It’s a beautiful-sounding card with thoughtful engineering and intuitive software features.
Positioning audio proved to be very good in several titles we used the card with (RAGE 2, Devil May Cry 5, Battlefield 1 and STAR WARS Battlefront II among others) but what really impressed us was audio clarity not just in games when you can even hear bullets passing by and instantly know where they came from but also music and movies.
EVGA has turned the definition of audiophile upside down by raising the bar and allowing us to hear exactly what creators have intended for us to here. PC audio is once again exciting and we look forward to the future of audio with EVGA.
Stacked with premium audio components and engineered by one of the most respected hi-fi companies in the world, England's Audio Note, not only does it outshine every other consumer-grade sound card on the market, but also ends up being more powerful and sounding better than many external DAC/amps, priced well above the $250 EVGA's asking for it.”
It felt like I was sitting inside the drum set. I could hear all the nuances of the cymbals in where they sat in the sound stage.
The sound is clean and detailed, and there is plenty of power on reserve for more difficult to drive headphones as well. I was particularly impressed with the quality of the line output, and using the Nu Audio as a source for my integrated amplifier made it hard to imagine the audio was coming from a PC sound card, and not a standalone DAC.
In a progression up from our USB sound card, the Nu Audio card exhibited far more musical nuances. The sounds became crisper and I can hear the transients start to shimmer. The cymbals sizzle, the guitars sing, and the piano notes are crystal clear with just the right amount of delay and reverberation.
It seems that separation of individual frequencies is just plain better on the NU Audio (especially when compared to cheap, integrated solutions), which results in crisper, more easily distinguishable sound effects and music.
For the audio enthusiast, the EVGA NU Audio is a real treat and a heck of an upgrade for any desktop audio setup.