ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim Sound Card

You don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate the enhanced surround sound effects from Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio found on most Blu-ray Disc movie discs over the standard Dolby Digital or DTS formats found on standard DVD movie discs. The lossless audio compression formats and/or the two extra channels of sound output really adds a significant amount of realism to the whole movie watching experience. The problem is most HTPC owners don't have the ability to experience these enhanced formats due to a lack of sound cards on the market that can support these formats. Benchmarkreviews has the ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card that does just that. Benchmark Reviews have put it through a series of tests and have determined whether HTPC owners can rejoice or not.

Finally, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio has arrived for the desktop computer. It used to be that if you wanted to watch a high definition Blu-Ray disc on your PC you had to listen to the audio in a downgraded form such as Dolby Digital which is probably fine for most people. However, if you're an audiophile or someone who just wants the best possible sound and will settle for nothing less then this is just not acceptable.

About ASUSTek Computer, Inc.

ASUS, a technology-oriented company blessed with one of the world's top R&D teams, is well known for high-quality and innovative technology. As a leading company in the new digital era, ASUS offers a complete product portfolio to compete in the new millennium. In 2007, one in three desktop PCs sold was powered by an ASUS motherboard; and the company's 2007 revenues reached US$6.9 billion.

ASUS products' top quality stems from product development. It's like learning Chinese Kung-Fu; one must begin with cultivating the "Chi" and inner strength. Besides innovating cutting-edge features, ASUS engineers also pay special attention to EMI (electromagnetic interference), thermal, acoustics and details that usually go unnoticed to achieve complete customer satisfaction. ASUS notebooks are the first TCO'99-certified notebooks worldwide.

The requirements for this honor include radiation emission control, energy (battery consumption), ecology (environment friendly) and ergonomics. To succeed in this ultra-competitive industry, great products need to be complimented by speed-to-market, cost and service. That's why all 8,000 over employees of ASUS strive for the "ASUS Way of Total Quality Management" to offer the best quality without compromising cost and time-to-market while providing maximum value to all customers through world-class services.

With unyielding commitment to innovation and quality, ASUS won 2,568 awards in 2007, meaning on average, the company received over 7 awards every day last year. BusinessWeek has ranked ASUS amongst its InfoTech 100 for the 10th straight year. ASUS has also achieved the number one title on the annual league table of Taiwan Top 10 Global Brands with a brand value of 11.96 billion US dollars.

Passion for Technology is the heart of ASUS. We continue to invest in our world-class Research and Development so that we are always able to provide leading-edge innovations to people and businesses. Quality is of utmost importance to ASUS. We continue to refine our quality management process to ensure customers receive quality solutions cost effectively. Long-term Relationships, whether they are our customers, media, shareholders or consumers, we believe in growing with our partners at all levels. Relationships with those key stakeholders are one of the most important factors of our continuing success. Perseverance, all ASUS employees share the same sense of purpose. We thrive under pressure and we look forward to challenges. And all of us are working to accomplish the same mission, to empower people with innovative IT solutions.

ASUS HDAV Xonar Features

World's First HDMI1.3 Audio Card with True Blu-ray Audio Designed to Fit All Home Theater PCs
- World exclusive true blu-ray audio playback
- Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD-Master bitstreaming
- Full-HD Audio/Video digital output
- Supports cinematic 24p frame rate
- Low-Profile design to fit HTPC chassis of all kind

Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim Specifications

Closer Look: Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim

At first glance, I couldn't help but notice the packaging because this is the first time I've seen a retail box with a matte finish on it. I guess I've just gotten used to seeing glossy packaging on most retail boxes of PC components. The ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card is still nicely presented in a way that's attractive and informative without being gaudy or obnoxious.

A look inside will reveal a standard quick start guide and a couple of DVD's, one of which is the driver software and the other the TotalMedia Theater software installation disc. There is also a S/PDIF optical adaptor if you won't be using the HDMI or coaxial inputs.

To my surprise an actual three foot HDMI cable is included in the retail box and so is a DVI to HDMI cable. These cables if bought separately can be quite expensive so it's definitely a nice treat to see these included. You also have a low profile bracket included for use inside of a small form factor HTPC case.

The ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card itself has that ever so classy black and gold color scheme that you used to see on luxury cars or maybe it was the Trans Am in the Smokey And The Bandit movie, regardless I still like this color combination.

The front of the ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card reveals the two HDMI jacks and the coaxial digital audio output jack. The HDMI jack on the left is the input jack that receives the video signal from your video card. while the other HDMI jack outputs both the audio and video signals to your audio/video receiver.

You can also see the two very little screws that you need to remove in order to swap out the bracket for the included low profile bracket. In doing so I found that even using a very small eye glass screw driver was just too big for these screws. They are very tiny which unlike the ASUS EN9400GT GeForce 9400GT HDMI video card I recently reviewed, has much larger screws that can be easily removed with a standard screwdriver. I'm not sure why ASUS chose to use standard screws on the video card but not this sound card, it would've been very beneficial if they had.

Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim Detailed Features

The Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card is essentially a spin off of it's bigger and older brothers, the HDAV 1.3 and HDAV 1.3 Deluxe models. These are essentially full sized sound cards that include analog outputs as well, whereas this sound card is specifically designed to fit inside of a small HTPC case. What intrigued me is that this card uses the legacy PCI slots whereas it's older siblings use PCI express slots. It would be interesting to know the reasoning behind this.

Also interesting is the mixed use of electrolytic and solid state capacitors in such close proximity to each other. I'm sure this has more to do with economics than any other reason.

Here you can see the ASUS AV200 High-Definition Sound Processor which is essentially ASUS's flagship chipset that makes decoding Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio possible.

The Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim includes a standard front panel audio I/O header which is the only analog connector on this card considering that the rear panel only has digital inputs and outputs.

The Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim also provides a single 4-pin audio input header that was commonplace for older CD-ROM drives that have direct analog audio outputs. These are pretty much obsolete nowadays since most audio is handled digitally via software but the Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim provides one anyways as an added convenience.

I have to say I am surprised at the overall simplicity of this sound card. There are very little electronic components on it when compared to most other sound cards available.

Xonar HDAV Center Software

The Xonar HDAV Center Software is bundled with the ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card. The Xonar D2 driver supports OpenAL, SVN and DS3D GX. It also has a pretty cool interface stylized like a pocket media player. Upon installation, the control panel shows a minimum of controls, a volume control, and a large information display with current settings and a spectrum analyzer.

The group of five buttons in the bottom right corner of the audio center window enables the DS3D GX feature and one of three sound processing presets: games, movies, music. The HF option, on the contrary, disables all processing. The rest of the controls are hidden under the sliding cover of the information display.

The SVN button near the volume control activates the volume normalization mode which may come in handy when you are watching a movie with quiet voices and loud special effects. This feature is not good for games as it makes shots and explosions sound distorted. Here you can choose the bass frequency, specify the number of speakers, choose the data format for the digital output, and change the Dolby surround sound settings that are enabled by the presets.

As with most sound cards, the reproduction mixer is independent from the recording mixer, which makes you press an extra button when you need to adjust your recording settings. The original control panel from C-Media contains the reproduction and recording settings on the same page, which is handier. The problem is the Xonar D2 Audio Center has no level indicator although C-Media's panel has two such indicators.

On the Effect tab you can see several settings of the environment and an equalizer. I'm guessing only the four most popular environment variants are placed on the buttons while the rest are in the drop-down list. When you select a variant from the list, you need to press another button to enable it. There is also a lack of the option to adjust the reverberation intensity which may or may not be an issue depending on your desires.

On the FlexBass tab, you can adjust the amount of bass among all your speakers. The cross-over slider determines the threshold below which all frequencies are sent to the subwoofer and are cut out from the small-size channels. For large speakers, low frequencies are not cut off.

Rightmark 3DSound Testing

Testing Methodology

The sound cards I have to compare with aren't capable of decoding Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound formats but they are 7.1 channel cards and the tests I will use won't actually test the Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound format decoding capabilities. Instead I will use RightMark 3DSound (v2.3) which is an independent synthetic sound test for benchmarking hardware features and quality of software support, specifically using the RightMark 3DSound: CPU Utilization test. All tests were run using the DirectSound test battery, and were configured with a frequency of 192,000 and 128 buffers.

