Auzentech HDA X-Plosion 7.1 DTS Connect Sound Card

Product and Included Accessories:

The Auzentech HDA X-Plosion box is not only visually appealing, but contains a lot of information to briefly explain the various technologies to the consumer. The box clearly labels the Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect capabilities, two of the major highlights of the product.

Packaged inside is the HDA X-Plosion sound card, owner's manual, warranty card, driver CD, TOSLINK cable, and a 2-pin CD-SPDIF cable. The sound card itself has several typical internal connectors for CD, SPDIF, and MIDI. A separate cable can be purchased should the user require a midi port (it can not be used as a game port). A very unique feature of the X-Plosion is that it has swappable OPAMPs, so hard-core audiophiles can upgrade the card which will improve gain and the SNR quality (so the box says). The layout of this card is unique, it's not a simple reproduction of the reference design.

If you take a close look at the sound card, notice that only solid Aluminum electrolytic capacitors are used. The advantage of solid Aluminum electrolytic capacitors is they have more or less an unlimited operational lifecycle. This means they can operate far longer against that of liquid electrolyte capacitors because they do not exhibit wear-out or dry-out limitations.

The back of the HDA X-Plosion features all the usual analog audio inputs / outputs, along with both coax & optical SPDIF outputs. This is what "sealed the deal" for me as I needed a coax SPDIF for one of my receivers. The other sound cards I found only had optical SPDIF, which would of then required me to purchase a converter box with an external power supply and that was just too much of a mess for me.

As mentioned before, the HDA X-Plosion is based on the C-Media 8770 8-Channel PCI chipset, supporting both Dolby Digital Live & DTS Connect. I believe the previous model was the 8768+ which supports only DDL (That is what is used in the X-Mystique and most other sound card brands). Auzentech is discussing the possibility of using C-Media's newest 8788 chip (which has even more features) in hopefully the next model sound card they release.