 Welcome to an unboxing of something that is honestly a little bit outside the scope of my expertise. Let me start by saying I love good sounding audio, whether it's music, movies, or games, but this is in a completely different class from anything that I have experienced before. This is the Zonar Essence 1 USB DAC and headphone amplifier. It is, according to Asus, the world's first 8x symmetrical up sampling DAC. And we're going to go ahead, we're going to flip it around. I'm just going to be doing a very, very high level sort of coverage of exactly what this thing is and why you might care. And then we're going to be following this up on my NCIXcom channel with a more detailed look at exactly what it is and why it's so special. So this is the Zonar sort of symbol that the Tiger that is sort of representing, according to Asus, the mankind's endless pursuit of the essence of sound and also Zonar Essence STX's commitment to offer the best quality ever from an audio card. So that is what Asus believes they've done here. This is your ultimate DAC solution. Extreme audio clarity with 120 decibel sound to noise ratio. The difference between this and other 120 decibel sound to noise ratio devices we've seen in the past is this one has the testing to back it up. So I would actually believe it. It has a built-in headphone amp which powers up to audiophile class headphones. That is up to 600 ohm impedance headphones. No big deal, right? User customizable tone characters with 11 swappable op amps. So two of those are on the headphones and the others are not. So you can change completely the way that the DAC sounds just by changing out to different op amps. Between the sound, thanks to dedicated internal power supply, Asus has put a lot of effort into the power supply that is inside this unit in order to minimize any interference or electrical noise that might be transmitted to the sound that you are listening to. So we'll check out the packaging here. We've got foam on the top there to keep it from getting damaged in any way. This unfolds here. This is a very expensive piece of kit. I should probably preface this entire unboxing by saying that this is not something for your average Joe computer user at all. It is very, very hefty and this is not an internal device as I probably should not have to explain at this point in time. This is meant to sit next to your computer and it is Asus' response to other high-end audiophile class USB DACs but in their estimation should pretty much turn the entire rest of that market on its ear because it will pretty much blow away everything else in their estimation. If you guys are interested in specs, they are here although I would, like I said, I haven't done as much sort of reading as I would be required to do in order to understand exactly what all of that stuff means. I mean, what I do see here is that they've specified every component they're using. So for the audiophile guys out there who are really interesting in pairing this up with a Sennheiser HD800 or something along those lines, you're going to know exactly what chipset it's using, exactly which op-amps it comes pre-configured with and exactly what this thing is capable of. So package contents. Let's move on here to the accessories. Alright, so we have a headphone jack adapter. We have a power cord inside. Just like, oh, look at that. I got an international one. Well, it's okay. It's just a standard PC one so it is capable of accepting, actually that's one of the cool things about the power supply, it is capable of accepting any voltage input. So you can use it in North America, you can use it in Asia, you can use it in Europe, doesn't really matter. Includes a USB A to B cable. And then what's in the other box here? Fascinating. So they managed to include only, yeah, they managed to not include only the one that I would be using with this particular device. So there you go. Okay, let's have a look at the unit itself then, shall we? Man, that's heavy. So here we have our power switch. We have our up sampling button. We have our input selector. So we can use coax, Toslink, or USB, mute button. This is your volume adjustment. And this guy right here, nice big knobs, is your headphone volume. Finally, here is your headphone jack on the front. The build quality of this thing is outstanding, actually. It just feels like a piece of audio equipment, which is a far cry from what you get with your typical PC equipment. Alright, so here is your unbalanced output. Here is your balanced output. So you do have the option of using either, and they're each connected to a different set of op amps, so you can customize how you want each of these outputs to sound. Here's your coax output. Here's your Toslink, or rather input. Here's your Toslink or your optical input. And finally, here is your USB input. You're going to want to make sure you select the correct voltage. In this case, I'm going to have to change that to 115 before using the device. And then it comes with a little sticker covering up the power port, and I'm going to leave that so that I don't accidentally screw this up when I go to plug it into power. So who is this for? Total audio enthusiasts who want to use it on their PC, although you are not bound to using a PC, you can use any digital audio source. And I would sort of suggest that most of the users who are going to be interested in a product like this are going to be using that port and not the stereo outputs that are here on the back, be it the XLR or the coax out. I would suggest most people are going to be using this as a way to drive their high-end headphones and deliver the most pure sound, regardless of the volume level. So the thing about a high sound to noise ratio is that even at a very low volume level, you should still be able to enjoy all the different aspects of the music and hear the entire range very, very clearly. However, if you do prefer more of a warm sound or if you prefer more emphasis on the bass, then you can actually customize this guy, whether you're using the ASUS software or whether you're actually changing the hardware of the unit itself. It's fully user customizable and there are no warranty void if removed stickers. Yeah, you can take the whole thing apart if you really want to. So you can actually color the sound that way to match your preferences. Now ASUS is comparing this to decks that are in the neighborhood of $1,000 to $1,500 that exist on the market right now and are quite well regarded. However, this guy is going to be coming in at a significantly lower price point. So 8x symmetrical upsampling. ASUS is touting the upsampling