I am thrilled with the sound quality of this card. I can't imagine anyone complaining about it regardless of the cost of the rest of their equipment be it cheap or ridiculously expensive. It really is worth switching to analogue for music listening and then back to digital for games and movies.

Behind every pair of headphones should be a good sound chipset. That's the idea, and hopefully anyone who knows anything about good audio would adhere to that. For those who can't figure out why their big expensive headphones aren't quite performing as well as they'd imagined, read on; Large and...

Great quality; beautifully packaged; forms a deadly duo with high-end headphones

None come to mind

This card is great for sound quality, but lacks analog outs for surround sound, and there is no EAX support. Good for audiophile music and movies, but don't use this for gaming and definitely not audio production.

Great audio clarity; and selectable ohm setting for built-in headphone amp

-Requires a 4 pin molex power connector -Useless gimmicky EMI sheild, A clean power supply makes this feature redundant -Not a true PCIe card, it's actually a PCI card with a PCIe bridge chip -Slow ASIO 2.0 drivers; You're lucky to get 30 or 40ms latency.

Im not 100% satisfied with the shipping, thus the 4 egg overall experience. The product itself functions exceptionally. It is a 5 star audio card. I definitely recommend it for an htpc build, for watching movies and listening to music.

i got it on sale and am pretty happy with it; On krk rokits, corsair sp2500 and bland creative t40s, the stx makes quite a difference in sound quality; highs, mids and lows become very distinct; It offers a plethora of settings to enhance your music and movie experience.

asus software interface looks outdated. Not a huge deal, since it's mostly a set it and forget it affair, but it just looks windows 98 ish. The extra clarity works both ways; lossy and unprofessionally mixed audio files will become much more apparent.

This thing is simply incredible. Really worth every penny for any audiophile.

Well, firstly this is a nicely made item, sadly though it told me that i needed to install "Windows Vista" after I had installed it... REALLY?! Need I say more?

I'll start with the cons: The driver support for win 7 64 was so bad. You can look throughout forums for hours and find that no one's resolved this simple issue. After countless screwed up installs, restarts, driver sweeping, I said screw it.

New to sound; but I can yell you I've never been happier

took ages to figure out driver issues...; HOURS

As with most products, I was slightly apprehensive about the Xonar Essence STX before I heard it. I asked myself, how could a small, simple amplifier on a soundcard perform anywhere near as well as a standalone headphone amplifier?

The DAC; capacitors; and op-amps on the card produce an extremely pure and transparent sound; Hugely dynamic and accurate sound on any headphones using the onboard headphone amplifier; Headphone amplification works for the front panel (case) audio sockets; Flawless driver compatibility in Vista...

The GX mode isn't a 100% exact emulation of EAX

After running the rule over Auzentech's latest discrete sound card offering, the X-Fi Forte, recently, today we have the treat of getting to spend some time with the latest offering from another current discrete audio giant, ASUS.

With all the current fuss about getting audio data from a computer to a standalone D/A processor via S/PDIF, USB, FireWire, WiFi, or Ethernet (footnote 1), it has been overlooked that the oldest way to get audio from a PC is to use a high-performance soundcard plugged into the host machine's...