Even though the sound cards I'm using to test and compare with have very different features and chipsets, they all offer audio quality up to 24bit/192kHz over eight channels. The sound cards I'll be using to compare with are the onboard sound from my EVGA 790i Ultra SLI SPP Chipset motherboard and a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS.

Test System

• Motherboard: EVGA 132-CK-NF79 (NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI SPP Chipset)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale Socket 775 LGA @ 3.00GHz (Overclocked @ 3.85GHz)
• System Memory: OCZ 2GB DDR3 Dual Channel
• Disk Drive: WD Caviar Black 640GB SATA with 32MB cache
• Monitor: SOYO 24-Inch Widescreen LCD Monitor (1920x1200)
• PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower W0155RU 1000W PSU
• Operating System: Windows XP Service Pack 3

Results

EVGA 790I Ultra Onboard Sound DirectSound 2D CPU Usage

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS DirectSound 2D CPU Usage

ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim DirectSound 2D CPU Usage

From the charts above, you can see that the ASUS Xonar HDAV sound card is not the same card as the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS. While sound output quality may be identical, the CPU usage is different. The ASUS sound card has a much steadier range of CPU usage whereas the Audigy2 CPU usage is all over the chart. The DirectSound 2D tests showed that the Sound Blaster card peaked at 6% and dropped to as low as 2% CPU utilization, while the ASUS HDAV sound card stayed between 3.5% and 2.5%.

EVGA 790I Ultra Onboard Sound DirectSound 3D+EAX CPU Usage

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS DirectSound 3D+EAX CPU Usage

ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim DirectSound 3D+EAX CPU Usage

Again, for the DirectSound 3D and EAX test you see a similar pattern for each sound card. However, the Audigy2 CPU usage dropped to 3.5% at peak levels and 1% at it's lowest level while the ASUS HDAV increased CPU usage to between 4% and 3%. This just illustrates the ASUS HDAV sound cards intended purpose and that is not to serve as a gaming sound card but instead one that will be used to process Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio for HTPC owners who intend on watching Blu-Ray movies.

Passmark Soundcheck Testing

Testing Methodology

There really aren't a lot of testing programs out there for audio processors. In many ways, it becomes unfair to test one against another unless they share the same input/output interface.

Passmark offers a testing program named SoundCheck, which monitors the bitrate output and CPU usage. For testing this set of sound cards, I used the highest settings the SoundCheck software would allow. In each test, SoundCheck's sample rate was set to 128,000. I really would have liked to see a higher rate, as to really stress the cards, but it didn't exist in the program. Next, the channel setting was set to 2 stereo channels and the resolution was set to 24-bit. Finally, the sound buffer was set to 1MB and the white noise test sound was played.

Test System

• Motherboard: EVGA 132-CK-NF79 (NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI SPP Chipset)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale Socket 775 LGA @ 3.00GHz (Overclocked @ 3.85GHz)
• System Memory: OCZ 2GB DDR3 Dual Channel
• Disk Drive: WD Caviar Black 640GB SATA with 32MB cache
• Monitor: SOYO 24-Inch Widescreen LCD Monitor (1920x1200)
• PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower W0155RU 1000W PSU
• Operating System: Windows XP Service Pack 3

Passmark's SoundCheck (v3.0.1001) is a software-based tool for benchmarking the CPU usage and bitrate delivered from the sound card.

EVGA 790I Ultra SLI Onboard 7.1 Channel Sound

To begin the testing the set, I started with the onboard audio chipset. With the onboard audio enabled and the Soundmax HD driver installed, I used Passmark SoundCheck to measure bitrate output. I was a bit surprised to see that the average data rate output actually exceeded the number requested with the onboard sound but this was consistent with all five times the test was ran. Also the CPU is the highest of the bunch but that is to be expected with any onboard sound solution.

