Auzen Forte vs ASUS Xonar Essence STX

[Bradan]

There are other reasons to say the XE sounds better, trying to say your Ears can tell the difference between 115 and 117 dB isn't on of them=P

It's funny how when I try to be objective about the comparison, you go on the subjective-defence to justify your purchase.

Sending out data via digital has NOTHING to do with Signal To Noise Ratios. Peior to sending data, a bad sound will be sent the same ways a good one+P Then the final output source will determine the final sound. You ought to be glad the other guy was being nice to you. You sound like one of those folks went out and paid $75 for a 12ft RCA "Monster" Coaxial cable

When I said coax, I meant composite, and yes they are infact analogue, and they do in fact have a 124dB SNR. I didn't mention digital out at all, you just read what you wanted, and made a stupid reply. No, I don't buy overpriced digital carrying cables, but would try to stick to medium-high quality, shielded analogue cables.

First of all, bit- matched is for recording!

It can be used for recording! It's also for playback.

On playback, it will not have an affect unless like me, you use DVD-Audio and etc.....

Bit-Matching guarantees the information from the source to output are exactly the same. I can use bit matching on MP3, FLAC, WAV anything I feel like. It's pretty impressive you bought audio DVD's though .

To do real tests for audio playback, they mean use the best SETTING meant for truer music playback. Not setting colored or tuned for Games or Movies! Surely you get that, right? I don't have a lot of respect for so called Audiophiles

I'm not sure what you're reffering to by they and tests, but your grammar confuses me. Bit-matching does not reduce colouring comapred to non-bit matched, it allows for 0 mistakes in the bitstream output. You can't argue that any errors would perceivably colours the sound.

EDIT: Wow, Mr. Beyer 770 is talking about colour. LOL.

I don't have a ton of respect for people who act like they know what they're talking about on these matters :/

You make a Recording Analog at 2ch 24bit/96KHz of something like an Analog source. Then you use a Lossless compression app like Flac or etc.. to compress it into something manageable. Try it and see?

I think you would be very hard-pressed to discern 320k-MP3 and CD/FLAC., let alone CD and DVD-A. It's pretty impossible I think. Download an ABX tester and try it using a FLAC file, and the same file converted to 320k MP3.

Also, can your sound card process data fast enough to "Time Shift"? X-Fi can do it flawlessly! By time shift I mean speed up or slow down the music without affecting the tone quality!

I don't have that feature on my sound card, and I'm not sure why you're boasting the processing power of a sound card, or do I recognize what such a feature would be used for. An application could easily do that on a CPU.