High fidelity: ASUS Xonar DG soundcard review

Bennett Ring
06 March 2011, 9:00 AM


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Music to your ears (and wallet), this affordable sound solution means you can put an end to the days of enduring onboard Realtek.


The road to high-quality audio can take one of two paths: the first being a set of expensive speakers paired to a power-guzzling amplifier, costing upwards of $1,500. This path is littered with the remains of sleep-deprived relationships and angry neighbours. The other path is much more affordable, and less relationship-destroying: high-quality headphones. Using a set of decent headphones is a cheap and easy way to get the best sound quality possible, but today's onboard audio chips will pollute a good set of cans with static and poor audio reproduction. Enter the ASUS Xonar DG soundcard, designed specifically for the headphone-equipped PC user.

Powering this audio card is C-media's Oxygen HD CM18786 sound processor, which is mounted on a PCI card – unfortunately, ASUS has removed the PCI Express connectivity found on other Xonar soundcards, which may be an issue in today's PCI-lacking motherboards. Maximum recording and playback quality is also limited to 24-bit/96kHz, half that of other Xonar cards.



Headphone gamers will appreciate the inclusion of Dolby Headphone, which emulates 5.1 surround sound over stereo headphones. However, one of the key features of the Xonar series has been given the chop; the DG can't do multichannel digital encoding in the form of Dolby Digital Live. This means that the card can't output 5.1 sound in-game over optical, falling back to stereo instead. It's only an issue if you want to game with speakers hooked up via an optical cable.

Blind listening tests of the DG, testing game, movie and music performance, showed that this card is leagues ahead of the Realtek onboard audio solutions most users endure. However, it's not without problems - we found the Xonar drivers have an issue when using the optical output. This connection turns itself off when not in use, leading to a large popping sound whenever it wakes up. This is an old Xonar problem that still hasn't been resolved, and it's disappointing to see that it's still an issue.

It's not a deal breaker though, and the ridiculously low price of this card makes it an absolute no-brainer for PC gamers who need an affordable, yet high quality, headphone solution.

Available from ASUS, retailing for $40.
APC rating: 8/10 (Highly Recommended)


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FostWare (New user):

"put an end to the days of enduring onboard Realtek."
and then
Powering this audio card is C-media's Oxygen HD

I didn't realise the Xonar's used C-Media, but I had a hearty laugh since not that long ago, people despised the onboard crappy C-Media and the Realteks were a breath of fresh air for cheap on-board audio.

06 March 2011, 2:44 PM (2 years ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

ss-rotel (User):

ooohhk. Anyone remember the Hecules 7.1 sound cards? One of the best sounding, (at the time), expensive, (compaired to what was readily available Sound blaster gear), sounds cards one the market.

AND they used c-media chips. Hell, i have one in a box upstairs, and if i could get it to work in win7, (managed to get it to work in Vista), i'd be using it now.

Infact i, for S@#t's and giggles, installed Vista and that sound card and run it throu my 15+yr old Rotel amp, Polk Audio RT3 bookshelf speakers, and it sound better then my current setup, running optically.


anyway... MOST of the time, the Audio control chip just pre-processes the signal to the D/A, (digital to analogue), converters. That's were the real magic happens.

If the card you're using has a cheap, (or in most cases with onboard, software based), D/A the sound to you're speakers will be cr... not that good a sound output to them.

You'll find that MOST 1/2 decent m/boards these days will have optical out, and you'll also find that you'll get a great sound out of the onboard, if you can run it to an amp with opt. in, due to the fact you'll be using the amps D/A converters.

Even "cheap" setup, like a Yamaha ST-15, or Logitech Z-5500's, (which you can find for less the $350, not bad considering that you get), will sound awesome.

On a side note, Windows STILL has no 5.1 channel Digital support. to get around this, most sound cards acutally, decode to Analogue in 5.1 then encode back to digital.

Currently using an Asus D1 card, optical out to my Sony K1600 amp.
i've tried a few other sound cards, (Asus DX, Creative XFi Extreme Music, and onboard Asus Stiker), and they have nothing on the D1 card.

Ref to that xonar popping problem. i haven't really noticed it. That said, my amp might be smart enough to filter it out.

06 March 2011, 6:51 PM (2 years ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Tin (User):

Wait... When did C-Media start making anything but rubbish audio chips?

06 March 2011, 8:45 PM (2 years ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

ss-rotel (User):

rah.... i posted a nice long resonse to that, and it didn't show up. can't be bothered posting it again, if an Admin can find it and post it cool.

But the gist was, it not so much the controler, as the D/A converter that makes the difference. Most onboard sound uses cheap, or software D/A converter, so even "bad" audio chips will sound decent if you can by pass the D/A, like going optical to an amp, and use it's D/A.

That said, Windows still doesn't support more then 2channel via optical out, and most sound cards convert the 5.1 analogue to digital, and yes, you'd want a decent soundcard for that

If anyone remembers the Hercules 7.1 Soundcards, they were awesome, expensive, but the best on the market @ the time, (like 10 yrs ago), and they used a C-media Audio controler, but the blue box did al the converting and amplification.

Have one in a box, if they only made a win7 driver.... managed to get it working in Vista... still sounds good

07 March 2011, 9:46 AM (2 years ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Halcon (User):

And how about Creative Labs? The line of Sound Blaster audio cards can do produce much better results for a couple of hundred dollars more!
Creative is still the undisputed leader and de-facto standard in audio cards.

07 March 2011, 1:05 PM (2 years ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Me In Oz (User):

Quoting Halcon:
better results for a couple of hundred dollars more!

I don't think you have quite grasped the spirit of this article.
It's all about value for money.
Can Creative match this performance for $40.00 ? .... I think NOT!




07 March 2011, 2:07 PM (2 years ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Tin (User):

Quoting Halcon:
Creative is still the undisputed leader and de-facto standard in audio cards.


I suspect many would disagree on that now. Crackling issues, driver support ending basically by the time you buy the card, random cards in a series have completely different chips, etc... Creative lost the plot about 10 years ago.

07 March 2011, 9:25 PM (2 years ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

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