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To test today we used a variety of compact discs, including (but not limited) to:
Peter Gabriel – UP
Norah Jones – Come Away With Me
Ryan Adam & The Cardinals – Jacksonville City Nights
Neil Young – Gold Rush
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Symphonies 29, 31 ‘Paris', 32, 35 ‘Haffner; and 36 ‘Linz'
Haftor Medbee Group – in perpetuity
Queen – A Night At The Opera (remastered)
Mike Oldfield – The Songs of Distant Earth
A Perfect Circle – Mer De Noms
Diana Krall – Love Scenes
Cara Dillon – After The Morning
Pavlo Beznosiuk – Johann Sebastian Bach – Sonatas & Partitas for Solo Violin
We immediately noticed that the Asus Xonar Essence One delivered extensive bass response, making it ideal for lovers of electronic and rock music. With Queen's A Night At The Opera, the Essence One was able to resolve lower frequencies with vigour, without dominating the sound balance. We did find that with Sonatas & Partitas for Solo Violin that the sound was a little too rich for our tastes, although the Audeze LCD2 headphones are well known to create a warm, bass rich sound environment.
Sound staging was impressive, both wide and dynamic, this was particularly noticeable with the Diana Krall CD, highlighting her position just left of center stage well. Krall's breathy vocals were delivered with clarity and impact, yet were warm enough to realistically capture her unique style of delivery. Some of the credit obviously has to fall to the Raysonic CD228, taking the harsh ‘edge' from many of the digital recordings.
The wonderful Mike Oldfield recording of ‘The Songs Of Distant Earth' was reproduced with passion and instruments were accurately positioned within the soundstage. Dynamic range was also exceptionally noteworthy and I enjoyed how the whalesounds were reproduced later in the recording. Ambient noises, such as low level background female vocals were easily able to be picked out from the wall of sound. This is one of the Essence One real strengths – being able to accurately hear every instrument within a complex, high grade recording.
There is no doubt in my mind that the detail of the Essence One is clearly a level well in excess of other soundcards I have tested in recent years. It still isn't perfect mind you, as I noticed that when compared with more expensive solutions that the sound could appear a little more compressed within the three dimensional soundstage.
Vocal reproduction deserves a special mention, Norah Jones, Ryan Adams and Neil Young all sounded very alive with only a hint of ‘digital' processing occurring on some of the tracks. This may sound negative, but I have been listening to so many sources over the last decade that I can generally tell when a recording is digital by nature.
The internal amplifier on the Xonar Essence One is certainly impressive, with a sound balance firmly on the dark/warm side. The range is focused, although on a few occasions with complex classical recordings it tended to reproduce a slightly imbalanced range of frequencies, focusing more on the lower, bass registers. This really is splitting hairs however.
I noticed when compared directly against the custom Little Dot MK VI+ amplifier that the Essence One wasn't quite as pleasant in the upper frequencies. Cymbals and subtle brushing against guitar strings wasn't reproduced as warmly, showcasing the negative side of solid state presentation. This might not be such a bad thing for ‘detail freaks', but I much preferred the slightly more subdued presentation of the tube/valve amplifier.
I was surprised how well the Essence One handled the Audeze LCD2 headphones, because they need a lot of power and control to sound their best. There were no problems under general listening conditions, however if the volume was forced to the last 20% then we could hear some minor clipping and distortion. This isn't realistic however as the level of volume would cause hearing damage on anything approaching close to long term conditions.
Using the USB port to a computer suffered a noticeable drop in quality, as I would expect considering the dramatic differences in source material. There are no real problems to mention, as ASUS recently updated their drivers to fix audio distortion and noise. I used an LG bluray burner to play back some uncompressed audio files from optical disc to the Essence One and the quality was fairly good, although after listening through the Raysonic CD228 player, I could easily pick up differences in dynamic reproduction, soundstaging and digital artifacting. That said, one costs £4,000, the other £180.
