Sound card choices aren’t what they used to be, you could consider it a good thing given the improving quality of on-board solutions but sometimes you require something with a better feature set than integrated audio tends to deliver.
Elite Bastards has a look at the Asus Xonar DS sound card and how it handles a wide range of audio tasks. Here’s a look:
Where the Xonar DS really impresses at its price point is in terms of
pure audio fidelity – It may be bereft of the EMI shield used by other
Xonar boards, and it may have all of its hardware squeezed onto a far
smaller PCB than its predecessors, but this barely affects sound
quality at all. In our testing, the Xonar DS broadly matched the
Essence STX, and indeed Auzentech’s X-Fi Forte, in terms of analogue
audio quality for 16-bit operations, with the aforementioned Auzentech
part only gaining an upper hand for 24-bit, 96KHz playback. Add to
that the possibility of user upgradeable OPAMPs for the Xonar DS, as
per other discrete audio solutions, and you have room for further
improvements to audio quality to add to the mix.
A nice alternative to those expensive sound cards from the competition.
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