Digital Trends

If you’re the type of audio enthusiast who delights in discovering nuances in musical recordings you thought you were already intimately familiar with, you’ll want to check out the Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card. This audiophile-quality sound card is a glittering sonic jewel.

If you’re the type who thinks MP3s encoded at 128Kb/sec sound just fine, on the other hand, no amount of praise we heap on the Xonar Essence will ever convince you that this card easily justifies its $180 street price—especially when even the least expensive computer can play music without needing any additional hardware at all.

But have you ever plugged a pair of quality headphones into your PC’s onboard audio and really listened to it? The interior of a PC is a harsh environment for audio, and most onboard sound systems do little to compensate for it. Listen carefully and you’ll hear noise and distortion worming its way into your music, irrevocably changing and diminishing what the artist worked so hard to record.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A PC can be an awesome high-fidelity component, and the Xonar Essence STX is proof. This card boasts very high-end digital and analog audio components, and it’s been vigorously engineered to eliminate the noise problems that plague the typical onboard audio solution. The result is the cleanest sounding PC soundcard we’ve laid ears on.