Asus Xonar AE Soundcard - No crossover for re-directed bass management... - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Shredhead
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2020, 05:19:12 am
content: Basically, you're going to buy this thing for it's highly touted analog outputs. You will find that there is no crossover like in the majority of ASUS' soundcards (they call it "flexbass"). This means that if you want to re-direct low frequencies away from your mains or satellite speakers to your subwoofer, there is no way to do this. All that would come out of the sub would be what is (if anything) included in the LFE channel of the Dolby Digital mix that you're listening to.If you have small speakers, they will get full range, break up, distort and be permanently damaged if the level is loud enough of full bandwidth content. I haven't seen ANY gear this oblivious to modern standards since the advent of true surround sound 20 years ago. "Sonic Studio" is their software interface, it is incomplete and to be avoided.ASUS' response on their own forum of people begging for a software update is that they have an EQ for bass boost so they will not include flexbass in an update, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. Anyone else getting tired of Chynah's typical lack of support?

author: dmills
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2020, 10:42:26 am
content: Why on earth would I want the soundcard to be doing crossover duties?Sound cards should take PCM and turn it into line level audio, simple as, last thing anyone wants is the card driver including some low bid biquad implementation to do something as system specific as bass management. Easy to do that in a software shim if you really want to, and that way you get to decide things like crossover alignments, and system delay settings.LFE is NOT a lowpassed downmix of L,R in any sane system.The L,R boxes need to be full range more or less, and should surely (precisely because it is system dependent) include whatever high passes and excursion limiting that is appropriate to their design.If the L,R system depends on an external box for a mono LF channel because the stereo boxes do not go low enough then the cross to that needs to be done as part of that system if it is to sound right, and again that should include whatever HPF, excursion and power limits make sense).Now the Xonar AE is not what I would consider a decent card (Unbalanced outputs, really? And making a big deal out of a stupidly high Z headphone output?), and is marketed at somewhere I don't really play, but apart from having some rather meh specs, it is clearly a fairly standard sound card that looks like it does what I would expect of such.It does not include a feature that some of their other stuff does, but that does not make it dodgy technology in my view.

author: Shredhead
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2020, 04:53:39 pm
content: Quote from: dmills on December 25, 2020, 10:42:26 am-It's been an industry standard for 20 years for a player with analog outs to provide bass management. When you run analog outs to a decoder or an AVR, it's standard practice to bypass all processing other than channel level controls but even sometimes that is also bypassed depending on the design of the decoder.Quote from: dmills on December 25, 2020, 10:42:26 amIn a system with the satellites not capable of playing full bandwidth (majority of systems), it is more common than not to re-direct their bass signal to the subwoofer channel and it is combined with the LFE track. Otherwise, you lose the accurate reproduction of that content, or possibly damage your satellites with strong low frequencies.Quote from: dmills on December 25, 2020, 10:42:26 amThis is the frequency response of my subs:Who do you know who has mains that are flat to 4Hz?Quote from: dmills on December 25, 2020, 10:42:26 amThis is called bass management and the mono LF channel is called the subwoofer.Quote from: dmills on December 25, 2020, 10:42:26 amWhat you consider decent is irrelevant. Ignoring industry standards for sources with analog outs is lazy and not updating the software when called on your mistake is bad support.But since you seem to play at a much higher level than I'm used to going, I am curious to see the frequency response of the mains in your system and detail your signal processing.