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Should I buy a Asus Xonar SE or Sound Blaster Audigy FX?

'Tusk'

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Unfortunately there are no proper reviews of either of these cards on the internet despite them being the 2 top selling sound cards in the world.

The sound blaster says SNR of only 106db where as Asus claims to have 116db

Not sure which would sound better on my Sennhieser HD58x or HD6XX

I notice creative claims to have a 600ohm Amp and asus says 300 ohm.

An interesting thing to note I once had a Topping D30 DAC
 

twsecrest

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For driving the 300-Ohm HD6XX, I would spend a lot more then what the Xonar SE or Audigy FX cost.
 

AnalogSteph

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Audigy FX:
Uses a MAX97220 headphone driver (on front and back outputs), like their E1. That gets 2 Vrms from a 3.3 V supply, thanks to an integrated charge pump. 22 ohm output impedance, plenty OK for 300 ohm cans. Distortion across frequency is quite flat at around -80 dB 2nd and not too impressed by output loading, I've seen much worse from this kind of IC. Performance degrades in the bass though. Always sounded fine to me with HD580s.
The audio codec is a Realtek ALC898, attached to a PCIe HDA controller. DAC is fine, ADC basically also is but digital filter periodic passband ripple isn't exactly measurement grade @+/-0.025 dB or so (ALC889 was better). Also, avoid recording at 44.1 and multiples, performance degrades a lot (PLL jitter?). Line in about 22 kOhm input impedance @ ~2 Vrms. Mic in is better than average for Realtek but bias voltage noise still obliterates (not very low) input amplifier noise.
Not sure whether that's fixed yet, but the Win7 driver at least has a somewhat annoying bug that lets the volume settings on FL/FR and the other channels go out of sync when alternating between front headphone and rear output and adjusting volume while headphones are in. The effects that are enabled by default are the first thing I turned off.

The Xonar SE seems like Asus' more modern answer to that particular card. Why modern soundcards always seem to be using USB audio controllers beats me, but whatever. No extra headphone driver is provided here, but from what I've seen the Realtek S1220A (ALC1220) should have half-decent headphone driving built-in, and can output 2 Vrms. From what I've seen the newer codec seems to be well-behaved even at 44.1. I may actually still give this one a shot myself. (I've been meaning to build a new PC for a while now and originally intended to use a Xonar D1 or D2, but from the looks of it the few Ryzen boards with PCI slots would still be problematic with these. Bummer.) SNR specs are close to the D1/DX, not sure about actual performance. Distortion should be substantially worse though. Drivers just might be somewhat less of a mess. (Looking at Amazon reviews, well, I'm not so sure.)
 

Schlippwhip68

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It is an thread but I purchased both the Audigy FXV2/DBPro combo and the Asus Xonar SE. Both are great cards and I doubt anybody will have any issues with either as far as sound quality goes. I rigged my HP Prodesk 400 G6 SFF with these cards and ran it into a Marantz PM6007 Amplifier with startling results. The sound quality is excellent.
 
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