 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Asus Zonar Essence STX. Now I talk about sound cards a lot and people ask me for sound card recommendations a lot and you know there's sort of lower end ones the whole Zonar line actually is just kind of awesome so whatever your price range is just buy a Zonar and you'll be fine but this one is like the baller Zonar. This is the Zonar with all the features that you need especially if you use headphones. So 124 decibels sound to noise ratio which is just ridiculous. I mean remember that decibels are essentially a doubling of, in terms of sound to noise ratio, it's a doubling of quality every time you go up three decibels. Ok so think, remember that. So when you see something that's 110 decibels sound to noise ratio that is like many times worse than this. Ok it has swappable op amps which means you can actually customize the sound of it according to your liking. So if you don't know what op amps are those are the the components on the board that actually do the amplification for the card. Ok so we're going to go ahead and start opening this up. The reason I'm opening this is because we're using it in like an ultimate system build guide so if I was picking an ultimate sound card for me personally this is the one that I would choose. Let's have a look at what Asus has to say for themselves on the box here anyway though. So industry leading ok with basically no distortion. Built-in headphone amp provides exceptional quality even with 600 ohms of impedance. Remember guys for context a Sennheiser HD800 is 600 ohms of impedance. So we're talking like spending well over a grand on headphones before you're going to run into the limits of what this can drive. Nikicon Fine Gold Capacitors offer great dynamic performance and uses audio capacitors which are actually different from the kinds of capacitors that some competing products are using on sound products whether it's built into a motherboard or whether it's built into a sound card where they're more like motherboard capacitors. Different capacitors will affect the way the sound comes out of the analog signal. Remember guys ok any of the music you're listening to is inherently digital. Any of the sound you listen to is inherently analog. So the process of converting that digital signal to an analog sound is extremely complicated and depends on every aspect of the design of the card. So everything from the processor to the DAC so that's the digital to analog converter. Everything to the... do they have anything on here about the EMI shielding? Ok well EMI shielding to keep just random interference that's bouncing around inside your PC from it from affecting any part of that process to the to the op amps as well. Everything affects the process. So moving right along perfectly shielded EMI free out. Ok there it is. Customize your sound card effortlessly with swappable app op amp sockets. You can just buy them online it's not a big deal. Ok in terms of driver features there will be digital live, there will be headphone, there will be virtual speaker, there will be Prologic 2, track sound 3D, vocal effects, volume, acoustic echo, oh acoustic echo cancellation that's kind of neat. Ok and let's go ahead and check out the card itself. So they have like an awesome picture of the card which we'll use to help us through the process. Oh yeah so guys if you if you don't know I'm running an ASUS S... what am I running? I'm running a Zonar Zense which is a similar card to this one but actually not quite as good. If I was going to pick my ultimate sound card this one would be it. So in terms of I.O. you've got stereo outputs so front right front left. This is if you're using an external amplifier so for for amplified speakers or something like that. Then you've got your amp headphone jack, your line in and your SPDIF. This is your digital out. So this is a headphone lovers sound card. This is not for you know 7.1 or you know whatever sort of things that people think are fancy. This is for audio files who are interested in stereo speakers, high quality output to stereo speakers or high quality output to headphones. It does have front panel jacks so you can still plug in your front panel headphone jack and microphone jack but honestly guys if you're not using these ports you're doing it wrong with a sound card like this. Has a dedicated Molex power adapter or connector rather and that is because this card actually does draw some power in order to deliver that punchy sound at a moment's notice. It also has some very large caps going on which is going to help with that as well. You can see that while this sort of shield on here this EMI shield looks like it has gaps in it. There's only very small gaps so from the inside of the case there's almost no way for any kind of interference to get in there. You can see it's actually blocked. There's a copper piece that's right in there that makes it so that nothing can really sort of get in there. It uses PCI or rather PCI Express 1x connectivity. Remember guys that can be plugged into any PCI Express slot whether it's 1x, 4x, 8x or 16x. PCIe1, PCIe2, PCIe3. All of those standards are basically interchangeable for the purposes of something like a sound card. Here's an adapter so you can take those analog outputs and you can run them to just sort of a regular stereo jack. Okay here's an adapter for this so you can run smaller jack headphones or microphone off of this. Alright and then there is oh awesome I actually didn't realize this but this coax jack right here is actually optical as well so you just use the included adapter and you can get an you can do optical audio out from there too. Alright included documentation audio precision test report. Your individual sound card was actually tested and this was printed out from your sound card. So this will give you the full characteristics of your card this card that's in the box as opposed to being some kind of generic you know how a lot of high-end products come with like a certificate of performance or something like that that actually has no basis on this thing this physical object that's in the box not how it works with an essence STX this is a serious sound card. Alright we've got a thing about the philosophy of something in a picture of the card okay that I'm less interested in moving right along. We've got ASUS's driver disk. Don't use this download the latest off the ASUS website they're excellent also there's a third-party universal driver for Zonar cards that actually has a couple of extra features so that's kind of cool. Here's a sticker that you could put on something okay here's a quick start guide here's a wow there's a there's a lot of documentation in here slick there's another quick start guide there's two quick start guides are these the same thing oh no they have different part numbers on them okay and then there's a like another poster they have two posters included okay all right who um I think that pretty much covers it so if you're looking for a sound card recommendation my general recommendation is some kind of Zonar card if you're looking for a specific recommendation I would take this one personally I'm more of a headphone guy I don't use surround so that's that's the context of that recommendation from me but let's just see if we're missing anything here hyper grounding circuitry design okay oh I don't know if I mentioned but it uses a Burr Brown PCM 1792A digital analog converter so that's part of achieving that 124 decibel single noise ratio this one can do even better than that swappable op amps perfectly sealed analog output path with all that shielding and all of that good stuff and I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing first look at the Zonar Essence STX from Asus don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos