't see anything Creative has going for them, I hope Asus's card can come out and do some damage to Creative. I was hoping Razer's offering would, but it's too expensive and haven't seen it retail (yet) but in terms of pure sound quality after buying it I will NEVER touch another Creative. I went Razer from X-Fi for anyone wondering.

No its not. It's using an ADI chip. This looks like its a new chip from them, but from what I can see it is pretty similar to the C-Media Oxygen HD chip used by the Auzentech X-Meridian and Razer's sound card. It might be a bit better at handling EAX (up to 3 I think) effects as I believe the onboard ADI chips were better than most of the Realtek and C-Media ones. I think these new chips are actually better than the Envy anyways.

I'd have to look into it a bit more, but this does not seem to be some big Creative killer card. It's just ASUS putting some effort into something different. The focus here is on the Dolby Digital/DTS capabilities (as has become popular in the audio card market of late). Its more of the same with a different marketing spin (similar to what Razer did). I would say the X-Fi has nothing to worry about, and you can already get most of the features of this card. I did read something about "filling the analog gap" where this card does something, it mostly concerned digital music (think DRM'ed MP3s and the like).

With Vista, hopefully we'll see a shift in audio to focus on things like that where the card is more there to clean up the signal than for the processing of the dimensional audio (which looks to be handled more by the CPU where the quality of the software determines the quality of the audio).

Didn't Creative buy Aureal after they pretty much killed them with litigation?

 

[IlllI]

if i remember... i think creative sued aureal for some reason (which i forget).. which basically bankrupt aureal. then afterwards, creative bought the patents and stuff from aureal when it got liquidated. i guess thats one way of getting rid of the competition :/

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: clandren
if i remember... i think creative sued aureal for some reason (which i forget).. which basically bankrupt aureal. then afterwards, creative bought the patents and stuff from aureal when it got liquidated. i guess thats one way of getting rid of the competition :/

Aureal never really had a chance, I mean I owned both Vortex cards and loved them, but I also owned a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 and a Gravis Ultrasound MAX. Look what happened to all those companies. Doesn't even matter each card owned.

Creative has always beaten the competition to a pulp and forced them to close shop, and the ironic thing is all 3 non Creative cards I've owned were all better then what Creative had out at the time. My GUS MAX was freaking nice...

Creative has nothing to worry about as far as remaining at the top, even with cards that are pretty bl3h.