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Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim

Michael Brown — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:00:00 -0600

A very necessary evil

There’s no good reason for the existence of Asus’s Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim soundcard, and yet it’s a godsend for those of us who want to hear the high-definition soundtracks on so many of the Hollywood movies released on Blu-ray disc. Blame Microsoft for the contradiction: No one would need a product like this if Vista provided a protected audio path.

After all, this card doesn’t decode Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks, nor does it enhance the audio or the video; it just passes the signals through to your A/V receiver. Using the included HDMI cable, the card takes the output from your videocard, re-encrypts the soundtrack so that no one can intercept the bit stream to make a bit-perfect copy, and outputs the encrypted audio and video to a second HDMI port. For those without HDMI, Asus also includes a DVI-to-HDMI cable.

The protected audio path requires a software component, too, so Asus bundles a copy of ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre with the Xonar. Not your favorite media player? Too bad, it’s the only one that’s compatible. For what it’s worth, we don’t have any complaints about the program. There’s nothing objectionable about its user interface; it can handle all the major codecs; and it supports BD-Live, so you can access whatever online content is linked to the movie you’re watching.

Your home-theater PC will downsample Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks unless it provides a protected audio path such as Asus's Xonar HDAV 1.3 cards do.

Asus actually has three cards in its Xonar line that are capable of pulling off this trick. The HDAV 1.3 Slim, however, is the only low-profile card in the lineup, and it’s available only in a PCI formfactor. That’s unfortunate considering that our current favorite home-theater PC platform, AMD’s Live Home Cinema, ditched that aging standard.

So we dragged our desktop rig, which is currently outfitted with an HIS Radeon HD 4770, into our home theater for this evaluation. We connected it to a Yamaha RX-V665 A/V receiver, which is in turn connected to a 42-inch ViewSonic N4285P LCD television. We used Klipsch Reference Series RF-35 loudspeakers. In terms of image quality, the PC clobbered the Samsung BD-P1600 stand-alone Blu-ray player we used for comparison. But the Xonar card doesn’t perform any video processing, so we can’t give it credit for that; more importantly, the PC didn’t sound any better than the Blu-ray player. Then again, the PC would be forced to down-sample the soundtrack without the Xonar card in the loop.

To get lossless Blu-ray audio out of your PC, you'll need to also play the movie using the included ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre player.

The HDAV 1.3 Slim has a front-panel output header that you can connect to your enclosure’s headphone jack, and a four-pin auxiliary input header you can connect to your TV tuner’s analog audio output. The mounting bracket has an S/PDIF output that can accommodate both coaxial and optical connectors (with an adapter), along with the aforementioned HDMI input and output. The card is compatible with the HDMI 1.3a specification and supports all three of its optional features: Deep Color (up to 48 bits per pixel, compared to HDMI 1.0’s 24-bit color), the xvYCC color space (which means the card uses the full range of values in an 8-bit space), and both lossless audio codecs.

Nonetheless, there’s really only one reason to buy an HDAV 1.3 Slim: So you can enjoy the splendor of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks while taking full advantage of your home-theater PC’s video capabilities.

Asus Xonar D2X

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:23:19 -0500

Much hay has been made of the incredible speed advantages PCI Express offers over PCI. Beyond GPUs, however, we haven’t found much worthy of occupying those slots. Asus hopes to change that with its Xonar D2X card—the first soundcard we’ve reviewed that makes use of the PCI Express interface. The D2X is basically a PCI-E version of the Xonar D2 (reviewed April 2008). In our review of the Xonar D2 we lamented the card’s lack of advanced EAX support—EAX 3 and above are proprietary to X-Fi-chipped soundcards, making those cards the obvious choice for gamers who want the best audio quality.

Or maybe not. With the Xonar D2X, Asus has done an end run to get a level of advanced EAX support in the card—but it’s not without controversy. The D2X instructs games that it has EAX 5, and the card’s drivers then shunt the EAX calls into its own effects engine. The results are far from perfect. Using EAX compliance tools, we found that the drivers didn’t support many EAX functions, such as reverb and filtering. Asus even admits to this. But the hack at least gives the card access to some functions that were previously locked up, such as support for additional audio streams in Battlefield 2—one of the handful of EAX games even available.

We’re more troubled by this card’s PCI Express support. Our D2X simply wouldn’t work on two different EVGA 680i SLI motherboards, and users have reported issues with nForce 790i boards as well. Asus tells us the problems are related to a BIOS issue that is being corrected by board vendors. Nvidia confirmed that it is working on a BIOS update that should be out by the time you read this. The D2X worked fine on Intel P35, AMD 790FX, and MSI nForce 750i boards.

The Xonar D2X uses the same audio codecs and offers the same I/O ports and Dolby Digital Live support as the D2. The D2X, however, requires a floppy connector for power.

In game frame rates, the PCI Xonar D2 was slightly faster than the D2X. We surmise this is due to superior drivers for the D2 or the PCI-to-PCI-E bridge chip on the D2X. Either way, the differences are minimal, and frankly, frame rates should no longer be the primary factor in soundcard decisions. Far more important is audio quality and gaming API support. In these areas, the Xonar D2X does well. The audio quality, rated at 118dB, is quite good, with no transient audio ghosts. The Auzentech X-Fi Prelude (reviewed April 2008) edges the D2X in our 24-bit/96KHz audio-file listening test, but honestly, both cards sound great and far exceed onboard audio.

So what would we buy? It depends. The advanced EAX in the Xonar is flawed, but it sorta works. If you want a full EAX 5 card, you have to go X-Fi. But that limits you to PCI, as the PCI-E version of the X-Fi lacks advanced EAX support. That makes the Xonar D2X the most feature-rich PCI-E card today, and that’s not a bad place to be—even if the EAX is faked.

Asus Xonar D2

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:16:09 -0600

Who’d have thunk it? Long considered a dead zone, soundcards are making a resurgence. Driven by an outcry for audio that doesn’t sound like a box of snap, crackle, pop every time you access your USB ports, manufacturers are releasing new soundcards that surpass the free audio that comes with your motherboard. This month, we test an Auzentech card that uses a Creative Labs chip and Asus’s new entry into PC audio.

Asus tries to hide the origins of the Xonar D2, but it’s the same CMedia Oxygen HD 8788 audio processor (or a slightly tailored one) that’s featured in several other vendors’ soundcards; still, the Xonar D2 features the best implementation of this proc. The Xonar also uses very good Brown Burr DACs to achieve a 118dB signal-to-noise ratio, which is slightly lower than the Prelude’s 123dB rating. Most people probably won’t hear the difference, but we still give the Prelude the edge over the Xonar card. One editor also felt that the Xonar D2 was a bit too bright with some jazz tracks. Despite this, both listeners gave the card high marks.

We love the card’s color-coded LEDs, which let you easily identify the green or red plug. It’s definitely easier than squinting to find tiny colored stickers. We were also impressed by the Xonar’s high frame rates in our gaming tests, despite its lack of a DSP.

Keep in mind, this card supports only EAX 2, while Creative has reached EAX 5. Of course, everything above EAX 2 is proprietary, so Asus couldn’t support EAX 5 without a lot of reverse engineering or a license. As you’d expect, game-audio rendering is quite good on the Xonar, but not as good as the Prelude with its full EAX support.

While the Xonar has an edge in home-theater use due to its real-time Dolby Digital encoding, the Prelude excels at gaming and general PC use.