Review on Enhance Your Audio Experience with the ASUS Strix SOAR Sound Card by Micha Kochaski ᠌

Headphones and a microphone are connected at the back (therefore, a longer wire is desirable for headphones) into connectors separate from the speakers, you can connect the headphones at the same time as the speakers and programmatically switch the output from the speakers to the headphones and vice versa. Pros: 1) Good sound quality (both in 5.1 speakers and headphones). 2) Availability of quick parameter presets (including equalizer parameters) for "Games"/FPS/racing/RPG/movies/music modes. When listening to music, you can also select the music genre for the equalizer. (Although this can also be done in the player program you are using.) 3) For those who do not like all these "improvers", there is a "Flat" mode with sound without any additional processing. 3) Unlike the drivers for ASUS Xonar Phoebus and Creative Sound Blaster Z, the drivers are normal, nothing is buggy in them, the channels do not accidentally switch or turn off, the sound does not suddenly turn off. Its cons: 1) There is absolutely no bass redirect below a certain frequency (Bass Redirect) to the subwoofer, so there will be no bass on the subwoofer when playing stereo, bass on the subwoofer will only be for 5.1 type of games and movies. For lovers of bass in music, this is a very serious drawback, but there are audio players that do this programmatically themselves. 2) When using the Firefox browser with this sound card, the Flash plugin in Firefox, when trying to play the sound, always gives an error and stops working. I don’t know, really, maybe this is a bug not in the sound card driver code, but in the Firefox code or the Flash code. On other sound cards in Firefox or other browsers (even with Strix Soar) Flash works without errors. 3) There is no connector for audio output and audio input on the front panel of the system unit. Headphones and a microphone are connected only at the back. 4) There is no support for EAX game effects at all. True, EAX is not used in modern games, but there are a number of older games (such as Doom 3 and Quake 4) in which EAX sounds very good. It's a pity that this will not work with Strix Soar. 5) The sound card control panel (called Sonic Studio) in the driver is for some reason only partially translated into 2022 - half of the inscriptions are in 2022, and half are in English. Maybe in the next versions of the driver this will be corrected. But I already know English well, I just write here for others, suddenly it will cause difficulties for someone.