ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim HDMI Audio Card

Box, Bundle, and Software

Moving right into what you get with the ASUS XONAR HDAV 1.3 Slim, we see a DVI to HDMI cable, a 3ft HDMI cable, and a low profile PCI bracket. On the software front, we have the driver disk and an install disk for Arcsoft’s Total Media Theater.

Software

It’s important to note that this is a special build of Total Media Theater for ASUS; the key provided will not work on retail copies of the software, and vice versa. ASUS has done a great job of keeping the software up to date from their web site, going as far as offering an upgrade to TMT 3 (TMT 2 is on the disc). Something you should remember to do when you get the card is to simply go to the ASUS download page and grab the latest drivers and TMT build available.

I would also like to make a note here that the ASUS build of Total Media Theater 3 does not provide the Windows Media Center Plugin that comes in the retail software, which means to watch Blu-ray movies you do not have a native way to launch the application from WMC. While it is not a major problem, it is something that could catch some off guard. Being that the software is provided in the bundle and could be considered “free”, it is easily overlooked. Most HTPC’ers are creative and are sure to find a “hotkey” or another easy way to launch the app when needed.

So, now that we talked a bit about the perks of Total Media Theater above, let’s move on to the software that is bundled in the driver, the XONAR HDAV Center.

As you can see the Xonar HDAV Center has a number of controls for your audio setup.

In this photo, starting on the left, are the choices of output. It defaults to Coaxial/TOSLINK on initial configuration. Next you see the output format and the speaker configuration.

In this photo we have moved to the “Mixer” tab, where you can change individual speaker outputs.

On the “Effect” tab, you can vary your environment size, as well as setup an equalizer.

And on the last tab we are going to look at, the “FlexBass” provides an LFE (Low Frequency Effect) Crossover where the bass cutoff can be set, and the amount of bass going to each speaker can be controlled.