New sound card and headset

[Tom_Tunes]

Hope this is the right place. :cool:

I am learning to pimp my PC up with sound.

Have used several headsets so far, um. Bose, turtle Beach Z6a, now have Logitech G35. Have been recommended into the world of adding a sound card, plus trying a new headset. Not used sound cards before, I see it is a simple thing to add it to the PC.

Here is the details of recommended parts, wondered if anyone has used these, or think of something better maybe.

ASUS Xonar Essence STX Soundcard

Beyerdynamic MMX 300 Headset

PC:
W7
SSD Drive
12GB Ram
GTX680

Programs:
CoolEditPro2
Reason4

[bobbasrah]

As the irish might say, "I would start from here...."
The STX is a very good card, and there are plenty of tweaks available to improve it, BUT
Ultimately it is a card that is parked inside the machine, and however much better motherboards and PSUs are, there is a lot of shit flying around in there, and your investment will be worth little in a couple of years or less when the latest must have hits the market.
I went usb out to an outboard externally powered DAC with a little headphone amp in it which sounded better than the Asus at the time. Now there are loads of external DACs out there many with Headphone amp out such as the Bushmaster, or the 02 from Epiphany Acoustics for second.
You might be surprised what your options are....

[AlfaGTV]

Agree with Bob here! This really is a delightful can'o'worms once you get into it. :D
I also own and sometimes use the Essence STX, with great results. I deliver my music to it using J River Media Center and of course the ASUS own ASIO driver.

I have exchanged the output OpAmp on my card to a LME49720NA which bettered the original OpAmp clearly.

The card manages to drive most headphones to an acceptable quality level also, even if ive never tried any Beyer Dynamics at home..

Regards /Mike

[alan47]

+1 for the 02 Dac/Amp from Epiphany.Best pc setup i have owned so far,works very well regardless of which phones i hook up to it.Hard to beat headphone amp for the money.

[Andrei]

Have to agree with what has been said so far. I have 7 pcs in my house and all but one have soundcards. Two of the soundcards are an Asus Xonar ST and an Asus Xonar STX. The ST is a tad better but not much in it. For a few hundred bucks you can have Hi-Fi, not high-end but still real Hi-Fi. Also I also recommend upgrading the op-amps: cheap, but a little bit fiddly to do.

The comment about the noisy environment is correct but that problem can be mitigated - Simply by using good quality components eg Solid State Drives, third party Noise filters, High Speed Ram etc. Software tweaks such as playing from Memory (very easy in Foobar 2000), or disabling Windows services and other programs that are running also help. My Lounge PC (the one without a soundcard) has anti-virus and firewall disabled. You can also apply damping material such as dynamat to metal surfaces to the case or hard drive.

I also tried using the Xonar to run via co-axial to an external DAC (Moon 100D) but the results were not worth the investment. The Xonar is so good that you need a really excellent DAC to get an improvement. If you go that route it should preferably be one with a Sabre DAC chip that has jitter suppression.