as a huge feature of this deck and I can see why they do that for a number of reasons. Number one, they have the hardware to back it up. Number two is the fact that so much of the digital audio that you can obtain these days is very low quality, but not everyone necessarily wants to go to the trouble or the expense, although if you're really that worried about the expense, I don't think you're buying one of these, but neither here nor there. Not everyone wants to go to the trouble or the expense of purchasing or finding the high quality audio that they require. So here's a little quick lesson on bitrate and sample rate. And so the bitrate is basically how high quality of a sample you're taking of the audio. We didn't really have this with analog because it doesn't really work quite the same way. With digital, everything is in terms of hard to find numbers, kind of like how pixels don't necessarily equate to the image quality we saw on an analog screen. It's just a different way of doing things. Okay, and then the sample rate is how many samples at that quality that we're taking per second. So ideally, you would have a very high sample rate and a very high bitrate. So upsampling takes your how many samples and your bitrate here and tries to smooth it out to make it more like how the artist would have intended for you to hear the audio. So why is 8x symmetrical upsampling important and what exactly does that mean? What it means is that it can upsample 8x from a variety of different sources. So I'm going to equate this to actually more of a video example. So when you're playing older games that didn't support high resolutions, especially when LCD monitors first came out, so I got a 24 inch 1920 by 1200 monitor and I did that for a very specific reason. The reason for that was that when I took older content that was running at 800x600 or was running at 1600x1200 and I upsampled particularly from 800x600 to 1600x1200 with black bars, I was getting exactly a 1 to 4 relationship between the pixels that I have and the pixels that it's being upsampled to. So this is not a perfect example because that resolution change doesn't add any additional quality to the image, but what it does do is it is an even multiple so we're not going to lose any quality by dithering one pixel between sort of the surrounding ones and blending the colors and using cheats and hacks like that in order to increase the resolution. So think of this as your audio resolution. So Asus' explanation here is that common upscaling USB DACs transfer whatever audio source to 192kHz indistinguishably, however some audio sources that are lower quality and you would want to upsample do not evenly multiply to 192kHz. So that's why the symmetrical 8x upsampling allows you to have two different destinations, so two different upsampling quality levels for the different audio sources. So it's kind of like the display example I'm giving you guys where you want to not lose any quality while you are trying to increase the quality. So as I mentioned before here we have a slide about the signal to noise ratio, whichever you prefer, and that is basically Asus comparing to some other well known USB DACs. Like I said you have so many sound cards, I mean you can go back as long ago as an Audigy 2ZS and they are claiming well in excess of 100dB signal to noise ratio, it's kind of nonsense. My expectation for an audiophile grade product like this is that this would be the actual signal to noise ratio that they have achieved, but I haven't tested it yet. Now the higher up you get in terms of headphone quality, the more power is required to drive the, I mean they become speakers at a certain point rather than being just headphone dude ads. So yes, you require an incredible amount of power to drive very very high end headphones and they are saying basically, I mean this is sort of iffy whether or not a regular normal headphone amplifier can drive a 300 ohm or anything above 32 ohms, but the point of this is that they are saying there is this capable of up to 600 ohm impedance headphones which is pretty much getting up there about as high as it goes. So this is a fascinating way to do product development and I think it is such a step in the right direction that it definitely merits a mention. Check this out. So they actually, besides testing, I'm sure they tested them, besides testing them, they actually selected the capacitors that they are using on the PCB based on what would interfere the least with the quality of the audio based on checking out hi-fi forums like DIY Audio and Headfy.org. So that is one way of taking user feedback and integrating that very closely with the development of a product because the reality of it is the guys who they are going to try and sell one of these to already know that they want these particular capacitors, which kinds of op amps they want to throw into the device and you are not going to sell it to them unless you are using exactly what they want and Asus went and figured that out ahead of time. So in short guys, if you don't already know that you need one of these and if you don't know what all of these numbers meant and if you don't have the money to spend on a high quality audio solution then this is pretty much not for you. This is a very niche, very high end product. Is it a replacement for a sound card? Yes. Is it a replacement for a sound card for every gamer and every guy who sits and listens to their iTunes library and their computer? No. This is a very specialty product. It will deliver better audio quality than almost anything else you can hook up to your PC but you got to pay to play and I got to say I am definitely looking forward to checking this out but for myself personally I don't think I would be running out buying one of these because if you don't have the hardware to properly take advantage of it and by hardware I don't mean your PC because your PC is irrelevant. It uses the onboard chipset in order to completely eliminate any quality interference that could come from a low quality PC or low quality sound card, whatever the case may be. But I'm talking hardware in terms of the headphones you're using, the, I mean it's not really hardware but the audio sources that you're listening to. You're going to want to make sure that you're properly equipped to take advantage of a guy like this before you go and set one up in your home. So thank you for checking out my unboxing on Linus Tech Tips and don't forget to subscribe to my NCIXcom channel as well because once I've had a chance to actually play around with this a little bit I would love to give you my impressions.