ASUS Xonar DG - a Linux user's impressions... and workarounds

Once I decided that my soundcard was crap, and I need a relatively cheap soundcard that can produce anything worthy from my Sennheiser HD438 headphones. I paid for these headphones ~45€ after all, and heavily distorted bass from my built-in Realtek card wasn't what I was looking for, especially considering that 70% of my music is very bassy. I bought ASUS Xonar DG sound card, which looked like the best option for me. It has integrated headphone amplifier, it's kinda cheap (25€), quick check on Phoronix seemed to confirm that the card has (relatively new) ALSA drivers, so I thought "that's my new card".


Anyway, with my new Xonar DG in my computer's PCI slot, I started testing out what it has to offer. On Windows, after playing a bit with bundled software's settings (key option: headphone impendance, also some bassy equalizing needs to be done), the bass was clear, loud, and I could finally enjoy my quality headphones. Switching to Linux, it wasn't so nice though. 

It turned out that this card doesn't have much more features working than playing sounds. First, the card even seemed not to work. That was because volume controls were missing - as ALSA wiki suggests, I needed to install Pulseaudio as a workaround. (that was a good excuse to replace my Gentoo install with Pulseaudio-defaulting Ubuntu to make things easier) It worked, I could hear sounds and change the volume. But sound was exactly like on my integrated shitty card, much quieter than on Windows and with distorted bass, which made me sad - I bought this card to use it mainly with Linux, right?

The problem is missing headphone amplifier support for this card in ALSA. Also because of that, I needed to set "Analog output" to either "Speakers" or "FP Headphones". When set to "Headphones" I got no sounds. I assume both of the proper settings sort-of workaround amplifier chip (I can notice a 'tick' sound coming from the card when changing the setting, by the way).

Now, after almost 3 months with my card, and being forced to listen to music on Windows for this time, I found a dumb way to make Linux-powered Xonar DG produce nice bass. The trick is to install Pulseaudio Equalizer, or use equalizer built into your music player (like Clementine, which I am using) - but Pulseaudio equ's advantage is that it will also change equ settings for YouTube videos etc. You can download it from there. If you use Ubuntu, it probably will install fine. If you have another distro, or got any problems installing the package in Ubuntu the normal way, you can unpack .DEB file, unpack data.tar.gz file from the inside, and copy contents of 'usr' folder to your /usr with command:

cp -r /home/sado/pulseaudio/usr/* /usr/

(where /home/sado/pulseaudio is the folder you unpacked data.tar.gz to). Remember that you need to install swh-plugins and bc from your distribution's repositories, python is of course needed too but you probably already have that one. If you have an error about missing /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/gnome-volume-control.svg file, try this:

wget http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Gnome-multimedia-volume-control.svg
sudo cp Gnome-multimedia-volume-control.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/gnome-volume-control.svg

Now, run pulseaudio-equalizer-gtk and play with equalizer settings. For equalizing newbies I'll remind you that a good equalizer set doesn't go above 0 decibels (in other words, above the center level).

Now, the workaround for nice bass on Xonar DG is to, first, set volume in your system mixer to (almost) maximum level (so it gives enough power to headphones without using amplifier), then make a bass-loving equalizer setting like one on the picture below: it doesn't have to be exactly like that, the key things to remember are: first frequency needs to be on 0.0, while all other freqs need to be set much lower. You could make all of them on almost lowest level (as my middle ones look like), but it's good to keep 2-3 frequencies lower than first but higher than next ones for better sounding bass. Also, same for last frequencies (on the right) - these ones give you better treble (high tones), so music doesn't sound too flat.

These equalizer settings may suck if someone's more experienced in that kind of stuff, but it sounds good for me and that's what matters. You can also use built-in presets, then lower decibels for middle frequencies. I also needed to add "pulseaudio-equalizer enable" to be ran on start of my KDE session, because settings weren't on after rebooting/logging off and in again. It worked fine on Ubuntu before, for some reason it doesn't anymore since I changed to Arch, so you might not need to do it.