Living with ASUS Xonar U7 MK II

Almost three years ago (damn, has it been that long?) I bought an ASUS Xonar U7 sound card to get audio output while my laptop was hooked up to a dock.

And now, three years later, that sound card has started acting up.

Roughly, the problem is it often doesn’t get enough power and won’t come up—plug it in and it isn’t recognized. After unplugging and replugging it a bunch of times it occasionally has a chance of working. Eventually I couldn’t stand spending ages plugging and unplugging every day when I brought the computer home, so I decided to replace it.

I had three requirements:

1. USB powered, I don’t want to plug in a power supply
2. Has audio input
3. The DAC chip can’t be too crappy
4. Has a headphone output jack

I looked through a whole pile of Chinese-made DACs and couldn’t find one I was happy with. The biggest pain is that they don’t have audio input, and they can’t be USB powered either—they all make you drag along a big power supply…

I’m not that fussy about sound quality; I guess I was after a functional sound card. As for why I don’t just use the one on the dock—the dock only has one output, and it’s on the front, so I can’t even reach it if I plug in the back…

After hunting around, I found one on Taobao that satisfied me…

It’s the ASUS Xonar U7 MK II!

Yes, still the ASUS Xonar U7, just the second version…

So what’s the difference between this second version and the first?

emmmmm, from the outside you really can’t fucking tell the difference.

The only difference is probably the device name—through ALSA you can see it really is MKII.

I dug through the docs, and it seems the MKII’s DAC chip is a slight upgrade… nothing else has changed.

Oh well, it was cheap and it works, so that’s OK.