 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance K70 and K95. These fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming. Visit corsair.com slash Vengeance Gaming to learn more. Now I've always said when people ask me for a sound card recommendation, buy the cheapest Asus Zonar card that you can afford, or the most expensive one you can afford, whichever works best for you, buy an Asus Zonar. Now the reason I created the Linus Tech Tips forum was because a lot of the time there's people who know better than me, especially when it comes down to the nitty gritty details of a given category. And the audio sub forum reached out to me and said, yo Linus, we don't like that recommendation because it's not always necessarily true. There are great options out there and one of them happens to be the Fio Olympus E10 USB amp and DAC. And what this is, is it is a sound card alternative. So for those of you who don't know what a DAC is, it stands for digital to analog converter. And what it does is it takes a digital signal, which your music is, unless you're talking about like, you know, records or cassette tapes. So it takes a digital signal and turns it into an analog output that can be interpreted by headphones or speakers or other kinds of inherently analog devices. So it has a couple of advantages versus a sound card that goes inside your computer. Number one is it sits outside your computer. So you can use it with the desktop. You can use it with a notebook. You can use it with a PC, a Mac. It doesn't really, it doesn't really matter. It just plugs in via mini USB B. So there's that port right there, which I actually don't mind. Micro is the one I hate. There's been some confusion about this lately. So there you go. It just plugs in by that and then plugs into a USB port on the computer. Advantage number two is because it is completely removed from the internals of your PC, there's no real risk of electromagnetic interference. Now many internal sound cards have things like shields on them, but obviously it's better to move away from the EMI and put an aluminum shield over the whole device anyway. So without further ado, oh yeah, right. The next advantage is superb sound quality at a very low cost. So Fyio is particularly known for this. They are extremely upfront about exactly what components you're getting inside, what kind of specs they're running. In fact, you can go on the specifications of their website. They're kind of like Swift Tech this way, where other water block manufacturers are just like, oh, it has the best flow. It has this, it has that. Where Swift Tech just takes all their blocks and runs scientific comparisons and just gives you the straight grass. It's like, look, this is how it performs exactly. So on their site, you can check out things like response curves and you can actually see they're not just saying, oh, well it has a, you know, flat frequency response. No, they're actually telling you exactly how much it has. And then to go along with the base boost button, which is right here. So there's actually a plus three decibel base boost. They actually show you what the curve looks like once you've enabled that as well. And it looks quite good. So you're getting quite a lot of base up at the, I guess I should mirror it. So you're getting quite a lot of base up here. And then it comes down into more of that flat curve that you saw before you enabled base boost. Now the more steep that line is, the more punchy the base will sound, particularly at the low end. And the more gradual that line is, the more it's going to affect the mid tones as well. But of course, because you have this data, you can make an educated decision before you buy the product. Now let's take a close look at the Olympus itself. So here on the front, there's a potentiometer, which is their fancy way of saying volume control. That is what happens to be inside of a volume control unit. But most, most people won't necessarily care too much about that. There's a volume, or not volume indicator. There's a power indicator LED, the base boost button I talked about before, in all likelihood I would keep that off. However, if you do like more bass, it is recommended to use base boost that's built into a high quality amp and DAC versus using something in software. Because and I guess I'm about to go on a bit of a rant here. Software EQs are not the be all and end all. I was talking about, I was talking on Twitter about the audio output quality of the HTC One and I was complaining about it and people said, oh, we'll just get power ramp and set up your EQ. No, no, no, no, no, no. I have power ramp and I've set up my EQ. That doesn't change the fact that the hardware inside the HTC One is not as good as the iPhone 4, which is what I was comparing it to. There is no substitute for better hardware. So yes, using hardware to adjust EQ settings will be better than using software, at least in this case. And that's what file has to say about it and I tend to agree with them. On the back of the unit, we've got the USB in, we've got a coaxial out. Now this is kind of a funny one to me because coaxial is going to be carrying a digital audio signal and it won't be amplified. So you've got a DAC and amp and then you're going to send a non-decoated, non-amplified anyway. So the purpose of it is if you wanted to run something like an AV receiver, which has its own amp and DAC off of like your MacBook, which obviously doesn't have a coax out, then you could go USB in to coax out and then you could play your music off there. If you really wanted to do something like that, but whatever. Also on the back, there's a line out. So you can use that to plug into something like powered speakers. So it really does take the place of a sound card in your system and particularly for mobile users where it's difficult to add a sound card or for people who don't necessarily have more expansion slots, like if you run an ITX machine or MATX machine that's full of graphics cards, these can be a fantastic option. On the bottom, there's one thing that I had actually missed there. So there's a low or high gain switch. This is basically for headphones that are lower or higher impedance. So you want to turn the gain up if you have high impedance headphones and the E10 can handle up to 300 ohm headphones. And then you want to turn it down for anything down to it's rated to around 16 ohm headphones. So 16 to 300 ohms. The last thing that's included are eight little rubber feet. So you can actually put those wherever you want it. If you wanted it to stand on this way, then you could do that or this way or you could put all eight of them on at the same time. I don't know. Whatever the reason they include eight is, they include eight of them. And I guess what's left to wrap up with is why this? Because Fyio has a ton of different products, some of which are just amps. So they're meant to take a source from something like an MP3 player and just amplify it. If you have higher impedance headphones that are going to not run very well directly off of your iPhone or Android phone or whatever else, they have regular DACs that don't include amps. They have an MP3 player. They have a wide variety of products. So the reason that we are going to start with this one is because it is of particular interest to PC users. It's only around 70 bucks, which means that if as long as it's outputting pretty darn decent sound, which to my understanding it should, haven't tried it yet, but it will, that makes it very competitive with other sound card options that are available. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and overview of the Fyio E10. 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