You don't need to spend a fortune to notice benefits by using the Essence One however. If you want to play MP3's via the Essence One through your computer into a decent pair of headphones, such as the Steelseries Siberia V2 or Corsair HS1A, then the sound will be very lively and enjoyable.
beautiful looking design. They always made good sound cards and products, b ut their drivers for PC are normally really weak.
very nice, but I agree with above., their audio drivers have always been dire. its surprising really considering their motherboard software is normally prettty good.
very specialised design, but im interested. need a new amplifier and this seems to be ideal for both my PC and other things.
Thank you ! been waiting on a quality review of this for a long time. Great design, im buying one now. I want something that is more versatile than that tube amp you use, but wow, nice setup man.
hardcore. asus have such a big range of products. very high quality. I have never had problems with their drivers dont know what people mean……
2 questions…
1. What cable where AND are you using to make such difference. I am an audio/video professional and never heard of such.
2. USB affected what exactly? USB is a digital connection.
If you are referring to the headphones, I tend to use cables from Double Helix in America – they make a huge variety of high grade cables for a variety of products. I am surprised as an ‘audio/video professional’ that you have never heard of such a thing. There is a whole industry devoted to various kinds of cable and some people swear by RS OCC Silver and others are even using cryo-treated Ohno continuous cast (OCC) silver. Whether you can hear the difference would be down to a: your ears b: the partnering equipment.
USB is a digital connection? Sure, it is, but it was designed mainly for computer peripherals. When you factor in transmitting audio through it, there are other dependencies, such as drivers for the operating system (which can be problematic) and interference and crosstalk with other digital circuitry inside the computer. Audio quality can be improved not only by cabling but with the purity of the signal. Some manufacturers use balanced four section DACT attenuators to precisely control the input signal of the input/gain amps. Therefore a USB feed from a computer is never going to be as pure or free from signal pollution as a high grade amplifer with dedicated audio output, built from the ground up for a single task of delivering the purist signal possible. I will say that downloading some of the studio master, uncompressed files from linnrecords in the UK was a very impressive experience via the computer, even over USB.
Apologies but I think I may not be clear.
I understand there is an industry of so called high quality cables using exotic techniques and elements to make extremely expensive cables. But having an industry does not necessarily mean scientific justified. I mean there are a whole industry based on “anti-aging” creams, diet pills, and palm readers.
I would love to see a independent lab testing results (with clear methodology) that illustrate the differences and not just subjective reviews with catch phrases like “clear mids” “powerful lows” and “soaring highs”.
I am sorry but your USB explanation is not standing on technical grounds. I work all day with broadcast film, TV and music projects with well known producers and artists.
USB signal is a digital signal. It is possible to transfer errors through transmission but it is not possible to reduce dynamic range and such. Cross talk, in the way being used here, is an analog phenomena. You might mean digital interference but that is a different thing and cannot affect the signal the way you describe it.
Having a bad HDTV reception does not make the color less saturated. You get digital errors (blocks, and such) but anything regarding range is an analog terminology. At best you are using analog explanations for a digital phenomena.
If I get a cheap USB cable with my scanner do I get less digital information???? And that less digital information means my dynamic range is smaller???
Yes drivers can affect the signal but that assumes there is a process involved. If it is a pass-through then no (assuming errors and error correction is proper levels).
Many studios record and use devices that uses digital connection like USB, firewire, AES, SDI, etc.
Interesting views. Is listening to music meant to be an entirely ‘scientific’ process? Exotic cabling is a matter for debate, sometimes i can tell the difference between a cheap cable and one costing many hundreds of pounds. Sometimes i can’t. There are debates ranging everywhere on the topic. To create an analogy of comparing human ears listening to music to that of a scanner receiving digital data is the most unusual I have ever heard. People aren’t cyborgs. ‘errors through transmission’ is one of the greatest areas that audiophile hardware tries to negate in a manner of ways.
