 Hello everybody and welcome back to my vlog to my channel. I apologize now for the overall quality of this for the video, the video capture software that I was using has now decided I can't use it anymore until I get the professional version. I have an older version of professional debut video capture on an old hard drive and I shall seek that out later so I'm not paying another £30 for this software. I'll seek that out later and we'll get better videos from there but I just wanted to show you this. So this is a loopback test with and I'm using the box at the moment as a stand but with this Sound Blaster A9 from Creative. It's lovely, it's good but the problem is is between this and this is a big old long wire which plugs into this bit here. Now for most things that's not a problem but when you're trying to do a loopback and you want to do audio measurements with it which is you know I don't play on the games anymore I've got a sort of gaming rig underneath this desk but it's you know it's I don't really plan it anymore but that's what I bought the sound card for I thought yeah it's got great numbers to it and it'd be good but I didn't think it through completely and now I realise that having that big distance between the auxiliary input on the back of this and the outputs here is a problem all right it is a problem if that wire at the back was all coiled up nice and tight to it probably wouldn't be so bad but it's nice outstretched and that doesn't work very well for what we want so it's being used as a box for now Creative has said I can send it back which is nice but I was trying to say that I was going to buy an x5 but I got something for doing the job that I want it to I can send it to be better so this is what you get with that we're going to zoom into the numbers because it might be easier for me to do it like this so let's look at it like this all right everything's going as close as we can to the calibration of 0.03 dbfs okay so that's the total armament distortion and that's total armament distortion plus a noise now if you run this down to negative 20 and we're not pushing full power the numbers do look much better they do look much better and most people wouldn't be running this to such a high number anyway and if you see here look we got minus 99.96 db on the three kilohertz I thought I'd show that because you can almost see coming against here this is 80 minus 80 db which explains these numbers here all right so now we're going to look at another that I got which was this I'm probably better off just backing that out a bit this focus rights scarlet 212 this is the fourth generation for the artist again I didn't buy it because I want to be a singer-songwriter or playing in musical instruments or anything like that I just thought I wanted to check it and just see what it's going to be like let me put that down and this is the result from that one let me put it there and as you can see much better if we just go straight into that three kilohertz over here you can see down here it's minus 109.3 db let me just zoom in for that and we can look at those got as close as I could to the minus 3 dbfs it's a little bit twitchy on the gain because the gain on that particular knob on it is there's a lot of gain I think it's 69 db it's got a gain and so you tweak it a little tiny bit we're going up to you know it was that's as close as I could get it but still again look at the thd in the noise book the thd that's nice we've got three zeros after the point lovely lovely and even with the noise there we got a two zeros one line putting it very close to that what we want and that's for that now this costs £274 all in with the delivery and such that's a lot of money a lot of money that costs 200 and that and sorry that was £174 that was the cheapest I could find it on ebay even on they're normally around about £200 but £174 was the cheapest I could find it now the one that wins the one that wins I'm gonna look at those numbers on the old the focus right scarlet ti2 it's pretty darn good but the one that actually wins is the one that's actually on now and this here if we just look just again at the the winning one there on the three kilohertz minus 109 or 109 and then here we've got minus 122.12 and our numbers again are very nice for this that's what we're talking about that's nice and this card that's in there cost me £30 I'm going to admit it's a second hand card but it cost me £30 what card is it you might ask well £30 yes you could set up your rig like this you could have a nice little test scenario like this and it's a Xona Xona I'm going to put it up on the screen here Xona DX2 30 pounds that's what it cost me look you can see it there I bought that and you bought this item 30 pounds and so I've decided this is what I'm going to be using all right this is what I'm going to be using for taking the measurements because even this 2k what is the keyboard for this even the 2k there oh let's just go drop down here's a minus 1.1638 and these numbers down here absolutely lovely so that's it I just wanted to show you very quickly I'm going to tell you now as well that the cables do make a difference even if you get a long wire make sure you quail it up nice and tight and don't be holding it when you take your measurements because that will introduce some noise this is using a small cable I've used several small cables and they all seem to don't make the same but that's that's how you want to do it with us anyway when you're doing a loopback so all you're trying to do is well let me just get this sorted out is benchmark in actual fact we've got some benchmark results as well more right mark results let me have a quick little look in here you can see all the measurements have been taken and you can see them all down here as well and you can see them here where we go to the onboard sound cards cable tests for the soundblaster 89 with the rca's on board with the rca's and all this down here but what we got here as well is the onboard for the rma let me just put this up for you for those who like the numbers i'm gonna make that bigger and somehow here we go make that bigger so for those who like those numbers we can see here i've done them at different bits and frequencies 16 bit 48 kilohertz 16 bit 96 16 bit 192 24 bit 48 and 24 bit you know you can look over this itself but yeah see the frequency response we get to see the noise levels and this is for the onboard so the onboard is my sound card that's built into my main board and i'm using a it's asus b450 tomahawk all right but look at the total harmonic distortion and this is running this this when you do the test on this you do it as close as you can to minus 1 db m what minus 1 db so this you know it looks again pretty good pretty good pretty good uh the stereo cross talk bit doesn't look as good when i show you the other ones uh but there you can look look at look through this i think it's the 24 48 that works out to be the best overall pretty much uh and on the 16 bit that doesn't look too bad at all all right so that's that one now i'm gonna go straight to the next one i'm not sure like any i would do it down here so now we look at the focus right uh i'm gonna have that one as close as we can to there so this is the onboard still let's go rid of that where's the focus right on there it is and here we go so again it's pushing it to that um as close to one minus one db as possible and so this is uh but this is at uh minus 3.1 on there the reason why that is is again it's very very sensitive on the old gain on the on the gain here on the big volume control all good but on this one very very sensitive very very hard to get it in the right place uh cross talk's better and the noise floor is better as you can see we get up to this sort of area here for the 24 bit and the noise floor is better this is a little addition um because because i didn't test it in this mode i've done a test 24 bit 176 and that would be 0.4 kHz and it gives us a much better um a much better result we're going to noise level now of um minus 115 dynamic range 115.6 and total i'm on extortion 0.00068 and the um with the noise intermodulation and the noise 0.0099 still not quite as good as a as the sound card zona but it's still a much better result from what we were seeing uh on the other slide on the other on the other output i thought i'd better just add that now you get to see what this um asus zona uh is um 16 bit 48 look at the look at the um look at the difference look at the cross talk as well stereo cross talk how far that is down minus 95 minus 94 minus 101 um much better i didn't do it on the 32 bit because it doesn't have any um specifications for its own 32 bit because it doesn't do it it does at 24 up to 192 kHz and this is lovely and this is lovely and again we get to see pretty much where it's working the best uh 24 bit 96 i would say personally between there and there 24 bit 48 but still very very good very very good and it out and it you know beats the other two so there you get 29 pound second hand sound card absolute brilliant i'm not listening to it for sound i expect it to be very good but that's not what i bought it for i bought it for to do these tests i wanted something with a lower noise floor and um a bit more resolution and now we can have a 24 bit resolution beautiful right that's it i hope you enjoyed that and i'll catch you in the next one bye