Xonar SE Souncard Problems. Any Ideas?

[quexos]

Yeah, I refuse to use anything related to Creative Labs due to crappy products in the past, crappy drivers, and disgusting, litigious, predatory business practices.

Other than this Xonar SE (that I gave up trying to use) I just use onboard sound or my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 these days. My Xonar SE will sit in it's box on a shelf and rot until Asus releases new drivers, or it becomes so old it is unusable (mainboards no longer have PCIe slots or whatever) like my Xonar DG. All I can say is "F" Asus for not updating the drivers.

[R5Eandme]

Hello Mekler22 and Quexos,

Are discrete sound cards really disappearing? If true, why is it happening? Are motherboards these days producing low distortion high fidelity sound making Xonar Essence cards redundant, or are there not enough audiophiles to make it profitable for manufacturers?

[quexos]

All of the above I guess. Most "audiophile" types go for high priced external DACS, and onboard sound now is so close in perceivable quality to any of the sound cards there's not a lot of point in messing with them. My plain old Realtek ALC892 onboard sound aaaaalmost as good as the Xonar SE and has much better drivers and features. You'd have to have really good ears, and a really high quality audio sample to tell a difference between the two. In short the onboard sounds fine and is much less of a pain in the...

The only reason I bought the Xonar SE was to use the optical output that my mainboard lacks...and it turns out it's not even any good for that. Stupid delay in the start of all audio played, no effects or features (EQ, Loudness EQ) on it, etc.

[mulderfox]

Hello Mekler22 and Quexos,

Are discrete sound cards really disappearing? If true, why is it happening? Are motherboards these days producing low distortion high fidelity sound making Xonar Essence cards redundant, or are there not enough audiophiles to make it profitable for manufacturers?

You've been answered well I guess. But in my eyes its usually just not worth the trouble to switch to a discrete sound card. I've done it to solve a hardware issue with my onboard sound card (little knowing that I am trading one issue for another)

I have since went and RMA'd the Xonar SE card under warranty. It is doing better, although the official drivers are still ****ty and the MS ones work better (although without all the bells and whistles). I don't know what Asus was thinking basing this series on USB DAC. It's a cry for help right from the start. USB DACS are not meant to be inside a PC. They are by nature, external. Aside from that, they contain much less processing power and that's probably the root of the problem. If you are going to pay good money for a discrete sound card, you expect it to offload tasks from your CPU, not add to it. And last, obviously, the software is a steaming pile of ****. The drivers are NOT optimized for anything, they are buggy, and if I had known beforehand, I would have picked a Audigy FX. at least Creative are not using USB DACs, and with sound cards I never gone wrong with them.

[R5Eandme]

Thanks to you both for your insights into the market changes for sound cards. It makes sense if motherboard sound quality really is becoming outstanding. It frees up a PCIE slot as well. I will have to explore quality external DACs as well. Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks!

[mekler22]

A few updates: I had to replace my motherboard since I foolishly managed to short it out via the front panel USB (simply inserting and reinserting a powered usb cable seems to do the trick). so... I had to go find a replacement motherboard, and pretty fast I knew that I will not get the exact same model. So instead of my ROG x99 Strix Gaming motherboard, I've went for X99a II. less fancy, but does the job well, and seems to be much more stable than my previous board.
The added bonus seems to be, that my Xonar sound card works much better now. no more stutters and audio loss. So.. I think that there was interference from one or more PCIe lanes. maybe my previous board was simply too feature rich to be stable.
Now my only issue is that the output reverts to XONAR (Headphones) from speakers and then I have to go to the Xonar Audio Center (yes, I've installed the official drivers since they work mostly fine now - but the issue may be still here) - and uncheck headphones, and check speakers. I suspect I can resolve it if I find the right registry key though. Ideas?

[quexos]

When I switched from an MSI B450 board to an AsRock B450 my stutters got a little better but are still very much there. Both those are just mid-level but good boards. It seems to happen when there is network activity, and the default Windows Realtek network driver seems to reduce stutter over Realtek's own drivers, but stutter is always there.

The defaulting to something other than speakers, I never found a fix for. After every full shutdown and restart, it will go to headphones. I searched through the registry and all config files (and driver .inf files) I could find but I did not see anything I could figure out to change it. The delay, cutting off the beginning on all sounds when using optical output never stopped either.

For the record, I get the stuttering now on my other usb audio devices as well. A Focusrite 2i4, so it may be a Windows 10 problem, or even the way the AMD platform handles USB or networking. I really have no idea. It's the first PC problem I've ever had that I could not eventually find a fix.

[mekler22]

One more thing: I noticed with my Xonar SE as well, that it always reverts to HeadPhones (Xonar SoundCard) and to change it back to speakers, I have to go to the Xonar Audio Center utility and click on speakers. It's really tedious. If anyone got a registry trick or anything to fix that, I'll be grateful!