One of the finest real world tests, is to get a hold of sennheiser hd800 headphones. Use the stock cabling for a while then try an exotic cable based on silver, or a silver and copper hybrid. The sound, especially the bass will be improved noticeably. Obviously depending on your source. Dynamic range alone does not translate to ‘perfect’ sound incidentally. This is why people still use valve/tube technology with tubes sourced from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. Does that ‘scientifically’ make sense when compared to the latest high grade solid state technology ? probably not, but the sound quality to many ears is significantly better.
This probably cant be scientifically measured either, but its plainly audible. Same as listening to a well recorded piece of classical music via good interconnects and a high end cd player. Then swapping the audio disc to a cheap sata computer optical drive, and listening via a usb sound card with windows drivers in the mix.
Its like chalk and cheese. But if you want a graph showing how it sounds better via my ears, i cant do that. If you dont believe the comments then thats fine, its not like a video card and acquiring xxx frames per second at xxx resolution with xxx imge quality settings.
I envy the fact you can enjoy all this without spending any money at all on source, cabling and output. Some people can. In your specific case I dont know why the Asus Xonar is even remotely interesting, you will be more than happy with standard onboard audio, stock cabling and headphones/speakers.
Why do people need to form an argument by saying they work ‘professionally’ in an industry? Its almost like saying ‘I can taste the burger better because I work in McDonalds all day’.
Digital crosstalk is a very big subject incidentally – with A/D and D/A CONVERSION/SAMPLING CIRCUITS. for an ‘expert’ to say ‘it doesnt exist digitally because I work with well known producers’ is ridiculous.
Quite a lot of information about it online…… scientific enough? 🙂
http://pdfserv.maxim-ic.com/en/an/AN1842.pdf
The capacitors are Nichicon Blue and not unbranded as mentioned. The volume pots are APLHA Taiwan and not ALPS Japan.
Hi ron,
Thanks for the info, appreciate your time.
I am planning on getting this DAC/Amp and would like to thank you for the wonderful review. It helped me make up my mind about getting this product.
Coming to the whole issue of USB related quality deterioration you have mentioned in the review, I have to kindly disagree with you on that. As an electrical engineer, I can agree with you on the merits of using specific materials and manufacturing processes to improve the conduction of analog signals between audio components. But, when it comes to digital data transport between digital devices (controllers), electromagnetic or other interference with the digital transmission has ZERO effect on the audio information being transported.
Yes! There might be some errors in the packets being transmitted from the system to the USB controller on the DAC, but these packets are packaged under specific protocols that ensure a high degree of error correction. So, when the packets are decoded and decompressed within the DAC, the audio information is 100% replica of that on the source file.
The only issue with USB transfer of digital data is the clock jitter due to the internal clocks of the source and destination not being in sync. This is taken care of by this DAC through the implementation of Asynchronous transfer protocols.
Also, any degradation/latency as a result of decoding and resampling of audio data within the computer is of no issue, since digital data is directly routed to the USB bus from the source file (bypassing the OS and onboard audio hardware), thanks to the bit-perfect data transfer protocols. Hence, data from your CD or lossless digital audio files, is exactly replicated at the other end (I2C output on this DAC) of the digital transport bus (USB in this case).
Hence, if anything, USB gives you the best option to transfer digital data to the DAC with ZERO loss of actual audio information. The only use scenario where this setup would have issues is when the computer develops hardware issues related to either the USB bus or the port-connectors.
You probably saw a degradation is quality due to the USB controller on the DAC being 24bit/192Khz and the DAC itself using 32bit/384Khz upscaling, while your source encoding was something else. Such combinations do tend to cause issues with audio quality, at times.
Anyway, thanks again for the great review!
Thanks for clearing that up Rahul, I also wondered about the USB cable issue and you seem to know what you’re talking about. digital is digital and only when things get to an analog signal distortion comes into play. This is of course as long as there is no filtering of the digital signal in between from something like codecs or otherwise, but a cable in and of itself shouldn’t affect sound quality from point A to point B.