Something feels very, very wrong about acclaiming a sound card for its looks. Isn't that like praising a mouse for its sonic properties, or a power supply for its framerates?
No doubt about it though, the Xonar is one fine-looking piece of audio kit. Place it on a table next to its great rival, the Creative Soundblaster X-Fi, and almost any passing punter would reach for it first.
Its giant, glowing fan-like cover (billed as an EMI shield, but blatantly really there to look spiffy) and multi-hued LEDs in the sockets make it perhaps the only soundcard that seasoned case modders would desire.
But enough jaffing off about the Xonar's appearance - what does it sound like? Really good, actually. Our initial suspicions that it was just a glorified embiggening of the boggo integrated soundchips on Asus motherboards quickly proved ill-founded. Music - even MP3s - sounds absolutely lovely and rich on this, with a great sense of stereo separation.
Surprisingly, our sample tunes sounded slightly better on the Xonar than they did on the Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty used for comparison. It's a difference you need to look for to notice, and won't honestly trouble you unless you have golden ears - this certainly isn't a card you'd be upgrading to from an X-Fi.
Still, that the supposed master of PC audio is gently beaten at its own game by a relative upstart is a shocker. Creative pulls it back somewhat with the Crystalizer function of the X-Fi, able to restore some of music's polish lost in its painful transition to compressed formats like MP3.
There's no such function here, but still, compressed music sounds lustrous enough that you'd be fooled into thinking you're listening to CD rather than MP3.
As a gaming board it's less covetable than an X-Fi. With EAX (the audio technology that applies environmental effects, such as tinny muffling when in an air vent, to in-game sound) limited to version 2 rather than the X-Fi's version 5, those few games that support it sound rather more lacklustre.
