 Today I have another Asus Oxnar, rather Zonar, product to unbox. This is the mobile headphone amp USB sound card. So Asus' claim is that this can power up to 150 ohm headphones, which should basically cover anything out there as far as gaming headsets go. So this is a gaming oriented product, and they are saying that it can pretty much power any gaming headphones, and it is a great replacement for onboard notebook audio. So there is the USB device itself. You know what? Let's go ahead and get it open up here. And then we will talk about it in a little bit more detail. Actually, you know what? Let's do the back first. Okay. Audio chipset is a proprietary Asus one. It uses a USB-C port. Okay. It has LED indicators, play music and idle, LED on, mute, is LED off. Okay. Cool. Operating systems. Windows 7 and Vista and XP. Dolby technologies, including Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual Speaker, Dolby Prologix, and Dolby Digital Live. So Dolby Headphone means that you can use it for any gaming device. And then XP. Dolby technologies, including Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual Speaker, Dolby Prologix, and Dolby Digital Live. So Dolby Headphone means that you can use this sound card in order to power your regular stereo headphones in virtual surround. Okay. So that's sort of a preference thing, whether you like it or not. But you'll have the option. Analog output jack and digital SPDIF output combo. So it has a 3.5mm mini analog and digital combo jack. Cool. Built-in headphone amp with up to 98 decibels sound-to-noise ratio. Signal-to-noise ratio. Sorry. I always say sound-to-noise ratio, but I know it's not right. Okay. For 32 ohms. Cool. Okay. So you actually have three different gains that you can select in the software. So you can tweak it depending on what kind of impedance the headphones you're using happen to be. Analog input jack is a mic-in. Okay. So you can use this for your microphone as well as for your headphones. Okay. Driver features. You can just sort of look at that. You guys can pause if you really want to read that. Okay. Actually, you know, some of these are important. So the 3D. Yep. Normalizes the volume. Smart volume normalizer. Okay. Magic voice. That's kind of neat. Modifies the sound of your voice for VoIP and online chat applications. Hello. I'm Linus. Okay. That's not very good, but whatever. GX 2.5 enables the latest EAX audio. So that's EAX 5.0. And audio performance. So there's your audio performance specs right there. What else we got here? System requirements. Really? 256 megs of RAM. Also, I can't run this on like my Pentium One. Okay. Package contents. Okay. What else we got here? Some not English. Headphone amplifier. So extra bass punches and sound details by fine-tune headphone amp circuit. Okay. Whatever that means. What they're trying to say is that using a headphone amp, even a small USB powered one like this, and using a sound card, even a USB one like this, is going to be worlds better than whatever you're using on your notebook now. The exception might be notebooks that actually have high-end onboard sound, although those are few and far between. I have been an advocate for a very long time of using sound solutions that aren't totally horrible. So the Zonar U3 aims to achieve that on the notebook side. I would not necessarily recommend using this on a desktop, because that is not the intended purpose. But for a notebook, you can expect to have a significantly better experience. So you can output to a variety of different things, including, look at this. You can output SPDIF out to an amplifier, or rather a receiver. You can connect headphones and microphone. You can connect a line in audio source. And you can configure what all of these are doing through the driver. We also have included a USB extension cable. So this is going to allow you to not plug it directly into your notebook. Say you have a notebook that doesn't have enough space around the USB port, so you got other things plugged in. You can't fit sort of a bulky connector like this. Well, you can use the extension cable to just run it a little ways away. So let's have a look at the U3 itself. It's fairly straightforward, I think. There we go. It's got two things on the top that look like speakers, but they're not. Okay, it's got a cap, which stays connected, which is kind of handy because you don't want to lose it. Okay, it's got a split ring keychain attacher thing here. So in theory that will also help you to not lose it. There is your headphone jack as well as your microphone jack. Hold on, just a moment. So what makes this better than your onboard audio? In all likelihood your onboard audio is using an inferior audio chipset because that's one of the specs that Joe Average Consumer doesn't care about when he's shopping for a notebook. So they tend to cheap out on it. The other reason is that it is separated from the rest of the components that are inside your notebook. So there's all kinds of fan spinning and electrons moving around and high frequency switching going on. That causes all kinds of absolute havoc on audio equipment, which is designed to operate best, well, not designed to operate best, but is limited to operating best when there are very few sources of interference. So I would say you're going to get the best performance out of it when you actually take it and plug it into this and get it as far away from your notebook as possible. One of the other reasons is they use what they're calling X grounding in order to reduce even further the interference that can be caused by the PCB design itself. So that's good as well. One last thing I wanted to also mention, actually this is on my deck here, you don't have to look at that. So there's three different modes. There's VUIP mode, there's gaming mode, and there's excite mode. Basically those are just zero boost to the noise audio level, then there's a nine decibel boost, which also includes amplifying some of those higher range sounds, you know, the footsteps for you FPS gamers. And then finally the excite mode I think is more for viewing videos, so it's a little bit louder so, and is great for explosions and all that kind of good stuff. So thank you for checking out the unboxing video of the Zonar U3. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.