Unpacking of my new ASUS Xonar Essence STX Reference Class Audiophile Sound Card. I belive this little gem wipes the floor with any Creative sound card today and I belive it to be a very very splendid long-term choice for listening to music or multimedia in general since it plays and records in realtime at 24 bit/192 khz, done by it’s Asus AV100 Sound Processor. Her soundstage is phenomenal, the sound is extremely natural, undistorted, tolerance for increased preamplification decibel load is very high, noise generated by it is by all means inaudible, controls are easy, intuitive, drivers easy to install, all internal switching is done hardware by relays, independent controls for each channel(left and right, just like all the profesional studio or stage gear), internal headphone amplification of extremely high quality and extremely low noise with probably the best headphone amplifier chip from Texas Instruments. Furthermore it has an internal Burr-Brown DAC of 124db Sound/Noise Ratio, the entire upper half of the card is covered by and EMI/ERF Shield, offering total protection from interference and has an external power supply Molex connector for additional, cleaner, better-filtered power. Like I said, this little toy wipes the floor with ANY Creative sound card. And it absolutelly loves Rock, Metal and Classical Music. It’s as if it was made specifically for these three types of music genres above all else. Anything will sound phenomenal on this card: rock, metal …