While it is easy to say that Creative owns the gaming sound card market today, they don’t own everything.  What happens when a large company has a market segment all to itself is that innovation slows and there is little drive for new products. This is not a maturation of the market, it is a sterilization of the market.  What Auzentech has produced is a sound card that offers new features to a different market, the HTPC, as well as a little sum-sum for the casual gamer, and the music afficionado.

Printed manual, driver disc, CDROM cable, S/PDIF cable, and the HDA X-Plosion 7.1 DTS-Connect.

When you open the box, you’re greeted with a slim, but high quality, bundle of stuff: the HDA X-Plosion 7.1 card, a printed manual, driver CD, a 2-pin S/PDIF cable for your CDROM, and a nice, beefy TOSLINK optical cable. Me like beefy optical cable.

High-quality materials, replaceable opamps, and kinda pretty.

A brief list of features:

• C-Media CMI8770/8768+ 8-channel, PCI chipset
• Dolby Digital Live real-time encoding
• DTS real-time encoding
• Full-duplex 8 channel 24 bit/96kHz DAC and 2 channel 16bit/48KHz ADC (simultaneous 7.1 playback and stereo record)
• Bit-matched playback up to 24bit/96KHz
• S/PDIF input/output at 44.1/48/96KHz at 16/24bit resolution
• Optical and Coaxial outputs, with internal header for optional digital inputs
• Upgradeable op-amps
• DirectSound 3D hardware acceleration
• C-Media Xear 3D 7.1 Virtual Speaker SHIFTER technology
• Buffers on front outputs for driving headphones

The three things that will matter most to enthusiasts are the DD Live encoding, DTS encoding, and the bit-matched playback.  The DD Live and DTS will matter most for HTPC users, which is integrated into the C-Media CMI8770 chipset.  The bit-matched playback will ensure no upsampling or downsampling occurs to audio streams on their way out of the sound card.

Nice, neat, well laid out.

Some residue on the back, but easily the best labeled card I've ever seen.

Photographs were taken with a Sony V3 on a foggy day in Northern California.  Thankfully, there are such things as tripods.

8 channel playback, 2-channel record, and a few other things...

The X-Plosion 7.1 has a lot of outputs on the backplane, two inputs (line-level and microphone), four analog outputs, and two digital.  It won't alleviate the need for crawling behind the rack to change stuff, but I imagine once the outputs are set, there will not be a need to change things.

As Goldmember would say... "gold!"

Coaxial and Optical outputs on the backplane.

Moving along to the encoding side of things...