The Experience: Music
Evenescence's Open Door album mixes vocal, orchestral and heavy metal sounds to decidedly gothic effect. Sweet Sacrifice provides a more typical metal track, while Lithium was chosen to highlight vocal details.
Elbow are known for their rich, soulful music and Bones of You is a great example of their fairly unique instrumentation and singing style.
Mahler's 9th is one of the richest examples of romantic music around and a great test of how well setups can reproduce the clarity and depth of orchestral sounds, especially tricky string textures.
Audigy 2ZS/DT 231
Voices, guitars and drums all have excellent clarity and separation in Evenescence's Sweet Sacrifice, Lithium by the same artist displays great vocal texture, although the guitar entry isn't terribly dramatic. Elbow's Bones of You follows the same pattern - good treble and texture, but a little light sounding.
Moving to classical and Mahler's 9th highlights similar tendencies - instrument separation is very good, and you can really hear the texture of the muted strings in the 4th movement for example. But it's all a bit light.
Xonar Xense/DT 231
Already there's a much more rounded sound on the ASUS card than the Audigy for Sweet Sacrifice. The attack is less sharp and sound separation isn't as good, but mid-range is better. Lithium gives a much warmer voice albeit with a little less texture. The guitar entrance is much weightier, but a little muddy. Bones of You likewise sacrifices a bit of texture for better mid-range and bass balance.
Mahler's 9th though hasn't gained the warmth I was expecting, instead there's quite a muddy bass sound that pretty much ruins the overall impression. This combination doesn't work at all well here.
Xonar Xense/PC 350
Wow. Not only is the increased bass range noticeable on all the music I tested, the balance has improved over the DT 231s even when they were combined with the ASUS sound card. It's like the range of sounds has expanded, giving more room for all the sounds to be heard. Bass is actually a little overpowering on occasion in Sweet Sacrifice. Lithium shows both great warmth and detail. Bones of You again slightly threatens over-balanced bass, I think it just needs to be a bit tighter for headphone use, but you won't be surprised to hear the detail and texture are improved over the DT 231s.
Mahler's 9th has recovered wonderfully with this combination. There's a great warmth but there's no muddiness and the texture of the string playing is allowed to come through.
I really didn't want to put the headphones down and stop listening to music with this combination to be honest.
Music summary
The Xonar/PC 350 easily comes out top in this test, while the Audigy/DT 231 shows it's not particularly well suited to music playing due to the coldness/lack of mid-range, although it highlights textures quite well. The Xonar/DT 231 performs well enough for popular music, but has an extremely disappointing classical performance.