Asus Xonar U1 - USB Audio station Review

 

Price Paid : £45 (Inc vat)  Postage : £8.50 (next day)

Purchased from : ebuyer.com

 

Unhappy with my current sound card i decided it was time to find a new one, my main goal was to get something i could use for gaming,  movies and ventrilo without compromising on quality by having an External USB card.

 

The main reason i purchased the xonar was for gaming and ventrilo on Vista 64bit, it has a one mic input and one headphone out but also comes with a S/PDIF optical out connector (that plugs into the headphone socket). The unit feels quite well built, initially from all the photographs i had seen i thought it was made of Plastic, but it is metal (possibly die cast) and has a very nice sleek finish. 

 

 

when i tried to get the unit going i was a bit disappointed, yes it does come with vista 64 bit drivers but installing them and getting them to work is no easy task, there is a splash screen that pops up whilst the installation of the drivers is going on in the background which stops you getting back onto the desktop or even the task manager, then because i have another sound card installed (creative xfi) A command prompt box appears asking me if i want to disable the sound blaster so it can install the Asus drivers, It is almost impossible to alt tab back to this screen and the only way i could read it was by closing the splash screen with task manager which was trial and error because i could not see it. I then decided to dump the drivers on the cd and got the ones from the Asus web site, this was the same deal as before but this time i just pressed Y (yes) to shutoff the xfi and rebooted. 

 

Now to the software, After rebooting i was greeted by and error message that said "Cm112eye.exe" had stopped working and it needed to close, this was very annoying since cm112eye.exe apparently controls the volume knob, the sound card did work though albeit with limited functionality (i had to restart the Audio Center software manually).

After about an hour of googling the Fault "KERNEL32.dll!SMapLS" i found out that a file in windows is to blame, the file is called : "Winmm.dll" and is located in : 

"C:\windows\system", Renaming this file to "winmm.dll.old" stopped the volume control program crashing (and fixed the audio center which was dependant on cm112eye.exe).

One thing i did notice though,  the volume knob gets Stuck at 92% if its turned up all the way, it wont go down past 92% unless its changed in software, Asus support did reply to my help calls but did not give me enough assistance with my problem, they don't even bother posting on their own Forums when people ask for help, after sending messages back and forth Asus told me to RMA the Xonar for a fault that is to do with there software, Not good. 

 

 

 

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.

  

 

 

 

Asus have raised the bar with the software suite for the Xonar, But at the same the installation errors make it difficult to use out of the box,  Im sure some people would just send the item back to the store for a refund if they couldn't get it working.  

I don't think the software being buggy upon installation is totally the fault of Asus, It could have something to do with Vista64bit (since messing with vista got rid of the problem) , Their support "engineers" should have been able to diagnose my problem though, telling me to RMA the unit because theres a few bugs and compatibility problems that they dont know how to fix is just terrible.

The sound quality of the xonar is exceptional, If you're looking for a good external sound card then this is definitely going to be a contender. The software bugs have to be taken into consideration though and at this price range they should be non existant, its not like the xonar is brand new either, i would expect these problems with products and the early adopters usually have to put up with them, after numerous software releases theres still a few things to fix, i just hope they get fixed in the near future.