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I must admit, I don't often spend time with budget oriented audio equipment, especially mainstream USB driven DACS and amplifiers. There is no doubt in my mind however that the Asus Xonar U7 Echelon Edition can dramatically upgrade your audio experience, even with a relatively inexpensive pair of headphones. Compared to the onboard audio on most motherboards the Xonar U7 is a significant improvement.
Part of this review today focused on pairing up the £80 Xonar U7 Echelon with a pair of £2,000 Grado PS1000 headphones and a raft of 24 bit high definition audio FLAC files. As crazy as this sounds, we did want to thoroughly test the capabilities of the little USB driven audio DAC/amplifier and even measured the merits against an expensive Astell and Kern (player) / ALOAudio (amplifier) pairing.
Surprisingly, the Asus Xonar U7 Echelon was able to impress me, even after a direct A-B with the £1,200 amplifier/player pairing. Sure, it doesn't sound quite as open, or transparent as the portable high end configuration, but for a measly £80 it is extremely difficult to find fault with the Xonar U7.
Our review highlights that the source material is just as important as everything else in the audio chain. If you have been happy downloading poorly ripped MP3's online then it really is about time that you opened up your mind (and ears) to a wealth of 24 bit audio tracks available on HDTracks and Linnrecords.
The Xonar U7 Echelon Edition earns our WORTH BUYING award, it is a quality product priced modestly to target a wide audience. If you appreciate audio performance and yearn for something better than the sound processor built into a motherboard, then this really should be your first stop.
You can buy from Amazon, for £80 inc vat, over here.
Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.
Pros:
- Superb performance.
- Software is very capable.
- powers from the USB port.
- 24 bit / 192Khz playback possible.
- native support for OSX.
- new ‘Camouflage' finish is fingerprint friendly.
Cons:
- some driver install issues.
- no lovely driver panels in OSX.
Kitguru says: At £80 it is difficult to find fault, especially if you want an inexpensive upgrade to nasty onboard audio
Wow I love those headphones, seriously impressive stuff. Nice review too, good value from ASUS< which you certainly can't always say.
Its a great little device, seems amazing value for money, just ordered one from Amazon. Also kudos on teh headphones, I always wanted the grado 315i’s but this is just porn.
Well this is a good idea, the plain black version was a fingerprint magnet, i had it, until my brother nicked it for his new flat. I might pick this up, as I missed it for my 598s Sennheisers.
Those grados are massively overpriced, ive heard them – incredible bass and overall quality, but the price is ludicrous.
Interesting review.
I am sure it is a solid product and for 80pound it sounds great for some use cases (especially paired with a gaming laptop!)
I have to say, I am very sceptical of the subjective testing for quality though. I am lead to believe that non-double-blind audio testing is massively tainted by confirmation bias.
Not to mention seeing an article breaking down 16bit vs 24bit audio claiming double blind testing lead to a near 50/50 successful determination rate (implying subjects simply guessed).
I mean, I know people who swear on their life that when they swapped their $20 HDMI 1.4 cable for a $150 HDMI 1.4 cable “the picture got so much better, more lifelike and the colours really popped”! Hard not to believe that kind of bias wouldn’t occur when swapping from onboard to 80pound external then 1000+pound enthusiast gear.
So did you connect the Gardo directly to the headphone jack of the U7, without any external amplification?
Having suffered with this infuriating piece of garbage for 2 months I feel its time has come and ebay will be getting a listing. Using windows 7, the software has the following major flaws:
1. As pointed out in the review, you have to change the date on your machine to 2013 to get the software to install to start with – very clever Asus.
2. I play Guild Wars 2. The only way I can get a decent sound out of this heap of !@#% it to set it on Dolby surround playback or I just get a thin stereo 2 channel. OK but it doesn’t consistently keep its settings so half the time when I launch the game I have to go back to launch the echelon soe and spend ten minutes trying to get the sound back on my speakers. The sound through my speakers or ROG Vulcans when using headphones is no better than the onboard sound I was getting before so overall a big waste of time and money.
Nice writing review