Feature Interpretation

Before I even get into performance, it is important to elaborate a bit on its features and show you what really sets this card apart from a majority of other high-end options on the market. 

The HDA X-Plosion is considered the "world's first" Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect logo certified soundcard.  It was primarily built to please the HTPC enthusiast, and is why it is among one of the very best options for such a setup.  However, many may not be too familiar with these features and therefore, I'll go over each before we take a look at its performance.

Dolby Digital Live

Dolby Digital Live is a real-time encoding technology that converts any audio signal into a Dolby Digital bit-stream for transport and playback through a home theater system.  What this basically means is that you can connect this soundcard to a Dolby Digital-enabled audio receiver via a single digital cable connection.  Considering a majority will setup HTPC audio via a Toslink or Coaxial digital cable, this card happens to feature both connections out of the box.

DTS Connect

DTS Connect basically provides an easy way to enjoy true surround sound from your home theater PC.  Using either you PC with DTS powered speakers, PC with DTS enabled receiver or PC with with a DTS decoder box, you can transform almost any stereo content into DTS surround sound.  Considering many will be using their HTPC for movie playback, choosing a quality card like this will certainly aid in providing the highest quality sound from all your source files. 

The Hardware

Unfortunately, many higher end soundcards on the market fail to provide digital outputs on the card itself.  The X-Plosion is designed for such as setup though, and the card features both Coaxial & Toslink digital out jacks.  It's a perfect card for such a build and is why it is an excellent option for those looking to build an HTPC.

Performance

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Considering this card is primarily targeted at HTPC enthusiasts, it was thoroughly tested strictly in this environment.  Everything from movies to music were tested for overall quality and were compared to a standard onboard optical audio out connection from a quality MicroATX motherboard.  All optical connections in this setup sport some higher end optical (toslink) cables.  With that said, I would like to add that the optical cable bundled with the product is practically useless.  It is an extremely cheap cable that will only cause many problems during setup.  Save yourself the headache and get yourself a quality cable.  After all, if you went this far, I strongly recommend you spend the extra cash on a quality cable that will definitely provide and improvement in overall sound quality.

Music Playback

The first part of testing was music playback.  My main HTPC setup is loaded with over 3,500 mp3 files taking up approximately 32GB of disc space.  Yes, I'm quite picky when it comes to music, so all files in my collection are songs I actually like.  I do not rip every single song on an album I buy.  I find this quite pointless and is why it has taken me years to actually build this collection of files, all of which are precisely tagged.  Anyways, a variety of genres were played to get an overall idea on how well it was able to reproduce sound. 

This is truly where this soundcard did not fail to impress!  The output from this card is exceptional through some quality home theater speakers.  You will certainly be impressed the second you load a song for playback.  No stereo sound here, when configured properly, this card is capable of outputting some impressive surround sound music, regardless of the source file in use.  When it comes to audio playback, this is honestly where this card did manage to impress me the most.

Movie Playback

When it came down to movie playback, it was where you you can tell where its quality did have its drawbacks.  Yes, the overall sound quality was equally as impressive.  However, what I have found with a number of DVD's played back on a pure digital DTS connection is that you'll be quite surprised with just how bad some audio tracks really are on a number of DVD's that feature only a stereo audio track or even AC3/6 surround sound.  Note though that this is obviously not the card that is at fault, but rather the quality of the audio on the DVD itself.  While I can indeed provide some tips to remedy this, I will leave this for another article.  In short though, what you will notice with this card is that it will certainly flag what DVD's you have with poor audio tracks.  A variety of movies were played when testing, including some with only stereo output.  When playing movies featuring surround DTS, the sound quality was exceptional, and basically put, will irritate your neighbors!  Some AC3/6 tracks did actually sound equally as good.  However, in some cases, you'll be forced to pump up the volume on your receiver to get some decent sound from poor quality DVD's. 

Next: Conclusions