HardOCP Gives poor review of Phoebus

[talax]

The Xonar Phoebus is a bit of a puzzle. On one hand, it had some nice hardware features that we truly liked and the headphone amplifier was a solid piece of hardware that performed well. We liked the Phoebus’ braided cable and desktop accessibility. On the other hand, the product's software suite is very confusing and in some ways, not nearly as capable or user friendly as those of the DGX and DSX. When you consider the sound card's price, the Xonar Phoebus’ core audio quality is absolutely mediocre. With its high quality components and unique design, it should have surpassed the quality of its much less expensive sibling products by a wide margin. We simply cannot recommend the Xonar Phoebus given the value we perceived. It seems to us that the Phoebus is priced about $60 more than it should be. All in all, the sound quality was only slightly better than the Xonar DSX.
http://hardocp.com/article/2012/07/0...us_sound_cards

[London]

meh, they mostly bitch about value.

[bee144]

With the driver issues I've pulled Phoebus out of my PC. Currently its worth $0 as its being used as a paper weight.

I'd have to agree with them though. Nice hardware but some terrible software.

[Jandenengelsman]

With the driver issues I've pulled Phoebus out of my PC. Currently its worth $0 as its being used as a paper weight.

I'd have to agree with them though. Nice hardware but some terrible software.

Well, the software will be fixed, so just a bit more patience and you will have one beast of a sound card!

[Estatus]

Guru3D also made a review recently where they had some negative feedback, perhaps not as bad as HardOCP, though. But I think it's worth a read. Always preferred Guru3D for this stuff.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/asus-x...ndcard-review/

Highlight from their conclusion:

Over all we were quite impressed with the Phoebus 7.1 as it has a few notable advancements over previous offerings using the 8788 chipset. The ability to set and keep features separate in the I/O panels is definitely a big step in the right direction.

For I/O setup, the user can set the headphone output to 24/192, S/Pdif output for Dolby Digital Live. The line output set to 44.1 from an external device and their Microphone input to 24/96 KHz. This is just an example but you can see the possibilities and flexibility of such as system.

Of course all is not perfect there are a few places we would have liked to see changes. The soldered opamps are not a welcome sight as it seems everybody these days has a small collection of opamps. The lower spec multi channel DAC for the center/sub side and rear channels could have used a higher spec part. To be fair, this is not an offering aimed at the higher end music crowds but it does offer some very reasonable sound considering the very large feature set and price point.

We played some great new games and the Phoebus made quick work of everything we threw at it. Our test tracks sounded great but in all honesty we had mixed feeling about the Dolby Home Theater 4 on some tracks it could improve the overall image and on other tracks it had a tendency to wash out the soundstage.

The breakout module offers some cool features for team gamers, allowing cleaner, clearer communication with or without a headset microphone.

We really like the layout and signal flow of the new chip and are interested in seeing what can be done with this chipset if coupled with higher end DAC’s, ADC, Opamps and Caps. The card offers clear articulate audio for your games, music and movies no matter if you are using a full surround rig or a set of headphones, the Phoebus has you covered in fine style.

In comparison, the Phoebus doesn’t quite offer the high end refinement found in the Essence series as it is more in league of the D2 or Xense interfaces.