Review on Upgrade Your Audio Experience: EVGA NU Audio Pro Surround Add-On - Lifelike 7.1 Surround Sound, PCIe with Audio Note Design by David Cronin

Purchasing this sound card was pure enthusiasm and a little risky. This is EVGA's first sound card and it hasn't received any reviews yet. I had the previous Asus Essence ST card for almost 7 years, it was a very decent card especially with the op amps modified. But it's time to change my outdated system and the new motherboard has no PCI slot. I've been using the Topping Dx3 Pro for almost a month and I'm very happy with it, except the DAC can't deliver enough power to my HD580. Since I liked the sound of the AK4493, I looked for a sound card based on this chip and settled on the new EVGA Nu Audio. When I held the card in my hands, I was amazed by its durable design. I installed it on my system and booted the system, my problems with the card actually started... The drivers for Win7 x64 were downloaded from the EVGA website, installed, but the card would not initialize and went unnoticed in the device manager. Several installations, uninstallations and restarts did not help, the card was not initialized. It's funny, but I ended up installing the Win10 drivers, but I had to disable the motherboard's built-in USB 3.0 controller. It was an unobvious step. The card works but doesn't remember some settings and I can't switch to 32-bit audio. It is better not to touch it while it is working and there are no new drivers. The main part of a sound card review is (obviously) the sound quality. The first thing I noticed was that the 600 ohm headphone support is a test because the HD580's 300 ohm impedance doesn't sound strong enough. That was the first shortcoming of the card for me, but an incorrigible one. The problem was solved by installing the APO equalizer and setting the preamp filter to +8dB. Second, I expected stunning effect from a $250 sound card... and I didn't get it. The sound was good, right, but exciting, there was no desire to play any music albums, review a film from my collection, play through the game. But we don't give up and look for easy ways. From previous experiments with interchangeable op amps I left Burson V5i - a very good op amp that can radically change the sound quality of a media device. Well, the sound has been disassembled and before replacing the OP275 with a more decent opamp, I could enjoy the quality assembly of the card and its design, I'm a radio technician by additional training. The change in sound quality with such measures was amazing, now I can say it's a wow effect! The bass is powerful and deep even with the HD580 over monitor headphones. High bright, clear and don't cut the brain. The average values are good, but not as good as the Dx3 Pro. The overall sound quality is balanced, very detailed, with wide scenes. To sum up the pluses: Excellent sound quality (with V5i). Disadvantages: price (with V5i), weak 300 ohm headphone amplifier, coitus with installation, driver problems (yet). I may update this information as new drivers are released and new headphones purchased.