I recently spent a good few hours unboxing the Xonar Essence One and looking at everything secreted away inside the fancy little box. I was surprised by the weight of the Xonar actually, this device is hardly enormous but it weighs a lot more than you expect when you first pull it from the packaging.
My first step was to install the Xonar Essence One but before I go into detail on how that worked out, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you exactly what this device is. This beautifully detailed gizmo is another ASUS world first actually – the first USB digital-to-analog converter with 8x symmetrical upsampling and 120dB SNR.
For some of you, that probably started to sound like a foreign language towards the end of the sentence. However, this isn’t as complicated as it may appear. Essentially this Xonar Essence One is the kind of toy that an audiophile wishes you had given them for Christmas. It’s all about delivering pure, rich, clear and beautiful sound and everything about it has been geared towards making sure of it in every possible way.
The goal, according to the ASUS website, is to help you say goodbye to the poor quality digital music stereotype, and hello to sound that makes your eardrums drool. Normally upsampling USB DAC’s just transfer the audio source to 192kHz regardless but the Xonar Essence One upsamples 44.1/88.2/176.gkHz input to 352.8Khz and 48/96/192Khz to 384Khz.
For those of you not in the audiophile know that means one thing – clearer, richer and crisper sound. The symmetrical upsampling to 8x is a world first and one that I am rather excited to experience, even though my audiophile knowledge is nowhere near as good as those you’ll find on the technical forums. I can still appreciate high quality audio when I hear it!
The infographic below really does make it easy for simple-minded souls like myself to get the general idea. With the Xonar Essence One, I get a smiley face. I can live with that!
The only downside that I have so far is that I am short on space in my tiny little office and the size of the Xonar Essence is proving to be a bit of a problem as I attempt to install it. Never fear, though, I shall persevere and in my next post I’ll let you know exactly how easy (or difficult!) it was to install.
What would you like to know about the Xonar Essence One? Tell me now so I can ensure I get to grips with it in upcoming posts.