Electronics Overview (3)

Headphone Amp
Sound cards with dedicated amplified Headphone outputs seem to be in vogue this year. The Forte also comes equipped with a headphone amplifier section although the Auzen audio designers took a different approach to supplying the power requirements needed to drive the high impedance headphones.

The Engineers opted for a proprietary circuit design instead of a off the shelf headphone amplifier IC.
The Forte has 8 high-end discrete transistors, buffer class A-B dedicated Headphone driver stage.
If we compare connecting headphones to a normal line-out on a soundcard we get a 7mW/Channel, definitely not enough to drive high end headphones. The Auzentech design can drive your headphones with over 100mW per channel which is quite a step up from normal line -level output.

Power and Grounding
The Auzentech Forte has a balanced power generation system
The Forte uses a Point Grounding design which helps prevent distortion, noise and interference from entering the card at the vulnerable points of the design. This design idea is similar to the "star" grounding topologies seen in high quality audio amplifier designs.


Filtering
The Auzentech Forte 7.1 has some high quality capacitors and this equates to high quality filtering on the card. Nichon MUSE ES series audio capacitors are used for coupling capacitors which clock DC and other undesirable frequency components leaving a high quality output signal and which helps with bass response and keeping the outputs crisp and clear.