The Package

The packaging designed for the Essence STX is really something to behold. The original Xonar was nicely packaged, but this really takes the cake and features a lovely black box with emboss tiger image adorning the center front and minimalistic styling throughout.

As seen above, the inside of the front cover features a blueprint of the unit which gives an explanation of the features I mentioned before. Opening the box reveals a stack of three plastic trays containing the Essence card, a driver disk, two pretty posters of the card, manual, test report, gold plated headphone adapter, 1x dual RCA to female stereo mini-jack and 1x coax digital to optical adapter.

Now, I feel the most impressive inclusion here is the gold bound test report for the card, which is something I've never seen before. Call me a sucker for detail, but I love it; it makes me feel like this is really something ASUS are proud of and not just another sound card, maybe even a concept product of sorts.

Inside the precision test report we have a blurb discussing the symbolic use of the tiger image throughout the product and how it represents the ancient pursuit of perfection combined with the very latest in cutting edge technology. The result? "unprecedented performance", as ASUS puts it.

Throughout we have several line graphs detailing specific performance results of key areas of the unit. Overall, I feel the way the package has been designed and put together is of a high caliber and I'm sure this reflects the performance of the Essence itself.