I am planning on having a computer built to hold my digital music. The CD's are all copied to wave files.I have looked at the Apple products but figure the PC based system will allow for storage upgrades in the future and is cheaper. I plan to locate the server just below the floor in a room below my system so noise from the PC fan is not an issue.I plan to use the analog out on the Asus board ( has Burr Brown 1792 chips) to my pre amp to start and may add an external DAC later. Has anyone used the Asus Xonar STX sound card. Are there any other cards and what have been your results? How would this setup sound?
Thanks
Number 5
Posted on: 20 January 2010 by GrahamFinch
I and a friend have each just bought Xonar STX cards and we are both impressed with it using an Asio4all driver. We are using Cplay and Cplaylist editor. These basically stream the audio without it going through the Windows mixer etc.
The interface of Cplay is very basic but overall the sound is much better. I also tried a Hiface USB\SPDIF interface but on balance I feel the Xonar sounds better.
It also acts as configerable audio device for all other Windows sounds e.g playing back audo from video etc whereas the Hiface only seemed to work with specified music playing software like Media Monkey, Foobar and WInamp. I din't ttry it with CPlay so don't know if it would have worked with that - possibly it would have.
I use the Spdif coax output to a Cambridge Audio Dacmagic feeding a Nam 72/Hicap/140 and NSATS with NAC5 speaker cable. I can recommend the card. Good imaging, good PRAT - sounds good.