SoundCheck Test on EVGA 790I Ultra SLI Onboard 7.1 Channel 24-Bit Sound

• Average Byte/Second Data Rate Output: 768,876 out of 768,000 requested (+0.11%)

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS 7.1 Channel 24-bit 192KHz PCI Sound Card

Moving onto the Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS from Creative the CPU load drops dramatically down to an average of 1.8% but the average bitrate loss jumps to (-0.20%).

SoundCheck Test on Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS 7.1 Channel 24-bit 192KHz PCI sound card

• Average Byte/Second Data Rate Output: 766,488 out of 768,000 requested (-0.20%)

ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim 8 Channel 24-bit 192KHz PCI Sound Card

The ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim offers the lowest possible average CPU usage at 0%. You can't get any lower than that so it is obviously the most efficient in regards to CPU load. However, the bitrate loss is the highest at (-0.23%)

SoundCheck Test on ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim 8 channel 24-bit 192Khz PCI sound card

• Average Byte/Second Data Rate Output: 766,247 out of 768,000 requested (-0.23%)

ASUS Xonar Final Thoughts

Most DVD movie discs have a Dolby Digital or DTS soundtrack encoded onto it which are both 6 channel audio formats and when used with a receiver that can decode that soundtrack, it can provide an excellent surround sound experience that simulates what you would experience in a movie theater. With the release of Blu-Ray discs, the audio formats have changed. You still have the option for Dolby Digital or DTS but you also have enhanced formats called Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio both of which allow for up to 8 channels and potentially more. Just by adding two extra channels for surround sound, you have sound effects coming from all around you and not just behind you and in front. The sounds come from the front, the rear, and the sides from where you're sitting which really adds to the realism of surround sound.

Most sound cards sold today are advertised as 7.1 sound cards but that doesn't mean they can decode the Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound formats. Due to the bandwidth limitations of Toslink and coaxial digital cables, these new formats cannot be carried across those mediums. Instead they're transported on the HDMI cable to the home receiver where the sound is then directed to each speaker. This sound card does have a coaxial output jack but it can only be used for Dolby Digital 5.1 output. You have to use the HDMI outputs in order to experience the Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound formats. This sound card is basically identical in features to it's older and bigger brother, the ASUS HDAV 1.3 with the exception of it being a slim profile thus making it more compatible with smaller HTPC cases.

HDAV 1.3 Slim Conclusion

I particularly liked the packaging ASUS has put forth with the Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card with it's non glossy matted finish, it's just a nice change from the norm. Of course, I also liked the whole black and gold color scheme, it just adds a certain touch of sophistication and quality. I didn't particularly like the very tiny screws that hold the mounting bracket onto the sound card, I found it much too difficult to replace it with the low profile bracket. I would've liked to see all solid state capacitors used as well and not a mix of electrolytic and solid state capacitors.

Overall the ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card performs flawlessly processing Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio signals and sounds incredible when mated with a decent home audio/video receiver. I also like the low profile design of it since HTPC cases tend to be small and limited on air flow. It's just a perfect solution in that regard. Currently NewEgg sells the ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim for $149.99 which is a premium price to pay but you do get a premium product along with two HDMI cables that really adds to the over value.

In conclusion, if you're an audiophile and/or want to experience the Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio surround sound on your HTPC and you have a need for a slim profile card then you need the ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card. The original HDAV 1.3 sound card had some driver compatibility issues with certain operation systems when it was first released but I believe most of the bugs have been worked out. I was also only able to test it with the Windows XP SP3 32 bit and Windows Vista SP1 64 bit operating systems. I didn't experience any issues at all and everything worked flawlessly. I sampled several Blu-Ray movies with the Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio formats and every one of them sounded incredible. It was sweet music to my ears.

Pros:

+ Slim profile
+ 8 channel Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio decoding
+ HDMI cables included
+ Low to no CPU load

Cons:

- Low profile bracket difficult to install
- Mixed use of electrolytic and solid state capacitors
- Premium price

Ratings:

• Presentation: 9.50
• Appearance: 9.00
• Construction: 8.00
• Functionality: 9.25
• Value: 8.50

Final Score: 8.85 out of 10

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