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Written by Osmajlic/Todorovic
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Friday, 30 November 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
After the driver installation, we are introduced to one pretty confusing interface. This is one of those unfortunate mishaps that have to happen when a brand new product series is launched with no previous experience. Luckily, this is one of the easiest to solve. The interface is unintuitive, and the manual useless, as it doesn't detail at all the available options. Inexperienced users could definitely have trouble at first. Luckily, there is a more detailed .pdf manual available on the official site, which demystifies most of the options. Still, we hope that ASUS will redesign the interface or at least enable skin changing.
One of the basic problems is that you will have to manually change settings each time you switch from e.g. games to films, especially if you have to switch between stereo and 5.1 options. This is really irritating at first, but we gradually got so accustomed to it that a week after purchase you won't even see this as a drawback. Content is divided into tabs – the general tab with the basic options, such as the number of speakers, audio processing type, speaker installation within the room etc., the classic Mixer tab, with all the associated options, and an Effects tab, with a large number of selectable effects (concert hall, arena etc.) and a well thought-out equalizer with many predefined mods; the last couple of tabs are Karaoke and FlexiBass – the name says it all.
Portable Music Processor
The Portable Music Processor is one of the exclusive options that Xonar brings. What it does is hardware decoding/encoding of any given sound format to another one, with the possibility of applying several effects. What this basically means is that you can insert Dolby Headphone or Virtual Speaker directly into the coding process of the output file. However, the process can be painfully slow, and the card cannot be used meanwhile.
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