At $280 online, it’s definitely a luxury item, perhaps too big a step up for someone unsure whether they even need a sound card.įortunately, the Xense isn’t the only fresh addition to the Xonar lineup. Bundled with a gaming headset from Sennheiser, the Xense has all the trappings of a fancy sound card: high-quality DACs, replaceable OPAMPs, 1/4″ jacks, a headphone amp, and support for multichannel analog and digital output.

Now, some three years later, Asus is celebrating the Xonar’s anniversary with a new model dubbed the Xense. Asus first waded into the sound card market with the Xonar D2X, an ambitious high-end model that garnered a TR Editor’s Choice award on its maiden voyage. The iconic Sound Blaster may be stagnating, but other players are picking up the slack, notably Asus, whose family of Xonar sound cards has been growing faster than the Duggars.

You see, as integrated audio has improved, so have discrete sound cards. Some defend this position with the sort of passionate ferocity normally reserved for GPU flame wars. Onboard solutions have gotten better, too, causing many to claim that modern implementations are more than adequate for most users. Creative’s EAX positional audio standard is all but dead, and the rise of console ports seems to have squelched the need hardware-accelerated 3D audio entirely. They also lacked hardware acceleration for positional 3D audio, which was a big deal at the time.įast-forward to today, and the PC audio landscape has changed dramatically. Early onboard sound implementations were plagued by poor-quality codecs and board-level interference that translated to lousy audio quality. There was a time when the “free” audio integrated on motherboards was almost universally horrendous. Not too long ago, the answer to that last question would have been a unequivocal yes. How many CPU cores do I need? Will a GeForce or a Radeon deliver the smoothest frame rates in the games I play the most? Can I afford a solid-state disk large enough to be useful as a system and applications drive? How quiet can I make the rig without sacrificing performance? Oh, and do I really need a sound card?

When building a new PC, today’s enthusiast faces numerous important questions.

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