The main purpose of this blog is for me to review bits of kit I like, hate, or get sent from kind folk. For my first trick, I will be reviewing the Asus Xonar U3, a USB sound card.
What's that? A U. S. B. sound card? Surely it's pants, review over.
Oh ok, I'll give it a fair
You can pick these up for about £30. Compared with some others, this is pretty good.
"What is the point of this device?" I hear you cry. "Why did you get this when you already have a Xonar D2X in your main rig?" However, this is made to boost the audio quality of your laptop/netbook. My laptop is now 5 years old and has on board Realtek. I will be comparing it against this. Obviously audio quality is subjective; What I think sounds good might make an audiophile cringe. For playback, I will be listening to Queen. Why? Because.
I will also be testing the input over TS3 and Mumble. All tests were done using my Razer Carcharias headset for both input and output tests.
Wonder what you get for your £30.
TA DA!
The device arrives in a nice neat box. Seems a little large for something that is about the size of a large USB memory stick. The box has one of those nice "ooooo open me to have a look at what is inside" flaps. Upon opening, you are presented with your sound device. Gloss black, even has plastic film on it to protect it.
Let's get the contents out.
We have -
The Device
S/PDIF TOSLINK optical adaptor
USB Extension Cable
Quick Start Guide
Driver Disk
Sadly, I do not have the capacity to test the optical adaptor, so that will not be covered in this review. However, I would like to point out that it comes with a rubber sheath to protect the connector, always good to know your device should arrive protected and in 1 piece.
THE DEVICE.
Interesting. First off, it's light. Very light. Makes it feel cheap. However, the different components all line up, construction is sound and the USB cover makes a convincing *CLICK* when placing it back on. You know that thing is going to stay in place. The USB head itself is also well attached; I have USB sticks where the USB head is going to just fall off.
As you can see, Asus have cleverly looped the 2 parts together with the keyring... however if I'm completely honest this seems pointless addition - I wouldn't carry this on my keys, it's too large. It's bigger than my Blizzard authenticator which I deem to be the right size for putting on your keys. Personally I would make the cord longer and tie it to the Kensington lock on my laptop.
The Xonar uses the standard 3.5mm jacks for input and output. Good, I dislike proprietary connectors. Let's get this set up on my laptop to see what the software is like. The casing is quite wide, and if your USB ports are in a row it will partially block them. That's probably why they gave you a short USB extender. Another tick for Asus.
Anyone with a Xonar card will be familiar with this layout. I'm not going to pretend I know what most of these things do, but more options is generally a good thing. I'm not sure what the KARAOKE button does, nor why it is all in caps. Quite frankly, it scares me.
When you mute the sound, the lights on the device turn off. Very good feature if you like to disable the sound notification on the task bar.
Let's do some tests. I picked a track I knew very well and listen to it on the Realtek onboard using the front audio jacks on my laptop.
Oh dear. Tinny and distorted, missing bass power and poor distintion of left/right audio.
Xonar time. Very impressed, a BIG improvement over the onboard solution. Deeper, stronger sound. Made the onboard sound solution look embarrassingly bad. Not up to the quality of the D2X, but SO much better than the Realtek.
I wonder what it's like for games?
Every Tuesday evening I play TF2. I disabled the Xonar on my gaming rig and tried the USB one. No one commented on a drop in mic quality, meaning that my mic was the limiting factor here. Good. Normally when you try a new sound card you are greeted with "OMG WHO THE HELL ARE YOU" over VOIP. One thing that is sorely missing from this device is an on board volume control - luckily my headset has one in line, but others might not be so lucky. Compared to my Xonar, it was a little lacking - but to be honest, this is to be expected. If I had hardware failure it would do in a pinch.
One thing I did find when I removed the device after the test - the underside was a little on the warm side. Not enough to concern me, but it's not something I expected.
Let's round this up. For £30 you have a device that vastly superior to onboard audio solutions. Would I buy one? If I had a gaming laptop for LANs, but was not happy with the audio quality, definitely. If I had a netbook and streamed audio or video to it, damn straight I would consider this product.
Obviously if you have a tower, either use the now semi-decent onboard solutions (Asus for example have designed the layout of some boards to reduce interference for the onboard sound or put it on a daughterboard) or, like me, get a decent PCI-e card. I'll also keep mine with me at LANs in case the worse thing happens - hardware failure. Or, Idy comes along and sets fire to his sound card again.
TL; DR version:
Pro: Decent sound and build quality. Price won't break the bank. Good for mobile computers and back up hardware.
Con: Large for a dongle, oversized box is a waste of materials, lack of onboard volume control, "cheap" feel due to weight/size ratio.
I'm not going to give it some arbitrary number or grade. This device does exactly what it is meant to - offer a decent alternative to onboard audio solutions. And it does this well.
Good review. Well written. Saw the link to this on overclockers.co.uk. How did it sound with headphones?
ReplyDeleteGood, no bleed from left/right audio and bass was present. Not near the D2X level of audio, but so much better than the onboard stuff. Like the review said, I was using the Razer Carcharis headset, so its not some shoddy quality one.
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