The Asus Xonar D2 was first spotted at Cebit, and subsequently at Computex. We got our hands on it, stripped it and took some nice pictures of it. The Xonar will be pitted against a series of other cards in Rightmark Audio Analyzer, something the industry watchdogs will be waiting for...

As we all know by now, the Xonar is based on the C-Media HD Audio (CMI8788) solution and probably isn't too far off in terms of specifications from the Auzentech X-Meridian, except that Asus put their PCB design expertise into good use with an excellent PCB design, something that was never seen before in previous consumer level soundcards. For example, the usage of dual voltage operation amplifiers without the need of a DC capacitor in the audio path. This design change allows less coloration imparted to the audio signals compared to tradititional soundcard design.

We have a total of 9 cards in our sound testing repository, and our users gathered to do some listening tests a while back, you can read more about the comments and flames in our forums here  Closed up pictures of the Xonar can be found in our "Asus Xonar 2nd Look! Article", and some of our initial comments made on the Xonar D2 can be found in our "First Look" article.

We will be pitting the Xonar against 3 cards in the above picture for our RMAA tests as well as sacrificing some of our precious operational amplifiers to fix the Xonar up. More in the following pages.