[goodguys]

Hi And thanks for reading.

I purchased an asus stx 2 soundcard and asus h170i-pro motherboard, supposed to be a top end card and board, and i spent a further £200 on op amp upgrades for the soundcard.

The soundcard sounds bad, very slight improvement over my Dune D1 media player which is just a standard player nothing audiophile about it.

Getting a lot of noise, buzzing, whistling, from the soundcard was told by my local pc shop: "The noise on the ground loop is not caused by the soundcard but by the motherboard layout. Your motherboard engineers decided to connect the PCI-e slot ground to a ground trace which also carries large currents for CPU/GPU/peripherals. My 2cents if the PCI-e slot ground trace led directly to one of the ATX ground wires dedicated just to this ground, your soundcard would be dead silent."

What do you think of the shop's assesment. I mean, there is a lot of noise but apart from that the sound itself is flat lifeless and boring to listen to. What could be causing this.

The only thing i can think of doing is to purchase another motherboard and hope the soundcard performs better, but it is going to be an expensive trial and error, unless you have this card and know a motherboard it works well with, or do you think soundcards are hyped up rubbish. Read this and it got me thinking:  https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-asus-stx-ii-pci-sound-card.4915/

[Bob2]

I have been using the ASUS Sound Card Essence STX II. I have swapped the op amps and not much difference between them. Didn't see the need for the hi170.
Have not experienced the issue you describe. No noise, buzzing or whistling. Dead quiet...  I did find that the analog out to be better than using the digital with a dac.
Using this in a Lenovo i5.

[WGH]

I looked at your previous posts to see what the heck you are doing, looks like you want very high quality sound from a HTPC. Correct?

You first mentioned the Asus STX II card 2 years ago in July 2018 and still haven't got good sound out of it, and in fact it's getting worse. If it was my card I would take it up to my roof and give it flying lessons. I don't think acceptable sound can be achieved with a small analog sound card, the pc environment is too noisy.

Expecting the same audio quality as a dedicated surround processor from a pci card is unrealistic as you have found out. Even though the card has excellent specifications and a very, very nice webpage both of those don't add up to a good sounding card, it's just marketing.

You will have to get the digital sound out of the computer using a HDMI cable, that way you get the highest resolution. I use a Sapphire Radeon HD6770 Vapor-X graphics card bought ages ago. The card has DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs, that way I can do dual screen, computer and TV. HDMI goes to a surround processor and I get DTX-HD Master Audio and Dolby Atmos if the film has it. eBay has plenty of HD6770 cards from $15 and up. That should fit into your budget.

Hamilton - Original Broadway Productin with Dolby Atmos (Disney+) is absolutely fabulous, very clear vocals with excellent use of the surround format. You will never get that sound quality with an analog sound card.

Finding used surround processor with HDMI input could be difficult. There are a few Outlaw Audio 975 and Emotiva processors on eBay for the price of a motherboard. Look at new AVR's with preamp outs at Acessories4Less.

[zoom25]

I have not been fond of any onboard sound cards or even portable external USB DACs that run off the computer's power supply. An external DAC with its own good power supply would be the best option. Having optical output into an external DAC is the only guaranteed option to not have to deal with electrical noise related to the computer.

[WGH]

My home entertainment setup involves two computers I built:

1.) An all purpose PC tower with an Intel i7, Asus mother board and the Sapphire Radeon card. HDMI is the only way to get hi-def 7.1.4 movies and Netflix Atmos streaming into my surround processor. The computer is in the office. The long HDMI goes up inside the wall, across the attic, and exits behind the processor. I can't hear the fans from the living room.

2.) The silent fanless music server PC is in the living room and has an Intel Pine Trail D motherboard with a low power Atom D525 (1.8 GHz, dual core) and 4 GB ram. The computer is painfully slow but once JRiver or Tidal finishes loading it works perfectly. Slow, simple processors have less noise. USB out is handled by a Paul Pang Audio Grade USB 3.0 PCIE Card with an Acopian 5v linear regulated ps. SSD is powered by a 2nd Acopian ps. The Kingrex USB to SPDIF converter is powered by a 3rd Acopian ps. USB cable is a JMaxwell Data Only USB Cable with simply 3 wires, data plus and data minus and a ground wire (no 5v power). DAC is a Van Alstine Hybrid Fet Valve. The music server is networked to the tower computer where the 373 GB of flac files are stored. It sounds pretty darn good.

[goodguys]

Bob2 - Can you tell me as you do not suffer from all the noises i am getting with the stx 2, what do you think of the actual sound quality from the analogue outs as you can listen to the card in its full glory and i cannot.
 How would you describe it, what would you compare it to. The manufacturer has released some very impressive specs and if you look at the link i have supplied, they do not appear to play out in real life, althought the reviewer has stated he is getting a lot of background noise as well, perhaps the card did not suit his environment much as mine isn't.  - Thanks

[ren28]

Sorry I am late to the game here, as I realize this thread is two months old but may still be useful.

I used the Asus Xonar Essence STX PCI card version 1 in my PC for a number of years, until Windows 10.  There were a number of issues with this card.

1.  It's sensitive to noise from the GPU, so I had to move it away.  I have a full size ATX motherboard, so it was not an issue to move it.  Too close to GPU = clicking and buzzing
2.  It has a problem with Windows 10.  Whenever I would use Firefox and play Youtube videos, it would randomly freak out the soundcard and a high-pitched squeal would be heard.  I'd almost flip out of my chair every time this happened because it's now hooked up to "real" speakers and amplification which I could not afford before.  This is a known issue with version 1 of the STX, but I don't know about version 2.

Before Windows 10, this card was a trooper, had a dead silent noise floor and a very pleasing sound with the burr brown PCM 1792A DAC.