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$90 Asus Sound Card Whips Creative's Best

EconolineCrush writes "Sound card giant Creative caught plenty of flak for its recent driver debacle, and has long been criticized for bullying competitors and stifling innovation. But few have been willing to compete with Creative head-on, allowing the company to milk its X-Fi audio processor for more than two and a half years. Now the SoundBlaster has a new challenger in the form of Asus' $90 Xonar DX, which delivers much better sound quality than the X-Fi, PCI Express connectivity, and support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding. The Xonar can even emulate the latest EAX positional audio effects, providing the most complete competition to the X-Fi available on the market."

14 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Am I paranoid to think that these hardware companies who are stingy with their drivers are mostly on Microsoft's tit Yes, esp. considering Microsoft has no tits and if it did, they'd be nasty man-boob type tits that nobody wants to see or even acknowledge their existence.
  2. Re:That'll teach Creative to be stingy about drive by jflo · · Score: 1, Funny

    I would suck the hell out of that MS Man Boob... aka the MSMBN - Microsoft Man-Boob Network -.... I mean seriously, how good would that milk be? Seriously.

    --
    WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
  3. Does it work with Linux? by Godji · · Score: 4, Funny

    Please don't mod me funny, I'm asking quite seriously. If it runs with open source drivers, does 7.1 and has hardware mixing so that I don't have to bother with dmix, I'm buying it tomorrow morning.

    1. Re:Does it work with Linux? by Godji · · Score: 5, Funny

      Come on people, this is not funny :)

      Somebody mod me down NOW!!!

  4. Why bother by hack++slash · · Score: 2, Funny

    Improved sound quality? What for? I've got tinnitus you insensitive clod.

    --
    To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
  5. Re:Kudos to Asus by 0xdeadbeef · · Score: 2, Funny

    WTF? Two girls one cup? On YouTube? That ain't going to last long. I think what you meant to post was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw

  6. You might be surprised by M$' man-boobs by PaulGaskin · · Score: 2, Funny

    And how many people are latched onto them. Just look at all the Microsoft-friendly interlopers who are trying to subvert the free software movement. These people are suckling at the M$ teats.

    --
    Freedom is free.
  7. Re:tell the difference? by maxume · · Score: 3, Funny

    Damn it, I wanted to crack wise about digital cables.

    I was going to go for something like "If a good cable costs $300, how much does a good DIGITAL cable cost?".

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  8. Re:tell the difference? by turing_m · · Score: 4, Funny

    Don't forget the $480 wooden knobs, for that rich, warm sound.

    --
    If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
  9. Re:Dead Issue by Boogaroo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Lemme guess, you can hear the difference in the sound when using the gold plated optical fiber cables.

  10. Re:tell the difference? by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well, actually with digital cables you do need to get a proper one, if you are doing a sufficient length. Now I say proper, not good, because what matters is impedance. Digital audio is pretty high frequency (as much as 25MHz for 192kHz stuff) and as such the cable acts like a wave guide as it does for video. Well, like with video it is a 75-ohm coax cable that you need. So while you don't need anything pricey, you do need to make sure you don't just use any old cable for digital audio.

  11. Am I seeing Solid Capacitors? by Wolfier · · Score: 3, Funny

    Neat! I look forward to the day when the electrolyte capacitors go the way of the Dodo.

  12. Re:EAX emulation... by Slashcrap · · Score: 2, Funny

    How much CPU does it use up like on an old Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2; all updates)? Sorry, no idea. I have figures for an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 939 system with Windows XP Pro. SP2 (IE6.0 SP2), but it's missing a few updates, so they wouldn't be of much use to you.
  13. Re:Sound Cards by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Funny

    At University I had a friend who was an audiophile. One day he came in looking very pissed off. I asked him why and he ranted that one of his female flatmates female friends had told him he was "the sort of man who stops having sex so he could turn over the record".

    All those complex arguments I tried to use to convince him he was wrong and that music really does sound better on a decent quality CD player than a vastly more expensive record player were so utterly outmatched by those few words.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;