Review and Measurements of Asus STX II PCI Sound Card

[bennetng]

There was a time when everybody blamed Creative drivers

In Windows XP and earlier when there was hardware level DirectSound 3D and EAX support for gaming. The bugs were mainly from hardware acceleration support.

In Vista and later those powerful Creative DSP chips are mostly useless apart from providing multiclient ASIO support.

 

[amirm]

Amir there is an equalizer on the Asus XOnar panel. I think by default it is enabled. So when you get to the equalizer and play a soiund - if it shows the bars going up and down, it is enabled even when it is flat. You probably want it disabled.

I have checked and it is all disabled.

 

[Sythrix]

And -110 dB:

View attachment 16674

It is strange that the level does not go below -95 dB or so and hence the huge linearity error. I am using their ASIO driver.

I clicked on its control panel and it says this:

View attachment 16675

So it is running in 16 bit mode and no way to change it (option above is grayed out).

Just FYI, I was able to change this, even grayed out, so it might be buggy.

There is a 3rd party driver for Asus sound cards (UNi Xonar Drivers) that claims to fix the problems which are present in the standard Asus driver. Maybe the 24-bit mode can work properly with this driver?

It would be interesting to see the results with a third-party driver. Would it possibly affect the linearity test differently with a different driver? Because that was really terrible...

 

[mindbomb]

@amirm

The asio driver defaults to 16 bits on this card for some reason. This could explain the sinad and dynamic range and linearity. You should be able to change the bit depth when nothing is utilizing asio, it is supposed to support 24 bit. The option is grayed out when it is in use.

The card does forced resampling normally with wasapi, but not over asio. It is supposed to aid with jitter i guess.

 

[amirm]

You should be able to change the bit depth when nothing is utilizing asio, it is supposed to support 24 bit. The option is grayed out when it is in use.

How do you bring up the asio control panel when not in use???

 

[mindbomb]

How do you bring up the asio control panel when not in use???

I use foobar2000 with the asio plugin. It allows me to open the asio panel without anything playing first.
file>preferences>playback>output>asio , double click on the device.

 

[TungstenC]

How do you bring up the asio control panel when not in use???

Here? I recall that there is an option for this during the installation for ASIO4ALL

 

[mindbomb]

View attachment 16688
Here? I recall that there is an option for this during the installation for ASIO4ALL

he's not using asio4all, he's using the asus asio driver

 

[amirm]

Here? I recall that there is an option for this during the installation for ASIO4ALL

I am not using ASIO4ALL. For some reason ASIO4ALL does not work with STX II.

I did find the control panel for it in the notification bar but it crashes as soon as I try to start it.

 

[bennetng]

From reviews I read in other websites I guess 24-bit mainly helps dynamic range and linearity of this card. For jitter I suppose there will be some improvements as well, but not much, it may be related to the controller chip on this card.

I guess the measured ~100dB SINAD and 0.001% THD+N is a realistic figure for this card at 24-bit since the PCM1792A is a bit old.

 

[amirm]

Somehow ASIO4ALL started to work and with a bit of playing around with grounding I can get to 101 SINAD:

 

[amirm]

Linearity starts perfect but then goes nuts:

Seems that there is a limiter of sorts???

I am going to go sleep guys. This card has a lot of gremlins.....

 

[mindbomb]

So what I think is happening is that with asio4all, the default volume setting of 50% (-10.5db) is actually on, whereas it doesn't affect asio normally.

Please try to get 24 bit on the asus asio driver. I think in the specific case of this device, it actually will measure better because there is no resampling or volume issues possible.

 

[XpanD]

Interesting review, thanks a lot for posting this!

I had the original STX (or was it an ST? can't find the order anymore) way back when, and had to return it due to the bundled drivers causing my computer to blue screen whenever I started specific games. Looks like I did not miss out on much, there...

Shame.

 

[sonci]

Is there any market for high end soundcards anymore? An external receiver can do most of the job and more, even for gaming onboard audio is good enough.
I remember using Dolby and Dts Live on Creative cards with gaming, is this still necessary for 5.1 gaming systems?

 

[bennetng]

Is there any market for high end soundcards anymore? An external receiver can do most of the job and more, even for gaming onboard audio is good enough.
I remember using Dolby and Dts Live on Creative cards with gaming, is this still necessary for 5.1 gaming systems?

The pro audio market has stopped making new internal and external PCIE interfaces since the market is small: PCIE slots can only be found on desktop PC motherboards, recent Mac Pros don't have physical access to PCIE slots, they need a Thunderbolt PCIE chassis like this:

The PC Card/ExpressCard standard for laptop is obsoleted and replaced by Thunderbolt. It supports PCI passthrough which offers better latency and higher bandwidth than USB.

As a result the "latest" pro audio PCIE cards are something like the 5-10 years old RME HDSPe AIO and Lynx E22/44, they are decent but due to the use of older components like DAC/ADC chips, are not as excellent as the latest offerings.

In the gaming market, Creative made some chips for hardware audio effects and mixing, as a side effect they also have a hardware SoundFont synthesizer, multiclient ASIO support, hardware monitoring, signal routing and so on. the CA20Kx chips are the most powerful ones the ever made:
https://www.creative.com/oem/products/chips.asp

However, since Vista, Windows' audio subsystem changed so much and made the hardware acceleration feature become useless. In fact the audio controller chips being used in current Creative cards (e.g. AE-5) are not as powerful as the CA20Kx in the original X-Fi released in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound#Windows_Vista/Windows_7

Back in the day I recall someone asked why hardware acceleration is necessary when people can do the same with software. A guy from Creative said theoretically it is correct, but in reality the processing needed to be fast enough to not interrupting real time performance. According to this review games gained higher FPS with better audio DSP chips.
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/multimedia/creative-x-fi.html

 

[Veri]

There is a 3rd party driver for Asus sound cards (UNi Xonar Drivers) that claims to fix the problems which are present in the standard Asus driver. Maybe the 24-bit mode can work properly with this driver?

Ah yes, can't believe I forgot about those 3d party drivers than did it way, way better than the official ones.

 

[mindbomb]

I think the asio driver is the same in both cases. A variant of this card was measured in stereophile. The difference between 16 bit and 24 bit is shown in a -90db sine wave.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/asus-xonar-essence-ststx-soundcards-measurements

 

[amirm]

So what I think is happening is that with asio4all, the default volume setting of 50% (-10.5db) is actually on, whereas it doesn't affect asio normally.

I caught and fixed that early on. As you see, the levels are above 2 volts as the should be.

 

[amirm]

I think the asio driver is the same in both cases. A variant of this card was measured in stereophile. The difference between 16 bit and 24 bit is shown in a -90db sine wave.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/asus-xonar-essence-ststx-soundcards-measurements

His harmonic distortion levels are lower than mine. That is independent of 16 versus 24 bits. So somehow there is regression in performance here.