Plugging in 

 

I found plugging in my Headphones a little difficult as they designed the xonar with a headphone jack that is Set quite deep into the base, this means that if your headphones are a little on the chunky side you wont easily get them in,  I also found the USB cable to be a little short for Desktop use,  It would be fine for a laptop but when you want to plug the Xonar into the Back of your Computer and have it near your keyboard or on top of your tower,  so you can change the volume it is a little bit annoying,  I fixed this problem by using a USB extension cable.

 

Once I had got the Xonar up and running i was amazed at the sound quality, compared to my Xfi it is a lot clearer and very loud, i use it on about 16% in games it is that loud, the xonar uses a Cmedia chip set so i was quiet surprised as i have a couple of mini sound card dongles by them which are mediocre. The bundled microphone was very good, Its a stereo mic and when the Array Microphone setting is turned on it uses one mic to cancel out the room noise, I personally find the array mic setting makes the microphone sound very tinny and crappy sounding, so i rarely use it.

 

 

 

The software that comes with the xonar is second to none, compared to other sound cards i have used over the years where they advertise functions which don't really do much the Xonar is very impressive, the main window has a spectrum analyzer which is similar to something seen on Winamp and there is a selection of DSP modes which i haven't used that much since i don't find them that impressive.

 

 

 

The second Window is the Mixer, this has the basic functions of the Xonar with left and right levels and a mic/line in level function with monitor mode (more on that later).

The third Window has all the Equalizer functions,  The differences between each setting don't do much for me, I find the Metal/rock/s-rock modes make rock music sound really bad,

And there's no POP mode ?!?

The Karaoke window has some nice stuff on it, Firstly there's the Mic Echo which sounds a bit like an Old CB radio Microphone, Then comes my favourite bit about this software the "magic voice" settings, its basically a voice changer with 4 settings, the first one is a "monster" setting which is a deep booming voice (my favourite), the second is a "cartoon" voice that i find sounds very shrill, like a hyper 5 year old, there's there's the stand Male/Female voice changer modes which are not much different from third party voice changer software.

The Key Shifting, only seems to work when you're listening to music/movies and does nothing to your own voice,  Same with the Vocal cancellation.