Well-known consumer audio manufacturer Onkyo announced on October 30 that they’ll be adding a USB audio card called the SE-U55SX to their Wavio line of products. The externally powered card features 1 analog input and output, one mic input, three digital inputs, two digital outputs and a headphone jack, along with up to 24-bit/96 KHz internal processing for the best in sound quality digital has to offer. USB soundcards aren’t exactly new, so why should you pay any attention? Well, what if we told you the SE-U55SX might be the best-sounding USB audio card in the world?
The SE-U55SX has two features that give credence to its claim: first, the company goes out of its way to describe the quality of the SE-U55SX’s digital-to-analog converter and clock circuitry, down to showing pictures of individual components, which shows a deep confidence in its choice of electronics that we feel probably translates to quality. Second (and more importantly), the SE-U55SX includes Onkyo’s VLSC technology, a filtering system that Onkyo claims removes digital noise without any noticeable effect on sound quality. The practical result is that the SE-U55SX has an obscenely good signal to noise ratio of 115 db.
