ASUS' Xonar STX Gains Even More Functionality Under Linux

[Rob Williams]

Ever since ASUS first released its Xonar line-up of cards, I knew I had to have one. But, being that I use Linux as a primary OS, I knew that the chance of me finding good support was slim. Well, that support may have taken a couple of months in the beginning to come to fruition, but since then, the open-sourced ALSA drivers have come to support every Xonar model available, along with many of their specific features.

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You can read the rest of our news post here.

 

[Kougar]

Funny ya should mention those cards.... they aren't as rosey in my mind as they used to be. Don't get me wrong, the sound quality is excellent for me... but the microphone support completely sucks.

I have always had issues being heard over my mic with the Xonar sound card. I have maxed out the volume in Windows, inside the application, enabled mic boost in both windows AND the application, and I even bought a special mic with a volume control built into it and STILL people say I'm too quiet to hear over games. I tried normal mics, a cheap mic, and even a Logitech USB mic and all were the same volume levels (and the Logitech was full of line noise, mic was the most expensive of the lot and the most useless).

It's gotten to the point where the only way I can be heard at normal levels is to enable my onboard sound and plug a microphone into that. This bypasses the ASUS sound drivers (which are the problem here) and uses Window's default drivers. Using Windows 7's default drivers AND Realtek's drivers both gave me good results and people can actually hear me again.

I had this problem with Vista as well, as that was when I had bought the card, so it's fairly evident ASUS's drivers need plenty of work as far as microphone support goes. Even the Azalia HD audio had more microphone options, higher boost levels, and various types of noise cancellation features.

 

[Rob Williams]

I wish I could comment on that aspect, but I just use a cheap Logitech USB mic at the moment. I planned on upgraded down the road to a higher-end mic or headset, so if that happens, I'll be interested to see how the Xonar fares.

Doesn't Windows itself offer Mic Boost options though? I didn't know that was specific to the audio driver. I thought it was just some default option that Windows itself offered.

 

[Kougar]

The Xonar drivers override Window's settings, so no. Once I used the Windows driver for the onboard mic I then receive the built-in mic-boost and other options Windows offers, but the Xonar doesn't.

Thankfully Windows 7 also appears to work fine with multiple sound drivers / sound cards installed... it looks like more than just the GPU stack was built to handle concurrent driver profiles.

 

[freestyler]

I think you gained even more functionality than the windows drivers offer!
We don't have "the ability to switch from a sharp to slow roll-off, and also alter the oversampling rate from 64x to 128x."

And if there is one bad thing you may read sometimes about this card is that's a bit "harsh" on the highs. So playing with those 2 settings might make the situation better.

 

[Rob Williams]

It would surprise me if the Linux driver had features the Windows driver didn't, because for what reason would ASUS leave them out of the official driver? It seems odd, but after taking a look, I couldn't find anything resembling those options either. I might have to e-mail ASUS about that...